It’s a touch Weird When Your Family Gets Geeky [Thanksgiving]

As many prepare to trudge home for Thanksgiving, an old dread is in our hearts. Our poor, confused parents and their malfunctioning routers that need fixing. But perhaps even scarier? Now they’re commencing to embrace an identical tech we do.

One of the perkiest perks of having a tech savvy spawn is the relief of free, lifetime tech support. I’ve had to field some agonizing, desperate calls previously.

” Sam, how do I shut down the Comcast?”
” Honey, how do I unplug the printer?”
” Where is AOL?”

We love them, but MY GOD. And Thanksgiving is-you’re fearing-more than any other holiday hotpoint, the epicenter of parental tech obliviousness. It’s probably been a long time since you’ve seen them. And for your absence, has every unplugged cord, forgotten WiFi password, and crashed harddrive been piling up? Thanksgiving chitchat may also be straining enough-but the concept of my Mom asking me what an IP address is can be most horrifying at all. Where to start? It’d be like explaining the enormous Hadron Collider to a member of some Amazonian tribe.

Right? Well, no, not exactly. Sometime until now month, my mother got a new phone. Which isn’t anything new. The lady has-and, really, I admire her like none other-lost, damaged, and misused an inordinate number of phones. a surprising number, really. And not ordinary phones, but the absolute worst, clunkiest, astoundingly bad phones. Phones that deserved to be lost, really.

But now she was rocking Android.

It was easy for me to ignore from afar. But then the texts starting showing up. Long ones. Frequent ones. Detailed enough that they may have only been pecked out with a plush smartphone screen. Granted, they often times gave the impression of they were being written by a shackled hostage frantically typing together with her nose, but there they were. And then the emails. And then the photos. At the beginning I condescended-wow, she was learning! But if truth be told, she was exactly an identical things I do with my phone on a daily basis.

There is barely something fundamentally weird about watching your mom use a touchscreen. Initially.

But it isn’t just her. I asked around, and the Giz crew’s parental units are on a similarly wacky tech trajectory back home, it kind of feels.

Kyle’s mom was upstairs downloading the iPad issue of self-importance Fair.

Spratt’s parents were having a woman Gaga-fueled Kinect dance off.

Matt? Under a barrage of all-caps BlackBerry texts from his dad.

Brian Lam’s dad-perhaps taking the cake in tech aptitude-meets-confusion, has taken quite a shining to attempt. So much so that he has a separate account for each of his five apartments, making contacting him somewhat… infuriating.

And my own father now prompts me for a nightly FaceTime chat around 7:30 pm. The camera in his iPhone 4. He loves that camera. He is beholden to it. Educated as an electrical engineer, he doesn’t approach technology with an identical chimpanzee-at-the-monolith approach as my mother once did, but he still has his fatherly quirks-the fellow simply loves to send me pictures of things. Here’s the cat! Here’s the duck! Here’s the tree! Here’s the bumblebee! It’s like a toddler’s picture book, as relayed through MMS and email. These are our parents? Technology was where we were safe. A boundary. A refuge! And it was what i’ll lord over my mother in exchange for her doing my laundry after I came home.

It’s not quite an analogous anymore-and it’s weirding us the hell out. Hearing the word ” app” come out of your mother’s mouth in the beginning is like hearing her mention some variety of horribly crude sex maneuver. It’s simply unnatural. At dinner this past month, casually pinching across her home screen, she sipped her martini and asked if she should get on Twitter. I nearly gagged.

I will be able to’t help it. And maybe scarier, I will’t stop it. Soon after buying an iPhone, my father snatched up an iPad. I’m sure he’s somewhere immediately, having a slurp of red wine and tapping out a two line email to me about our dog. But the stuff has just gotten so simple, so well designed, that, at the chance of being supremely insulting to a whole generation of american citizens, anyone can use it. Even my mother, who at times finds herself unable or unwilling to turn off caps lock. And that’s a terrific thing. Better design means more people doing little things that cause them to happy-like sending their children photos of a log. It also means fewer panicked PLEASE I ENCOURAGE YOU WHAT IS A MODEM late night phone calls.

So I’m undecided what awaits me-or any of us-at home this Thanksgiving. I do know that it’ll probably involve me helping my dad discover an iPad case, and showing my mom some cool new Android apps. I’ll have-can or not it’s?-cooler, tech-savvier parents. I also know that reading the previous two sentences still freaks me out just a little.

Illustration by Contributing Illustrator Sam Spratt , based on Norman Rockwell’s ” Freedom from Want” . Inspect Sam’s website and become keen on his Facebook Artist’s Page . Like this Rockwell spin-off image? Investigate the highly dysfunctional version Spratt did for Gawker right here .

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This post is tagged: free lifetime, hadron collider, inordinate number, obliviousness, tech support, thanksgiving