Am I the only one that's not crazy!?

[ghall]

Ever get that feeling that your the only person who's not crazy?

I was staying at my grandmothers last night, and she was trying to get me to help her with her new 40" widescreen TV. I was pretty envious at first, I mean who doesn't want a 40" widescreen TV. Well, it seems the model she has (I'm not sure if this is true for other tvs of that kind) needs to have an external sound system, and all kinds of other weird gizmos hooked up to it (bear in mind, I am considered a rather tech savvy person), it's the most complex setup I have ever seen for a TV, and appearantly this was the reccomended setup.

Her cable service also supplies a cable box (uh, since when did cable need a special box? When I had cable I didn't need a special box) with a DVR built in, which is bad news, because any device that does more than one thing, and not made by Apple, is a disaster waiting to happen.

It was the most user-unfriendly setup I have ever seen. It made Windows look easy as pie. Is it really so difficult to make something that's simple to use, and not have a billion different components, and wires, and inputs, and outputs, and all that crap? I mean, I'm really good with electronics and such, but even I couldn't even figure it out.

Then, I had to spend an hour explaining to my grandmother that DVR is very different from VCR, which I guess really isn't the designers fault, but I' about to explode anyway.

On top of that, my grandmother has so many problems with Windows, and what's worse, she refuses to even look at a Mac, never mind try one out. I keep telling her that a Mac would be a perfect computer for her, plus, I'd actually be able to help her with her computer problems, instead of having to say I have no idea. She always says "oh you do too, your so great with computers", and I have to remind her that I don't use Windows regularly, so I really don't know much, I only know the basic stuff, like writing up documents and surfing the web on that so called "web browser", Internet Explorer. So, I have very little sympathy for my ol' granny on the computer side of things (whenever she has a problem, I jokingly resping "Hmm, looks like you need a Mac" ).

Anyway, this isn't about my grandmother, it's about those crazy TVs with 30 different components, and cable/DVR boxes (um, if you want DVR, get a TiVo!), and all that stuff. Makes me want to slap myself in the face!

Well, anyway, any thoughts on my story, or any times you thought you were the only one in the world who's not crazy?

 

[question fear]

Well, I will give you this; playing tech support for granny is tough. i do it too, and we often have the same "I don't use windows often so I don't know if I am right" conversation. With her though the issue is that she has the singlehanded worst mousing skills in the world. I've never met anyone who, through indiscriminate clicking, manages to create so many duplicate shortcuts and simultaneously moves and deletes said shortcuts. Anyhow.
The world is truly a strange and complicated place, I sympathize with your rant.

 

[MalcolmJID]

Well, I will give you this; playing tech support for granny is tough. i do it too, and we often have the same "I don't use windows often so I don't know if I am right" conversation. With her though the issue is that she has the singlehanded worst mousing skills in the world. I've never met anyone who, through indiscriminate clicking, manages to create so many duplicate shortcuts and simultaneously moves and deletes said shortcuts. Anyhow.
The world is truly a strange and complicated place, I sympathize with your rant.

Number three for the granny help, and for the "I forgot how to fix Windows" convo.

 

[question fear]

Number three for the granny help, and for the "I forgot how to fix Windows" convo.

Maybe we should start a support group. Or a dedicated tech support line for the elderly!

 

[iMacZealot]

Well, I feel crazy sometimes because all of my friends have turned into sheeple and I'm not following the herd morality.

But back to the grannys, okay, um, well my grandpa was a meteorologist, so he spent a lot of time on computers, and he's never touched one since the day he retired. As for my grandma, the only problem was when we brought over the camera from my cousin's wedding, and we couldn't get them up on their TV, so they just had to look at them on my camera, and my grandma pressed the D-pad so very hard that it would skip several pictures, and she also deleted some of them in the process.

 

[Mammoth]

My grandmother's eyesight is too bad to read anything on a computer screen. My other grandmother's too dead.

 

[Fearless Leader]

Ever get that feeling that your the only person who's not crazy?

sort of, but backwards for me.

I have the very same issue about macs for the family, but it's more a why get a computer that is 3 to 5 times as expensive as the 300$ dell. A computer is a computer to them in their eyes a Mac pro with 16gigs of ram a couple 7800's and terabytes of storage is the same as a dell tower from a few years back.

Also my TV set is what makes me crazy. I have three component devices two component spots, one HDMI and HDMI devices one of which has to use seperate audio cables due to some crazy crap. I don't know why I go through all the trouble. All I do is play 360 on it.