My dad, the computer illiterate

[Jeraden]

My dad is pretty clueless about computers. I made the mistake several years ago of buying a computer for him, thus I became his free tech support for life. Every few months he does something that just makes me hang my head in shame. The latest event...

Sunday morning I get a call from him where he thinks his monitor dies. Later on it starts working again, but he still thinks its on its last legs, so I agree to buy a new one for him. Costco had a 19" lcd on sale for a decent price so I buy that and take it over... a big step up from his crappy 17" crt. I hook it up, it works fine, the monitor has built-in speakers. So I ask if he'd rather keep the speakers he has or if he'd like to use the ones on the monitor, that way he doesn't need the other speakers. (he doesn't do much that he needs sound for, so quality isn't a concern).

Dad: Try the speakers in the monitor, I've been having troubles with the old speakers.
Me: What problems?
Dad: I try to do voice chats over yahoo messenger but nobody can ever hear me.
Me: What do you mean?
Dad: I turn them up all the way, but people still can't hear what I'm saying.
Me: Uhhhh... do you have a microphone?
Dad: A what?
Me: *hangs my head in shame*

I can just picture my dad yelling into his computer speakers, trying to get other people to hear him. Silly dad.

 

[BobDaMenkey]

Your dad has failed at trying to have phonesex over the internet.

 

[scorpmatt]

buy him a mic and soon he'll need something else... send him to a computer user beginner's course

 

[woowoo]

Remember....

Your wearing his genes.

 

[Conky]

My dad refuses to touch a computer at all because he knows he will be that retarded too. :laugh:

 

[godmare]

lol

 

[keeleysam]

lol

 

[gw186]

haha, thats funny. My mom keeps using Hallmark Cards to type letters. Even after showing her Wordpad

 

[imported_Kensai]

:laugh:

 

[...After speding 20 minutes explaining how to create a desktop shortcut...]

Dad: I don't like the name "Shortcut to Manual." How do change it?

Me: Ok, click on the icon once with the mouse.

Dad: Done.

Me: Ok, is the icon highlighted?

Dad: More or less.

Me: !

 

[neutralizer]

Wow, my grandfather actually can figure out to chat on yahoo. Well, then again, he actually knows HTML so I say :thumbsup: to him. I don't need to tech support him ever.

 

[akubi]

:laugh: good story
:thumbsup:

 

[Manchurian Candidate]

anymore ?

 

[Slacker]

Well, he wasnt too far off, a speaker can be used as a mic, if you took the leads of a speaker and hooked them up to a mic jack you could talk into the speaker and broadcast sound.

Also a mic can be used as a speaker, if you took the leads from a mic and hooked them up to a sound source you would hear sound, though the mic would be poorly suited to this task.

Overall a speaker would do a better job as a mic than a mic would do as a speaker, but they could sub for each other in a pinch.

 

[imported_Mike]

lol, I get this picture of this older guy sitting at his computer desk yelling as loud as he can into his speakers..