And why does it bring out my most impatient self?

There are few things in life that I find require quite as much deep breathing as assisting senior-aged parents with tech support. Sometimes, when my mother phones me while I’m working – to tell me she’s been logged out of Facebook, again – I want nothing more than to obliterate Silicon Valley and all its inhabitants. On some days it can feel like I’m an unpaid worker in a call centre, on others I am simply an overworked chatbot.

Ever since she acquired a smartphone and laptop, my mother has considered me to be some sort of IT expert. Someone who is skilled at resolving any tech issue over the phone, in easy-to-navigate simple steps. Which, to be clear, I am most definitely not. I am barely keeping up with technological advancements myself and have only a loose grasp on the functions my own devices are capable of. I am someone who struggles to hang up from a Facetime call, who battles to get my phone camera to scan QR codes, and who has to shout to get Siri to listen to her. But to my mother, who has difficulty putting her phone on silent, I am the oracle of all things online.

I just spent a week in Sydney with said 78-year-old mother, which was a practical lesson in IT support for us both. She had downloaded the Air NZ app before we departed – which I was impressed by – and she could see her flights on there, but this is where her grasp of the app ended. She was still planning on checking in at the airport and getting herself a printed boarding pass, until I explained to her there was no need to do this, she could check in on the app and her boarding pass would be on there. “I think I’ll get a printed one anyway,” she said. “Just in case.” In retrospect, this was a wise decision as she misplaced her phone approximately 59 times over the course of the week. 

Explaining to her what to switch off so she wouldn’t be charged for roaming was another hurdle for us to cross, especially as – for some reason known only to her – she kept switching data roaming back on. It was a blessing when she opted to leave her phone at the hotel for our excursions. When I completed our returning customs declarations online before we landed. it was a revelation. “You mean I don’t need to fill in a customs card?” she asked me, approximately 15 times. “No, you still don’t”, I replied, through an increasingly clenched jaw. It was a tense moment in our travelsmostly because filling in an online customs form on my phone is still a reasonably new process for me, too, and one that required my full concentration and all of my remaining eyesight.

With each technological hurdle we faced I tried my best to teach her how to solve it along the way, in the futile hope I might never have to show her again. To her credit, she was very keen to learn how to do these things herself. But when you’re an iPhone user, like me, who is trying to navigate someone else’s Samsung, it’s very difficult to appear knowledgeable and be an effective teacher. 

I totally get that having all of this new tech thrust upon them in recent years must be utterly confusing for people of my mother’s generation, not to mention overwhelming. If they don’t learn to use it, they get left behind. Like us all. But it’s quite some responsibility being the only line of defence between your golden aged parent and the world of digital technology, and all of the pitfalls and dangers that lie within it.

I am undyingly grateful that my mother is able to sniff out an online scammer and calls me to confirm if she’s unsure, because that’s a whole other world of pain to extricate parents from. I am also grateful she has no desire to join Insta or TikTok or any other myriad of social apps that I would somehow have to help her navigate.

Whenever I find the role of IT support frustrating and feel the urge to scream like a braking train, I endeavour to remind myself just how frustrating it must feel for my mother to have to learn how to navigate this new digital technology. I also remind myself that what goes around comes around and one day it will inevitably be me phoning my children when I’ve been locked out of my banking app or have a funny spinning ball on my computer screen that won’t go away.