Having to re-teach your parents how to work the smart T.V.

Coffee in the case of Janeway ... Or candy .. or chips ... Or donuts ... Or an herbal tea

You just offer a distraction and the adult will step aside.

I know because you can give me a bag of chips and I'll let you do whatever you want to my laptop.

Pringles?

me nefariously installing linux on your laptop

BWAHAHAHAHAHA
- Pringles! .... here is my info ... give me a shipping address to send my laptop
  
  Ron A. Rausch
  3295 Princess St
  Kingston, ON K7L 1C2
  
  Mother's maiden name Colunga
  SIN 083 704 486
  Geo coordinates 44.253199, -76.426152
  Phone 613-533-1643
  Country code 1
  Birthday May 23, 1961
  Age 62 years old
  Tropical zodiac Gemini
  Username Fortiong61
  Password Ahl1iePai2u
  Visa 4539 2318 8318 6333
  Expires 8/2026
  CVV2 373
  Company Life Map
  Occupation Pipelayer
  Height 5' 7" (170 centimeters)
  Weight 237.4 pounds (107.9 kilograms)
  Blood type B+
  UPS tracking number 1Z 150 293 65 9808 210 7
  Western Union MTCN 1805921668
  MoneyGram MTCN 02591927
  Favorite color Blue
  Vehicle 1993 BMW 856
  (if you read this far and actually believe this ...
  I generated the info from
  www . fakenamegenerator . com)
That may work for them, but not my grandma. She just turned 98! I couldn't fathom teaching her to use a minimalist, multifunction, touch sensitive remote... let alone how to navigate multiple, terrible UI's. It's the only reason my parents still have conventional cable.
- Is there some kind of law that consumer electronics have to have a terrible UI? It's pretty much just smartphones and computers that don't totally suck.
- 98! wow .... lucky you ... if my grandmother was still around, I'd operate everything for her myself and allow her to use me as her personal butler. I'd want to make her life as easy as possible.
  
  Good for you and I hope she is happy and well ... we should be so lucky to see as much life as she has ... my best wishes to her and your family.
- Universal remote. I did that up for my husband's grandma 'just press this button and your show comes on'

This is my dad in a nutshell. I'll tell him about something simple on either his laptop or on whatever app he's using on the smart TV and he'll tell me to be quiet and that he can figure it out. I definitely think it's a pride thing in us males. That, or he's getting old and doesn't want to deal with the realization that he doesn't fully understand modern technology anymore.

My dad used to absolutely love gadgets, but couldn't understand how to work any of them. So he'd buy the latest tech of whatever interested him, try it once or twice, get tired of trying to figure it out, then let it sit in a closet for a year until I asked if I could have it and he said yes.

That's how I ended up having stuff like a video titling system for home video tapes in the 90s and could make cool title screens for all the videos I pirated.

Oh yeah, he also had a dual-deck VCR which had the ability to beat the VHS anti-piracy technology. Now that he did figure out how to use and we copied a lot of stuff from the video store. Also, to his credit, he did know how to program a VCR.