postcards from zoom

Last week, I got a great text from my stepdad.  He said, “Your mother is on the StairMaster for the third time today! We may need to institutionalize her!”  This little cry for help from Encino, California made me realize that COVID-19 hadn’t actually killed all of my blog ideas.  Part of the fun of being the “sandwich generation” – people who are simultaneously taking care of children and parents – is that you get endlessly ridiculed for being technically challenged by your kids, but can easily boost your confidence by heroically changing wallpaper on your parents’ iPhone. Add some “Groundhog Day” monotony to the “sandwich” scenario and you’ve got a semi-humorous post. 

In the midst of unprecedented craziness, I spend several hours a day avoiding the news and trying not to think about how long this might go on. I am stuck in a cycle of at-home workouts, group texts, dog walking, jigsaw puzzles, cooking, laundry, online Bridge, HULU and Netflix. While I am busying myself with nothing, my kids have found themselves in a unique spot.  Where my parents – their grandparents – would normally hit me up for tech support, they now have a better option. In the last two weeks, the grandparents have had a taste of Zoom, got some grasp of speakerphone vs FaceTime and are having varying degrees of success connecting their phone camera with their face. And now, they’ve got the grandchildren, the real tech experts, available and with no excuses.

The tech support sitcom started on the first day of Northern California’s shelter-in-place mandate when my mom wanted to get on Instagram. Her sudden interest in a new social media platform was surprising given that she has had a Facebook page for several years and possibly only checked it a few times. Her motivation to get on Instagram was Barry’s Bootcamp, her 7-day-a-week workout addiction, would be streaming classes (once again, see “jane for president”). As a celebrated Barry’s Inspirational Person of the Month, I knew she was aware of how the class worked but I felt the need to emphasize that it is typically done on a treadmill. She was unthwarted and firmly explained that her 1986 Stairmaster would absolutely do the job.  

I ended up putting her on speakerphone with my son’s friend who was staying with us.  George is a 19 year old MIT computer science major and basketball player from Athens, Greece who speaks perfect English.  My mom was pretty thrilled to be getting world class technical support and somehow uncharacteristically refrained from asking George five to ten rapid fire personal questions. George thoughtfully and patiently helped her get an Instagram user ID and password, find the Barry’s Bootcamp page and become a follower. The initial conversation went like this:

Jane:  “What’s my user name?” 

George: “It can be anything.” 

Jane: “I don’t have one.” 

I jumped in and suggested “jane_for_president”! 

Jane:  “Can I do that?” 

George: “Absolutely. And then choose a password.”

Jane: “I don’t have one.”

It was really heartwarming. 

Our next inter-generational technology moment is written by my son, a sophomore in college and our recently promoted Household IT Department Senior Manager.

My synchronous learning lecture this morning was interrupted by an email from my grandmother stating, “Hi, I can’t play bridge online. Please call me at … Thanks, Nana.”  I started off this harrowing technical journey with a phone call where I tried to blindly direct her to buttons which I knew existed, but were inexplicably missing from her screen.

I knew I had to get a visual of her screen in order to have any chance of helping her so I changed the call to a FaceTime. I was greeted by a lovely picture of her smiling at the camera, but when I asked her to flip the camera so I could see her screen, she proceeded to physically turn the camera around. I would have accepted this if the phone wasn’t both behind the iPad screen that I was trying to look at and also pointed at her feet. The first time I tried to get her to press the ”flip camera” button she proceeded to leave the app and ultimately hung up on me because the app apparently “up and left” from her phone.  

I called her again and actually got her to find the flip camera button. A major success. Going forward, for the rest of the multiple calls, she could see on her screen everything that I saw. Yet at any given point, the most I saw was approximately four square inches of her computer screen.  Once I realized that her holding a camera was a lost cause, screen sharing became a necessity. I asked her if she could move to a laptop or desktop and to call me when she got there. Her response was “I don’t have your number.” Once I recovered from my shock at this, I gave her my number and was immediately hung up on.

After waiting a number of minutes for her to call me back, I received a call from an unknown number from Los Angeles (my grandmother lives in the San Francisco Bay Area). Instead of ignoring an unknown caller as I normally, I realized that it could be Nana calling me back. I picked it up to hear “Sorry, my phone ran out of battery, this is one of our fax numbers.”  This comment makes me believe that my grandparents have not one, but multiple fax machines, and one of those machines has a phone receiver attached to it. I managed not to get too distracted picturing her calling from a land line attached to the messaging equivalent of a VCR.

After finally forcing my way onto a screen share, I took remote control over her computer and showed her how to click “accept” on a friend request that showed up on her screen. Mission accomplished and she was able to commence online Bridge!

I have to say that this event was not entirely surprising given that my grandmother once posted to her own Facebook page “Congratulations!” when she meant to reply to my parents Facebook post about my high school graduation.  

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As we try to persevere through this strange reality, I am selfishly hoping for many more Boomer/GenX/GenZ foibles. With Instagram and Bridge Base Online tackled, I would really be overjoyed if I could listen in while my daughter attempts to explain TikTok to my dad.