The WiFi Is Down!
And other tech puzzles we need our children to solve
The comedian Bill Burr was having computer problems while recording his podcast and decided he would try to fix the issue — a loud ringing noise — without going off the air. “Go to settings,” he read aloud, from the fruit of a Google search.
“Oh really?” he asked his audience in trademark repressed anger. “And what would you say I should click on? Desktop? Display? Wallpaper? Battery? Is there something here that says sound? No. Let’s click on general. Start-up disc? What?”
And then: “Yeah, I don’t know how to do this.”
He paused recording and presumably brought in a tech wizard, who just might have been his school-aged daughter. The signal clear again, he continued the unrehearsed rant and as I chuckled audibly all I could think was, I’m not alone.
“Don’t let the old man in” — Clint Eastwood
That same thought reoccurred to me while watching an episode of Only Murders in the Building. A character played by Steve Martin was voice texting and grew increasingly annoyed when Siri recorded the words “still works” as “bill durks” and then “stilt worst” and finally “steal words.” This is, of course, everyday stuff. My own texting nightmare came in an exchange with a friend when spellcheck turned “hospital” into “hospice,” a comical turn that was for a moment crushing.
Only Murders delights in the tech-related frustrations of the generations. No one is spared. Martin’s millennial sidekick in the show, played by Selena Gomez, all but loses it at one point when a fresh-faced Gen Z character references “baby witches” blowing up TikTok by trying to “hex the moon.” I looked it up. It happened. How fire do you feel now?
Everyday technology has been dumbfounding anyone older pretty much forever. Two million years ago our ancestors fashioned the first stone cutting tools and you can bet some despairing elder homo habilis ejected theirs from the cave after using the blunt side and declaring the tool way too complicated. That’s 2,000 millenniums of repressed anger. Someone was bound to monetize all this frustration.
My grandparents couldn’t figure out their color TV and watched everything in a hideous shade of red or green. My mom dabbled with email but viewed her personal computer mostly as a worthy bridge opponent. Many of my peers gave up on social media right away because they couldn’t figure out how to build a decent profile page. Part of me envies them, given the online cesspool that has evolved.
Comedians like Burr and Martin may be having a field day. But, on a dark note, so is the mental health profession, which is expanding rapidly to pacify the multitude of celebrities and teens who have been canceled or ghosted. Citing addiction to the likes of TikTok and Snapchat, the U.S. Surgeon General called youth mental health “the defining public health issue of our time.” Kathy Griffin, an edgy entertainer who you might think would be cashing in, has instead suffered what she calls “crippling” post-traumatic stress disorder after being repeatedly assaulted on social media.
My own struggles with tech are nowhere near that heavy. Sure, it’s numbing when the internet is down, and I call the service provider only to be told I must report the outage…wait for it…on their website. I suppose they think I can get online through some kind of workaround. I’m not good at tech workarounds. When the internet is down, it’s down.
It’s said that humans use about 10% of their brain. Well, we use even less of our iPhone. Unless you’ve been to the iPhone Photo Academy (for 80% off!) you can’t have mastered the camera. The preloaded health app measures my walking asymmetry at around 3%. What do I do with that? I already know my left knee hurts. Honestly, I’d be happy if I could just stop the sideways pictures from staying sideways when I rotate the screen.
My track record of fixing tech issues is woeful. Often the problems have to do with the printer, which has more secret doors and passageways than a medieval castle. I plumb these depths when the paper jams. Nothing gives me the access I need, and I usually give up about the time I’ve unlatched several rollers and brushed against something sure to stain my shirt. There is no triaging this mess. Even the kids can’t help. They haven’t used a printer since Barney went off the air. Soon I’m off to the nearest Best Buy because, well, I’m a boomer and I’d rather store my documents in a clunky filing cabinet than learn how to back up my hard drive.
When my printer gets into a snit and won’t talk to my computer, I scour the internet for “solutions,” which invariably point me to headings in the drop-down menu that aren’t there, and probably never were — at least not since the beta version came out on Al Gore’s watch. This all makes me feel somehow lacking and I may end up crying, yelling, and throwing things in an empty room. But it doesn’t drive me to bed for days. I was raised Catholic and learned to cope with feeling inadequate at an early age.
Besides, I’ve found some hidden benefits to all this tech madness. If a couple weeks go by and I haven’t heard from my grown-and-flown offspring, I calmly login at Netflix and change the password. My iPhone begins vibrating within hours. This is tech know-how that matters.
At age 88, Clint Eastwood was working on his film The Mule and in a passing conversation with singer Toby Keith reflected on how he managed to remain engaged and productive. He told Keith, “I just get up every morning and go out. And I don’t let the old man in.”
I try not to let the old man in, too. Technology is amazing, breathtaking, life changing. I don’t want to stop moving forward and, far from a luddite, I hope to be challenged by tech innovations the rest of my life. I sometimes bemoan the unforeseen discoveries I will miss after I am gone.
Yet some of us just aren’t wired to handle the tech glitches that come our way. That’s why we have children. A century ago, couples spawned families of 10 or 12 to ensure they would have plenty help on the farm. Today you need at least a couple kids at home to increase the odds that at least one of them isn’t “yak shaving” while you are being throttled with a “fork bomb.”
There is every chance I didn’t use those terms properly. But I had to give it a shot. I’m not even sure if those terms are real — or the result of a flawed query on ChatGPT. See. I’m trying. The point is: kids are the home-office geek squad these days. We desperately need them to address our “pebkac error” before we go off “bikeshedding.”
I understood the penchant for tech frustration even as a young man. In school, I briefly thought I’d like to have a career as a TV cameraman. In one of my broadcasting classes, the professor noted that to get a job behind the lens you first must learn how the camera works. Not the on-off switch, he said. The guts of the thing. The manipulation of beams from the electron guns in the cathode ray tube. How does that work?
Whoa, I thought. I just want to zoom in and zoom out on movie stars. This brutal realization — that I would need to understand the underlying technology — prompted me to search for another calling. It all worked out. But I still feel the fomo during any televised event where they show a camera operator in the best seat in the house.
I never thought I’d miss the IT guys at work. For some reason, at my job, they really were all guys. But that’s for another day. When I left my long career and set up shop in a home office, I quickly realized how much I had taken the in-house helpline for granted. That doesn’t mean it always went smoothly. Far from it.
Typically, when I called with a problem, the IT guy would attempt to guide me through some fix over the phone even though we were only one floor apart. IT guys genuinely believe they can talk you through it.
“Restart your Mac,” was always the initial instruction. This was at the dawn of Macs in the workplace, before anything was easy, and annoyed me enormously. When a light bulb is flickering you don’t restart the lamp. When your car muffler has been dragged two miles and you finally understand the source of the clatter, you don’t pull over and restart the engine. What was this voodoo the IT guys were trying to sell me?
Restarting a computer does, we all know by now, fix a lot of issues, and yet it took years for me to make a habit of trying that remedy before calling the IT department in a panic. Once, when no one picked up and I was on deadline, I ran up the stairs to bang on the door. It was locked. They were out. But they had posted a sign the size of the door itself. It read: “Restart your Mac.” Again, I knew I was not alone.
Now, in my home office, I admit I miss the IT guy and all his esoteric snark, if only because I am petrified to ask anyone for tech help within earshot of my wife. Kim already jokes about my abysmal aptitude for such things. I don’t need to give her more ammo.
“Honey, I can send email, but I can’t receive email,” I say. “What the heck?”
“Maybe you need an update,” Kim replies. “Which email address is giving you problems?”
“AOL,” I say.
Long pause.
“Oh, you definitely need an update,” she says. “Maybe we can dig up a new CompuServe address, bring back dial-up and, God willing, move past Y2K.”
This, I imagine, is why my broadcasting professor decades ago wanted me to understand how the inside of a TV camera works. Maybe he intuitively understood that one day we would all have to be our own IT guy, so we might as well get used to it. Or maybe he just didn’t want me to end up giving my future wife so darn much ammunition.
Dan is a former columnist at TIME. Clint Eastwood is one of his heroes. He needs his kids to explain 90% of the iPhone. Dan is writing a memoir of his early career as a small-town newspaper reporter, when pay phones were a lifeline.
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