Tech trouble with computers and smartphones? Ask a young person

Asking a young person for help with technology requires humility, bribery and a whole new set of rules.

The Sightgeist: Jon Kudelka

Friends and I have a new refrain. It ends with, “You’ll have to ask a young person.” Usually we say this hunched over our smartphones, trying to figure out how to share something, send an invite, retrieve something or get that bloody thing off the screen.

We can spend a whole coffee session asking each other for help, swapping phones, tapping screens and jiggling devices like a crying baby before sadly concluding that we don’t have a clue and only a young person can help us.

Asking a young person (definition: anyone aged nine to 30) is easy when you live with them. They are there most of the time and you still have negotiating power. That is, you promise to feed them, educate them, drive them everywhere and be crushed by a mortgage in return for 10 minutes of IT advice every so often.

They accept this deal because they can wrangle extra privileges out of you while their finger hovers over a smartphone, tablet, computer, wrist device, TV remote, printer or anything else that goes beep in the house.

It gets more difficult when they move out. Your negotiating power drops precipitously so you have to make a list of things you need to know when they visit. I mostly invite them to dinner, give them fine foods, the odd gift and a lift home in return for a 10-minute consultation.

There are protocols developing around this behaviour. For instance, you can subcontract your young person to help a grandparent or, at a pinch, an aunt or uncle. But you can’t ask them to fix friends’ IT problems. I really feel sorry for my childless friends. Who knew that childlessness would entail such hardship?

Another protocol is that you have to “show your workings”. That is, you have to prove that you’ve tried to make it work. You also have to promise to remember how it works after the session, or assure them that in the future you will google the answer, ask an Apple genius or just keep pressing on the thing until it offers you an option.

Obviously, adults don’t like doing this. We feel pathetic. It seems like an inversion of the natural order. And that’s because it is.

Young people are meant to ask old people. It wasn’t too long ago that young people would say to each other, ‘Jeez, I don’t know, you’ll have to ask an adult.’ And mostly adults would know the answer. We would know, for instance, what an upper house was or why submarine cables aren’t underwater ropes where submarines hitch up for the night.

We knew the answers to stupid questions. Now we don’t even know the right way to ask a stupid question. Clouds — real or metaphorical? Emoticons — where are they on the keyboard? Sub keyboard — is that a thing?

What’s worse, we can’t even exchange general knowledge for tech tips. If a young person wants to know something, they don’t ask us, they ask Google, and avoid looking silly in adult eyes. But adults can’t ask Google to help them around the keyboard. They wouldn’t know the words to use. You can’t ask Google about thingamajigs. You can’t finger point for Google.

We are doubly stupid and they look smart. Sometimes they can look like a different species when their finger skips over a screen discovering commands we never knew existed or when they thumb a 200-word message in a matter of seconds. We felt pretty special because we had opposable thumbs. They have thumbs that think. They have evolved.

And that’s the scariest part — the idea that they are evolving into … something else. They have thinking thumbs, a comfort with technology that can turn devices into extensions of themselves. They are more meme than gene.

Still, I like to think there’s a possibility for revenge in this. When I prepare to make a call to one of my three adorable help desks, I remember all those years when they would ask “why?” 30 times a day. And sometimes I hear the same response that I gave to them.

At the end of the session I can hear them thinking, “Don’t ask why, just do it!” Sometimes I can feel them wrestling with the ultimate comeback. “Why? Because I told you to.”