Amusing messages from your parents

Chew Toy McCoy said:
My 79-year-old mother just sent me a text excited that she just discovered the yacht rock station on iHeart radio, Yacht rock is about 30 years past the music her generation typically loves.
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My mother loathed Elvis (she always claimed that he "put her off the dance floor"), but she loved The Beatles, and adored ABBA (as some who post here know well).

Both parents loved Pink Martini.
 
Huh......I'd never heard the term "Yacht Rock,' so had to do a Google search. Ah, OK, "soft rock," "West Coast sound"...... those two terms are familiar to me.
 
Clix Pix said:
Huh......I'd never heard the term "Yacht Rock,' so had to do a Google search. Ah, OK, "soft rock," "West Coast sound"...... those two terms are familiar to me.
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Started this thread a while back with intentions of updating it periodically, but it kind of fell off my responsibility radar.

Post your favorite yacht rock tracks

Definition: Yacht rock is a broad music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to early 1980s. For my own personal reference I see it as music a bunch of Wall St. Chads in the 80's probably played on their yacht...
talkedabout.com talkedabout.com
 
Clix Pix said:
Huh......I'd never heard the term "Yacht Rock,' so had to do a Google search. Ah, OK, "soft rock," "West Coast sound"...... those two terms are familiar to me.
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SiriusXM turns the "Love" channel to "Yacht Rock" between Memorial Day and Labor Day. It's OK, but the catalog seems a bit thin. Too many repeats in the same day.
 
Herdfan said:
Your 79 year old mother texts? You win! :)
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Ha! Possibly even more impressive a couple months ago I got them to kill their cable (saving $200 a month) and switch entirely to streaming services. They are quite proficient in Netflix, Prime, YouTube, Discovery+, and Tubi. My mom is big into quilting and even knows how to subscribe to YouTube quilting channels and create playlists. Her other favorite thing to do on YouTube is find DJ set style videos of what she calls “dinner music”, a lot of acoustic guitar and mellow jazz music to play in the background while she’s “putzing around”.
 
Chew Toy McCoy said:
Ha! Possibly even more impressive a couple months ago I got them to kill their cable (saving $200 a month) and switch entirely to streaming services. They are quite proficient in Netflix, Prime, YouTube, Discovery+, and Tubi. My mom is big into quilting and even knows how to subscribe to YouTube quilting channels and create playlists. Her other favorite thing to do on YouTube is find DJ set style videos of what she calls “dinner music”, a lot of acoustic guitar and mellow jazz music to play in the background while she’s “putzing around”.
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My mom was also big into quilting. Tried to explain to her that she didn't keep to keep her DVR filled up with Fons and Porter shows as they were all available on youtube. Never got anywhere. I knew it was a lost cause when she kept asking where she could find the Netflix schedule.
 
Herdfan said:
My mom was also big into quilting. Tried to explain to her that she didn't keep to keep her DVR filled up with Fons and Porter shows as they were all available on youtube. Never got anywhere. I knew it was a lost cause when she kept asking where she could find the Netflix schedule.
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Before I got them to kill cable my mom’s biggest concern was how she was going to access the 3 movies she had saved on the DVR for like the past 6 years. I then used the Just Watch app to show her all the streaming services they were currently available on. Worst case scenario she could buy DVD or digital copies for a grand total of $45 max….or continue to pay $200 a month to access them.
 
Herdfan said:
Your 79 year old mother texts? You win! :)
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Hey.......those of us who are in our 70's and a bit older are the ones who are responsible for bringing you all this wonderful technology we have today! Sure, many of us text and use computers and stream music and the lot..... :). Until her final illness and death, my 95-year-old mother used a computer, too. True, there are those who don't, and who by the time the technology was becoming more and more popular were hesitant and afraid to try it, which is too bad. Computer and technology literacy isn't just for the young.....
 
Clix Pix said:
Hey.......those of us who are in our 70's and a bit older are the ones who are responsible for bringing you all this wonderful technology we have today! Sure, many of us text and use computers and stream music and the lot..... :). Until her final illness and death, my 95-year-old mother used a computer, too. True, there are those who don't, and who by the time the technology was becoming more and more popular were hesitant and afraid to try it, which is too bad. Computer and technology literacy isn't just for the young.....
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My mom was locked into c1984. No matter how hard she tried, she never could program the VCR. LOL. She could used a DirecTV DVR though. Usually kept them at 3% available. :oops:

She liked having pieces of paper. Would drive her crazy when she had something written down for me and I would just snap a pic of it and hand the paper back. But the one time I really freaked her out was when she asked me to take a check to the bank and deposit it for her. Since I was on her account and I used the same bank, I simply opened the app, did the mobile deposit and handed her the check back. At first she got annoyed thinking I wasn't going to take it to the bank for her. She finally accepted it had been deposited even though she didn't understand how it worked.
 
Alli said:
Heh. My mum’s 87 and she’s a forum member here, although she hasn’t posted in a while. She’s addicted to Twitter.
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Mom's best friend was addicted to FB. And she stopped by for coffee a couple of times a week and would show mom all these pictures of me. She kept wanting to know why I didn't ever show her those pictures. Explaining that those were other people's pictures and I was simply tagged in them didn't register.
 
Clix Pix said:
Hey.......those of us who are in our 70's and a bit older are the ones who are responsible for bringing you all this wonderful technology we have today! Sure, many of us text and use computers and stream music and the lot..... :). Until her final illness and death, my 95-year-old mother used a computer, too. True, there are those who don't, and who by the time the technology was becoming more and more popular were hesitant and afraid to try it, which is too bad. Computer and technology literacy isn't just for the young.....
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You're right! Only problem is that if you worked in (or played with) any level of infotech anytime after the 1970s or 80s, you may have got tagged by your family as the go-to person for anything more tech-y than sticking a foolproof cable in between two devices.

To this day I still get calls from not only peers in my family but nieces and nephews figuring I can convert their bricks back into computing devices. I've been retired longer than some of them have been on the damn planet, and I have no clue why they think there's such a thing as a "renaissance man" (or woman) whose technological expertise is as broad as the American tech consumer's marketplace, but yet they entertain a fantasy that somehow I have laid eyes on and worked with whatever it is they bought that is now acting up or playing dead.

Anyway I try to be kind and I don't start out by asking them if their device is plugged in. I start with "Do you have a backup?" because I find that shortens a lot of otherwise exasperating conversations.
 
Herdfan said:
My mom was locked into c1984. No matter how hard she tried, she never could program the VCR. LOL. She could used a DirecTV DVR though. Usually kept them at 3% available. :oops:

She liked having pieces of paper. Would drive her crazy when she had something written down for me and I would just snap a pic of it and hand the paper back. But the one time I really freaked her out was when she asked me to take a check to the bank and deposit it for her. Since I was on her account and I used the same bank, I simply opened the app, did the mobile deposit and handed her the check back. At first she got annoyed thinking I wasn't going to take it to the bank for her. She finally accepted it had been deposited even though she didn't understand how it worked.
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Nevertheless, the thing with tech is that - like an à la carte menu - you can pick and choose which areas you would prefer to become proficient in, while bypassing others completely.

My mother never learned to programme the VCR, and neither did I, I'm afraid.

But this begs the question of just who uses VCR today?
 
Clix Pix said:
Hey.......those of us who are in our 70's and a bit older are the ones who are responsible for bringing you all this wonderful technology we have today!
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I think in the 70’s and 80’s the amazement was just that the tech actually existed - it actually making sense, common or other, be damned. Just be excited it actually exists. Spend hours trying to figure out how to record your answering machine's outgoing message and a good part of the weekend hooking up your multi component stereo…and there was no internet to help.

I think we’ve come a long way in trying to make technology make sense in both setup and usage and a lot of times when there is a problem it’s when the user put close to zero effort into getting it to work. (Some of) the generation who would spend half the day looking at all the inputs and outputs on the back of a stereo amplifier will now get completely derailed by the caps lock button…even with the message on the screen saying the caps lock is on.
 
Scepticalscribe said:
Nevertheless, the thing with tech is that - like an à la carte menu - you can pick and choose which areas you would prefer to become proficient in, while bypassing others completely.

My mother never learned to programme the VCR, and neither did I, I'm afraid.

But this begs the question of just who uses VCR today?
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More like who even has a functional VCR now? Ars Technica ran a piece back in 2016 about some Japanese company being the last VCR manufacturer on the planet and deciding the market just wasn't there any more.

As for use, if one still had a functional VCR in recent times, one might want to digitize contents of videotapes for which there was apparently no DVD version or alternate production.

That's probably about it, except for people who bumped into a freebie bookcase (or whole store shelves) full of commercial videotapes they might not have seen and who so far never had anything higher tech at home than a VCR player to begin with. But, I would think such folk are running into VCR repair issues by now.
 
Because none of us could programme the thing - not even Decent Brother - although occasionally, he did manage to master it, - if any of us wanted a programme recorded, we would have to make arrangements with another family member (usually Decent Brother or I) to actually stay around, set the machine up, and press 'record' for the specific programme or movie on a given channel.

For me, this would have been something such as Life On Mars, or STNG - if I was away on an election observation mission; for Decent Brother, it was usually Match of the Day. The fact that I could tape the thing for him, meant that he could head out to the pub, and proceed to watch MOTD on his return.
 
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