Plain Text: The Tech-Support Generation

Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We'll sit with our families in warm, candle-lit dining rooms eating stuffed turkey, reminiscing over old photographs, preparing holiday shopping lists and ... Please. Let's be frank. We are going home to fix our parents' computers.

Forget the generational tags you've already heard, like Gen X and Gen Y. We are the Tech-Support Generation. Our job is to troubleshoot the complex but imperfect technology that befuddle mom and dad, veterans of the rotary phone, the record player and the black-and-white cabinet television set. Next week, on our annual pilgrimage home, we'll turn our Web-trained minds and joystick-conditioned fingers to the task of rescuing our parents from bleeding-edge technology on the blink. The tech media does us a disservice by trumpeting every product evolution and incremental software advance. They tend to overlook how each new improvement throws a fresh set of roadblocks in the way of the uninitiated. I'm as much a perpetrator of this unrelenting technology optimism as anyone. So, I hope you'll forgive me as I try to balance things out with a few personal recollections.

Last winter, my wife and I went to visit her parents at their home in Las Vegas. Between exchanging gifts and hitting the casinos, we spent hours trying to configure their new wireless network. (By "we," I mean my wife. I am pretty hopeless as a troubleshooter.) The problem, as I understood it, was that the new Linksys network router wasn't properly distributing an IP address to my father-in-law's computer. We spent most of three days trying to tackle the problem, including hours on hold trying to reach the Linksys pay-per-call tech-support hotline listening to stale holiday music. They never picked up. Eventually, we surrendered. At a computer-security conference a few months later, my wife bribed one of her hacker friends, known as "Simple Nomad," to come to her parents' house and to fix the mess. It took him over an hour.

Last summer, I visited my own parents in Cleveland. That weekend, we spent good, quality time together. By "we," I mean, me and my stepfather's laptop, an ancient Compaq. His colleague had generously configured it to the DSL network in their office. Now it no longer worked over the telephone line at home. My professional diagnosis: the computer had two versions of America Online on its hard drive that were somehow interfering with each other. I tried to delete both and reinstall the software. "Drivers not found," the computer told me when I went to connect to the Internet over the phone line.

I failed to fix that computer too, but I recently called to check up on its condition. "I never figured out what happened," my stepfather told me. He says he just doesn't use it to connect to the Internet from home anymore. It is the black sheep of the family--invited into the house but generally ignored.

For our parents, the lingo is foreign and indecipherable. IP address? Why should they even have to know what that means? The worst part is that they know it should and can work--if they can just crack the alien code. When they can't get it to work, they make preposterous compromises they never would accept with a new car or household appliance. Bringing the laptop home but not using it; or using dial-up while the broadband wireless network router sits unused in the office for six months--until the kids come home. I recently overheard one student saying to another on a college campus: "I told my parents I am coming home this Thanksgiving to spend time with them, not to fix their printer."