Even I, a member of Gen Z, or a digital native as they call it, who grew up with technology, feel like I’m falling behind in knowing about all the new apps, glitzy phones, computers, and who knows what else. So imagine the struggle of those who were raised on magazines, TV, and radio. They simply aren’t used to things advancing this quickly, so their attempts at technology are usually full of trial and error, which we sometimes can’t help but find hilarious.
This TikTok recently invited people to share many such instances, which we gathered in the list below for a little weekend pick-me-up. To find these stories, all you have to do is scroll down!

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My mom couldn’t login to her Disney plus account so she called Disney Land
my grandma tried to order my aunt chandelier earrings for her birthday and accidentally order a MOTORIZED DENTAL CHAIR.
My dad got asked to officiate a wedding once. He spent months on a “course”. We told him he can just get a daily thing at the court house. No mam, this man made himself a full on PASTOR without knowing it.
My mom broke up with a guy using a screenshot of the text I sent her telling her what to say
my grandma used to think Obama was posting to her when he’d post on Facebook so she’d reply to all his posts something like “thank you for letting me know, Mr. President.”
My mom still thinks stuff that shows up on her page is people posting things just for HER. 😁 No mom, we all saw that post by Uncle Jim - it was a private message.
when Facebook used to prompt you to write a status by saying how are you today, my dad posted I'm good who's this
My mom called a stranger about a thousand times to vote for American idol and he politely took her vote each time.
My grandma has 24 Facebook profiles bc when she forgets her password she’ll make another
My dad drove to the Amazon warehouse near us to get me an Amazon gift card for Christmas.
My grandma shared a pic of a random garden. Then she commented on that same post later saying “wow, you have a beautiful garden.” Then later she replied to her own comment and said “you should come see my garden one day.” A post 3 comments and an invitation and it was all her. Bless her sweet heart!
my aunt once accidentally applied to be deployed overseas with the navy
my dad tried booking a holiday to canada online and managed to somehow apply for citizenship instead
One time my mom sold me on Facebook marketplace
Definitely better than one of those “free! Left on side of road!” posts….
Load More Replies...Quite a racket. She sells you, you escape and run home, she sells you again to someone else. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the cash comes rolling in.
My FB Marketplace ad would be like one from a used car website: "White - Antique - Good condition - Reliable - Cheap with some evidence of body damage."
I used to threaten to sell my kids to gypsies, but only if I could recoup our investment. Nobody ever offered enough.
People need to learn how to use tech. She made you, she SHOULD have sold you on Etsy.
my dad called me upset he couldnt log in to his email. I went over and he was typing his password into Google search
My grandpa hears you mention you’re not feeling good in any capacity and he does a whole Google research, prints, binds & laminates his findings to help you
Hey, I can appreciate well-preserved notes. That's not clueless, that just classy~
MY MOM DID THAT WITH UBER FOR ME!! she was like “there’s no reason your driver needs to know you social security number. i was like ??? mom delete everything you’re doing
My aunt is constantly posting random people’s names as her facebook status. She’s trying to search for the person’s page.
I couldn’t call my mom for a week because it would go straight to voicemail so I thought she died and called the hospital. Turns out she blocked me and couldn’t figure out how to unlock me…
In the early 1990's, our construction company was in a dispute with the Defense department over changes we suggested to the project we were working on. After winning the bid, we learned it was the third time the project was being constructed because the first two times builds had a design flaw that guaranteed failure. We caught the flaw, but the government wanted us to build it to those specs again anyway. , Midday Friday, received an email query that CC'ed dozens of people at the Pentagon (literally), so in my response I hit "Reply All". I'd previously set my email to auto-reply my upcoming vacation. Within a half hour, the FBI and another government official were at my office investigating a complaint I'd "shut down the Pentagon's email system". I later learned a significant number of recipients were out of the office, with auto-responses hitting my auto-reply triggering a never-ending back and forth that supposedly jammed "the whole Pentagon.
One time my aunt was showing my family how instacart worked and accidentally accepted a cart and had to go shop and deliver it lol
My parents went to AT&T and asked them to change their relationship status on facebook to married.
Not surprising at all: two of my friends (I'm 62) are absolute Luddites when it comes to their phones (one still has a flip phone, the other is afraid of using any apps) or their Facebook accounts, both are around my age (one is 57, the other is 65), both are male, and both barely graduated high school (the 65 year old brags that he rarely attended classes during his senior year and still graduated).
My mom once sent me a screenshot of her phone home screen to try to show me the crack in it
My grandma tries to play solitaire with me on Facebook and shares it to her timeline and tags me when it’s my turn…
My grandma wrote “LOL” on someone’s Facebook post about their husband dying. She thought it meant lots of love 😭 she called me asking why everyone in the comments was upset 😂
meanwhile my grandma who was in MEMORY CARE figured out how to order an uber for herself (she wasn't allowed to leave)
When my mom gets locked out of any app she drives 40 minutes to the Apple Store
My mom took a personality test and somehow got Scientology books sent to our house
A Lyft driver knocked on our door bc my dad accidentally ordered an ride from San Diego to LA
Mine deleted maps from both his & my moms phones bc he thinks that’s how the govt tracks him
We saw a house for sale that we were interested in. Decided to contact the (elderly) owners and they were confused. Turned out the husband put the house up for sale by accident
My sister put her own cell phone number as the "If found, call: ..." number on her cell phone.
My dad will post a video on Facebook and in the parts where it says "comment" he will literally put "No comment"
my grandpa was watching call of duty gameplay videos thinking they were real povs of the war.....
My mom has only ever posted 2 tiktoks. One was my son as a newborn. The other was my dad’s necrotic foot injury. Both used Shaboozey audio
my mom paid for a flashlight app on her iphone
my mom told me to check out the 4th post on Instagram because she thought everyone had the same feed
I showed my mom my crush on Facebook and she accidentally tagged me on his profile picture. BYE
my mom took a picture of her computer screen because she wanted me to see something. she printed the picture and then took a picture of the picture she printed and emailed it to me.
My mom couldn’t figure out where the emoji keyboard was so she screenshotted a previously texted emoji and then cropped and pasted it into my text. It was like 4 pixels
yesterday i found my mom recording on her phone, a YouTube video playing on her laptop because she wanted to listen to the song again
My dad takes photos by opening the notes app, pressing the paper clip, then selecting take photo. And then wonders where his pictures go.
Im still trying to figure out where things are that are sent to clipboard.
“Why do they need my damn car insurance information? Anyway…”
My dad once got really excited that “Taylor Swift had tweeted at him.” In fact, he had just received an email notification that she’d posted something on twitter
Okay but I’ll admit that it is sometimes fun to assume that they are messages directed at you even though you know they’re public! I once got a notification that a celebrity I like had posted a new story and the notification came up as just their name and “love you.” It was a story of them with their mum with a caption reading “love you”. Had to do a double take when I saw that notification lol! But then I did save a screenshot of it :p
My grandma will screen shot my pictures then print them out and give them to me as Christmas gifts
I just posted about how my aunt did this. But she just printed it on paper and send it to me in the mail. 🤣 I was so confused when I got it.
My dad made an Instagram one day and ONLY followed Kim Kardashian and never logged back in.
My MIL sends me my own posts and stories on IG
My aunt once printed out a picture off my Facebook page (on paper) and mailed it to me. It was a picture that I had posted from my phone. It was literally MY picture. 🤣🤣 I appreciate the thought though! She so sweet. 😊
I had to explain to my grandma what Wi-Fi is and why it’s different from Netflix and why you have to buy both
My grandpa thinks the emails he receives from Facebook are directly from me so whenever I post something I get a phone call from him telling me he got my email 😭😭 I’ve tried explaining it and that is what he believes
My friend still thinks this same thing even though a few of us have tried to explain FB and notifications to him. It's been a lost cause.
my grandma was watching a military going home video and accidentally live streamed her crying and posted it on facebook
my grandma posted a picture of her credit card to her Facebook story. No idea what she was even trying to do.
my grandma was frustrated why she couldn’t open any of her apps. she was tapping on a screenshot of her home screen
Mine deletes recent calls from his phone because he thinks they can still hear him
My dad got a scam message on WhatsApp and was all freaked out after they “sent him a picture of him in his office asking when he took it”. How would they have gotten this picture of me?! It was his profile picture.
My grandparents tried to sign up for Instagram and immediately got a 30 day ban??
I suspect they tried to sign up with a username that has been previously banned. The site admins probably thought 'this moron is signing back up with the same username but a different email address, like we wouldn't figure out it was still them'.
my mom LITERALLY did this with Uber, and then thought she was ordering rides but she was really picking them up so they banned her since she wouldn't show up
My dad prints memes to bring to his cousins house to show him. Full page, full color prints.
My dad made the whole fam smile and wave for a video to my brother on Thanksgiving and then posted it in a FB marketplace listing he made to sell antique bottles
my dad tried to google something and got redirected to some other website and in the search bar he typed: “hello i was told 2 come 2 u 4 help”
One time my mom couldn’t find her phone so she filled out the contact form on my business website saying “brooke it’s mom I lost my phone call me”
In a way that would make sense. If she lost her phone and as long her phone ringer was on, when you call her she could hear her phone ring and she could find it.
My mom had a random appliance repair company as her only emergency contact on her iPhone medical ID
My nana just called me today because she accidentally posted a picture of herself without makeup on Facebook to tell me she’s suing the man from cricket who was at her house the day before because he MUSTVE posted that photo of her and she’s filing a formal complaint because she can’t fathom that it was her
My dad got lost in Olive Garden and used Google Maps to find the exit
my highschool teacher went live on facebook for 47 hours one time.
My Father-in-law signs all of his Facebook comments with “-Gary” like Gary, we know who you are 😭
To be fair, many of us sign emails with our name, e.g. ending in' Yours, David Morgan', even though the people I'm sending emails to largely already know me and therefore identify me from my email address anyway. It just seems more courteous as an ending.
My mom applied for a job over Facebook messenger. Gave them her SSN and everything!
My grandma firmly believes you can call in a Lyft and pay them when they pick you up, in cash. The concept that it’s not a cab is not sinking in for her
My dad randomly “😮” reacts my texts but he has no idea how it happens. He works on machines that test for nuclear radiation for a living.
My grandma accidentally went live this morning, it’s just her eyes peaking over the camera and her scrolling with Manchild by Sabrina Carpenter playing in the background
My mom thought LOL meant log on later. So whenever she would be talking to people on Facebook or anything and see lol she just thought Facebook was too full for her to be on it so she would log off and go back later
My grandma was told she could see her Costco receipts in her app. I went onto her app… she hadn’t logged in, but was searching receipts into the product search bar
My mom kept ordering Chipotle and she was confused as to why she would only get the tortilla 😭 she never added anything 😂😂😂
Probably him on the app: “oh wow I didn’t know I could pick the color and model of the car that picked me up!”
My dad signed up for Apple Music and instead of using the Apple Music app he purchased like $300 worth of songs from iTunes..
My mum got a smartphone and somehow managed to permanently delete the keyboard. It was impossible to type anything, in any app. The tech guy in the shop was baffled, he said that shouldn’t be possible. We returned it and she went back to her old phone with a physical keyboard. Now we joke that if AI tries to take over the world, we’ll pit her against it, because she’ll manage to disable it through the power of extreme technophobia.
Hubs favorite phone was the kind that slid when held landscape-wise and had a full keyboard - would buy if they made these again!
Load More Replies...I'm 72 but I'm retired from the medical tech industry. I'm currently volunteering at an aparment complex for low-income seniors. While some of them are computer savvy, most are absolutely clueless. I spend a lot of my time helping with their phones and PCs.
Can hardly blame them. People are set in their ways. We'll have AIs writing full computer programs, and I'll still be grumbling about having to write out my code on paper when I first started learning (didn't really have the money a decent computer). And 70 years from now, people will be grumbling about how they had to interact with their devices by hand, not this new-fangled biotech.
Load More Replies...Born in 1945. I'm relieved to see I'm not at the stage of most of these just yet, 🤞
Born in the 70’s and I can relate to a few of them. 😹
Load More Replies...If My mother wants to show me something she sees online on her computer or if she wants to forward a pic someone has sent her, she takes a photo of the screen and emails the photo to me.... despite me having showed her 100 times how to just send a link or a screencap, which is easier
My mother keeps managing to change the keybord to japanese again and again. She does not speak japanese. She does not know people from japan either. Why and how, i have no idea.
My dad sends me his grocery lists by email because he can't text with his flip phone. After the first one that just rambled on continuously I asked him to make it a list. "How do you do that?" "By hitting 'return' or 'enter' after each item." "My keyboard doesn't have those."
eh, I don't care of the downvotes, look at my cat fff69a51-6...1d-png.jpg
They didn't individually invent the internet, and they were not of a generation that grew up with and had lessons on how to use computers. A little critical thinking and compassion before you start labelling an entire generation pathetic please
Load More Replies...My mum got a smartphone and somehow managed to permanently delete the keyboard. It was impossible to type anything, in any app. The tech guy in the shop was baffled, he said that shouldn’t be possible. We returned it and she went back to her old phone with a physical keyboard. Now we joke that if AI tries to take over the world, we’ll pit her against it, because she’ll manage to disable it through the power of extreme technophobia.
Hubs favorite phone was the kind that slid when held landscape-wise and had a full keyboard - would buy if they made these again!
Load More Replies...I'm 72 but I'm retired from the medical tech industry. I'm currently volunteering at an aparment complex for low-income seniors. While some of them are computer savvy, most are absolutely clueless. I spend a lot of my time helping with their phones and PCs.
Can hardly blame them. People are set in their ways. We'll have AIs writing full computer programs, and I'll still be grumbling about having to write out my code on paper when I first started learning (didn't really have the money a decent computer). And 70 years from now, people will be grumbling about how they had to interact with their devices by hand, not this new-fangled biotech.
Load More Replies...Born in 1945. I'm relieved to see I'm not at the stage of most of these just yet, 🤞
Born in the 70’s and I can relate to a few of them. 😹
Load More Replies...If My mother wants to show me something she sees online on her computer or if she wants to forward a pic someone has sent her, she takes a photo of the screen and emails the photo to me.... despite me having showed her 100 times how to just send a link or a screencap, which is easier
My mother keeps managing to change the keybord to japanese again and again. She does not speak japanese. She does not know people from japan either. Why and how, i have no idea.
My dad sends me his grocery lists by email because he can't text with his flip phone. After the first one that just rambled on continuously I asked him to make it a list. "How do you do that?" "By hitting 'return' or 'enter' after each item." "My keyboard doesn't have those."
eh, I don't care of the downvotes, look at my cat fff69a51-6...1d-png.jpg
They didn't individually invent the internet, and they were not of a generation that grew up with and had lessons on how to use computers. A little critical thinking and compassion before you start labelling an entire generation pathetic please
Load More Replies...
