quote:

Dear r/relationships,

I have realised that I've made a grave mistake. You see, I work in IT, which usually makes people go “Oh, my printer doesn't… “ to which I can reply “No, not that kind of IT.” Of course I can fix it, but I do computer things all day at work and I need a break every now and then. But of course, I'm the family’s tech support guy.

My entire family has computers from my siblings to my grandparents. My siblings also grew up with computers so they're fine. My grandparents, for what little they need their machines, they're fine. They've gone and taken a computer course for senior citizens and since then I had barely an issue with them other than simple misunderstandings. Awesome.

Then there's my mother.

She's a smart woman in her late fifties. She works a high profile job with a lot of responsibility for both minors and adults. To a large extent, her career depends on working with computers as memos and whatnot don't write themselves. Being the expert in her field means that she is not used to being wrong. Having brought up my siblings and me on her own means that she's stubborn, resolute and she's used to being the decision maker.

The problem is that she can't operate a computer to save her life. In fact, her incompetence almost cost her her job.

The even bigger problem is that I've been enabling her incompetence for the past twenty-one years, ever since people realised that I know what I'm doing with computers and became the family tech support guy. All other family members have acted on their incompetence at some point. My grandparents have gone to their course, my sister managed to comprehend and act on the idea that she doesn't need administrator privileges for everything she does and my brother has taken up some basic coding.

Tomorrow, I'm taking my mother's privileges to install anything on her machines because she ran head first into Ransomware this weekend. Here's what she did:

Her desktop picture disappeared after she's done a Windows update that she knows she should not do. For twenty-one years I've told her that she shouldn't worry about them and that I'll take care of them on the last Sunday of the month, which I've been doing.

She googled for a recovery tool. For twenty-one years I've been telling her to call me whenever something is wrong.

She installed the first best thing she found

Turns out it's not a recovery tool but Cryptolocker 3.0

At this point, everything is hosed

A minute before I wanted to turn off my computer at home and go play some PlayStation for the rest of the day, I get an email by her asking me for help.

Needless to say that my Sunday was spent with ten hours of crisis management, including telling her that she not only has lost all her private data such as family photos and whatnot, but also that the infection spread to her locally synced Dropbox folder and thus her work files, all of which also presumed lost. I hope that her company can recover her data from backups, but that's not all. By uploading her confidential work data to Dropbox she violated her company's data protection policy as she has access to a lot of confidential data. This is grounds for immediate termination, but luckily their IT guy is a slacker who might not want to be burdened to inform the company's CEO. As my youngest brother works for her, he's in this as well of course. So not only could she get herself fired but also my brother whose career would end before it began.

All this because I can not get anything through to her. I'm obviously not the person to teach her anything. Immediately after I explained what she did to her computer and what happened, she went “Well, that can happen. Every car has a flat tire every now and then”which made me angry. This is not a random occurrence. So I told her that what she did was not a flat tire, but her driving her car at a wall, but instead of braking she thinks about it, floors the gas and hits the wall head on because that will take care of the dust on the dashboard.

I give up. I can't do this anymore. I'm obviously inefficient at best and a direct threat to their careers at worst. It breaks my heart to see my Mom who I love very much lose all her data because I failed to have her learn anything. It’s been years and she still can’t tell the difference between Windows and Office. It’s all either “Microsoft” or “Foxfire” to her. I can’t tell her that I think she’s stupid, because she really isn’t. I can’t tell her that she’s got to learn something or she loses her job and ends my brother’s career with hers while she’s at it. Because if I do, she’ll get mad, stonewall me and will take no action. I know her and her stubbornness.

I've looked around and found a great basic computer course. Just the basics as this is what she does not comprehended at all. So I suggested she take this course, because she does have some certification, but that is at the very least seventeen years old. I remember quizzing her for her big test and it was still the age of “Oh, you have internet. So awesome!” She was not too keen on the suggestion, even after having probably lost every bit of data with no backup anywhere. Because she knows I will come and fix it. This is what makes it even worse. She relies on me for every little bit. She doesn’t display any kind of carefulness or anything because until now, I’ve told her that I can fix it. This I can’t fix. Her data is most likely gone. She deleted the backup because she needed space for her TV shows.

Basically, I want out. It’s not that I mind doing tech support, but I mind being used as the “He will fix it, regardless of what I do” guy. I want to stop enabling my mother. I want to not endanger my brother’s career by carelessness. I want my mother to be at least somewhat competent when it comes to using computers. But I have no idea how to go about this. So please, help?

tl;dr: My mother has learned nothing in twenty-one years of using a computer and it might cost her her job as well as that of my youngest brother. As the designated tech guy, I have failed to teach her anything for twenty-one years. She uses me as the “Fix it” guy. I don’t want this anymore.

Cough Drop The Beat posted:

Haha, yup. Always fun when dudes hookup with a lady they're into half a dozen times and then aren't decent enough to text "You're a cool person but I'm just not feeling it right now" after moving on. So many men are worthless cowards scared of their own shadows.

Antinumeric posted:

I'm beginning to wonder if all the onlyfans relationships stories are actually part of some bizarre advertising campaign. You don't get "My boyfriend keeps browsing pornhub dot com" you get "my (22f) bf (33m) won't stop looking at porn". There are other can sites. Why only onlyfans mentioned by name.

Miss posted:

Me [30M] with my mother [50sF]: She can't use a Computer to Save her Life, Lost all data now, might lose her job and I enable her reckless behaviour at the keyboard. I want this to stop. Help?

quote:

I really don't know where to begin here. My girlfriend and I both live with her parents in order to save money and pay off our student loans faster, but we both work and I think we do the whole adulting thing pretty well. My girlfriend is NOT a superstitious person. She does not believe in ghosts or anything paranormal and is a highly rational person about everything except this.

A couple of weeks ago we were rooting around in the attic and we found her old Playstation 2 in a big box with all its games and accessories. Score. We set everything up and gamed the night away. It's important to note that there were three controllers, two that we used and a third one that was kept in a separate box that was taped shut. I asked her about it and she said "We don't play with that one. It's cursed." Apparently when she was a kid she noticed a pattern of friends and family members getting into car accidents shortly after she would play a game with the controller. After her uncle was in a fatal accident (he didn't die, but the driver of the other car did) she put away the controller for good.

Like I said, my girlfriend is a very rational person who does not believe in anything supernatural. She even sounded like she was half-joking/embarrassed about it so I didn't think it was that serious. That weekend I invited a friend over to hang out and we decided to play some Playstation. Some buttons on one of the ""uncursed"" controllers were sticking and making it hard to play, so I swapped it out with the ""cursed"" controller and let my friend play with it instead.

I honestly thought it was not a big deal and that my gf understood that the whole curse thing was just an irrational thing from her childhood. But she was actually kind of upset when she got home and saw it plugged in. She's boxed up the PS2 and put it back in the attic. I asked her what was so wrong with having it out and I even said I would buy another controller. She's not completely icing me out or anything but I can tell it's gotten under her skin more than it probably should and I can't get her to talk about it. Help?

tl;dr: Non-superstitious gf is superstitious about a game controller, which I used. Now acting weirder about it than is warranted since (I think?) we both know there is not really a curse.

chitoryu12 posted:

Bourdain was concerned about food that tasted good, not food that met pretentious standards. Do you think street carts in Thai night markets are cooking a bunch of fresh ingredients of the highest quality in their $2 meals?

well why not posted:

i'm ready to drop this in favour of lolling at reddit

Miss posted:

Me [30M] with my mother [50sF]: She can't use a Computer to Save her Life, Lost all data now, might lose her job and I enable her reckless behaviour at the keyboard. I want this to stop. Help?

kimbo305 posted:

I know OP is not that kind of IT, but they could have invested in an automated backup setup for mom. In that sense, her flat tire analogy has a lot of merit. You should expect to have to pull from backups when you're breaking the machine that often.

LimburgLimbo posted:

I mean the mom literally went out of her way to delete the backups, which it sounds like may well have been automated. There’s only so much idiotproofing that can be done.

Miss posted:

Me [30M] with my mother [50sF]: She can't use a Computer to Save her Life, Lost all data now, might lose her job and I enable her reckless behaviour at the keyboard. I want this to stop. Help?

kimbo305 posted:

I thought the Dropbox was the only non-company backup solution she had? Knowing her, there should have been something less attached. Especially if he was going there monthly.

quote:

I was recently hired at a financial firm that has been doing business lunches at a local restaurant for more than twenty years.

At the first business lunch with the company I was surprised to see that I knew the waitress - a friend of my mom's, Karen. I said hello, it was nice to see her, etc.

She started chatting and I tried to brush it off as this was a working lunch and we were with clients. She didn't take the hint. Even when I told her, "Well Karen, we'd better let you get back to work, we have some things to discuss here," she came back two minutes later.

Every time she came to our table she shared an embarrassing story about my youth. At first they were harmless but she told a couple of stories that were not a good choice.

She said she can't believe how grown up I am, and said it seems like it was only yesterday that I was a little kid. My boss made some polite comment and she went on to say that she thinks I grew up quickly when my girlfriend got pregnant when I was 15.

She also said something like 'it's crazy to think only two years ago you were getting arrested for bar fights and now you're working at a company like this!'

The back story on that is that I punched a man who was physically attacking a woman on the ground. I was temporarily handcuffed until the cops saw the security footage. Never even saw the back of a cop car.

But of course she didn't tell them that I was trying to protect someone, she just told them I was arrested for getting into bar fights two years ago and laughed it off.

My bosses were horrified. One of them texted me under the table and told me to excuse myself for a family emergency before this woman comes back with another story and our clients run for the hills.

I later explained the situation to them, but that doesn't fix the fact that I was trying to sell a million-dollar deal to clients and Karen was bringing up things that would make them not want to put their trust in me.

I called Karen that night and told her that while it was nice to see her, intimate stories about my past can be a little uncomfortable for clients. I asked her to keep them in the family in the future.

She became incredibly upset. She seems to feel that this is not actually about the stories, but that she thinks I'm embarrassed that I knew someone who is a waitress for a living. She believes that I'm asking her not to tell stories so it will look like we don't even know one another.

She ended a long rant by saying that next time she sees me at a business lunch, she'll only have one embarrassing story to tell - the one of how I'm an entitled prick and I'm ashamed of the very people who helped raise me.

Now I have two concerns.

Should I try talking to her again? Or just let this settle down?

I don't THINK she'd actually try to "get revenge" or whatever by bringing this up if she's our waitress at future lunches...but I don't know. A friend has suggested that I let the manager know we'd prefer a different waitress for future lunches and I'm seriously considering it.

tl;dr: Mom's friend embarrassed me in front of clients during a business lunch. I asked her to not tell stories about me to my boss/clients and she's upset with me, and vaguely threatened to make the next lunch difficult as well.

No Pants posted:

she had a backup solution that wasn't dropbox but she decided to use it for tv shows instead

Miss posted:

Mom's friend [50s F] humiliated me [28 M] while I was working. Now she and my mom [56 F] are upset.

Jack Trades posted:

Just because you hosed someone doesn't mean that they suddenly are entitled to your emotional labor. Ghosting is a perfectly viable option when you don't want to deal with the other person anymore.
That applies regardless of the genders involved too. Hth.

ilmucche posted:

I felt bad for the person who gave their mom the seashells. That's such a brutal reaction, then to double down with the fishing for sympathy apology is disgusting.

Waffle house fight guy owns. I hope he sees it for the comedy it is and it isn't serious. The egg in the hole is a great joke.

Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:

It’s called a hole-in-one, and it’s literally the best way to serve an egg.

Edit: I think some deviants (British) might call it eggy in a basket or some such nonsense.

the article posted:

SPIRAL MOINTAIN — A new post on Reddit’s r/relationship_advice by an anonymous user was quickly identified by fans to be about the famous bear and bird duo Banjo and Kazooie.

“I just feel like I’m being used,” begins the now-deleted Reddit post entitled My (36F Bird) boyfriend (38M Bear) keeps pulling me out of his backpack and using me as a gun. “I have no agency in this relationship. For the most part, I don’t get to decide where we go — I rarely get to be the one walking. I get poo poo talked constantly by strangers, and my boyfriend never defends me. He uses me as a tool, he smacks me against other people. He ground pounds me. But I just don’t know what to do, he’s the only person I really know and I still love him.”

Commentators quickly picked up on the fact that the post seemed to have been written by Kazooie about her boyfriend Banjo.

“I think I know who this is, but sis, dump that only-pants-wearing motherfucker,” said one reply to the Reddit thread. “Throw the whole bear away.”

“Obviously this is anonymous but if it is who I think it is, maybe you should just appreciate your boyfriend more?” said another reply. “He’s the one gathering most of the jigsaw puzzles and musical notes. I think everybody sucks here.”

After some time, however, many commentators began to discuss whether or not the post was a troll pretending to be Kazooie.

“This is way too obviously supposed to be Banjo and Kazooie. Bad troll is bad,” replied one comment. “Kazooie has been on record saying that she loves Banjo and has nothing bad to say about him. Just watch any video of them, they’re clearly mad happy. This is so fake lol.”

As of press time, a spokesperson from Rare clarified that neither Banjo or Kazooie could have written the Reddit post because both are illiterate.

quote:

I've been very depressed lately. I no longer enjoy the things I used to enjoy, even sex. I have been having a hard time cumming lately because I can't get out of my own head. My sleep schedule has been hosed up lately, and I have had chronic depression for more than half of my life.
My partner is very good at what he does and I find him so sexy and I love him SO MUCH, but I just cannot bring myself to be interested in sex lately. The only things I have energy for are Animal Crossing and binge watching shows on various streaming platforms.
Today, I was playing Animal Crossing on the couch when my boyfriend came downstairs. From behind the couch, he ruffled my hair, then kissed me on the top of my head and massaged my shoulders and reached for my boobs, slowly inching his way down as a hint that he had sex on the brain. That, and his boner happened to be at couch level, so it poked me on the back of my head.
I was a little annoyed, but I realized that I have been neglecting him lately because I don't find sex that fun anymore since I find it so difficult to cum. We went from having sex maybe 3 times a day to only once a day, and actually recently, it's become every other day. I usually shower before sex, too, when I'm feeling good, but I've also stopped doing that because depression, my showering dwindled from every morning before work, to maybe once every other day.
I half-jokingly said, "I'll have sex with you if you're cool with me just playing Animal Crossing while we do it." He's a very horny guy, so of course he said yes. I took my Switch upstairs, took a shower, and then just lay in bed, on my back, playing Animal Crossing while he did his thing.
Something about the soothing repetition of crafting things in game, just had me in a good mental space where I was so relaxed. When he found the sweet spot (a combination of the right tempo and pressure in the right places) I put down the game and just focused on what he was doing. I had not just one, but several strong orgasms.
TLDR: I credit Animal Crossing for those orgasms during that sex session.

Antinumeric posted:

I'm beginning to wonder if all the onlyfans relationships stories are actually part of some bizarre advertising campaign. You don't get "My boyfriend keeps browsing pornhub dot com" you get "my (22f) bf (33m) won't stop looking at porn". There are other can sites. Why only onlyfans mentioned by name.

Jack Trades posted:

Just because you hosed someone doesn't mean that they suddenly are entitled to your emotional labor. Ghosting is a perfectly viable option when you don't want to deal with the other person anymore.
That applies regardless of the genders involved too. Hth.

Cough Drop The Beat posted:

I was able to relax enough to orgasm thanks to Animal Crossing

Antinumeric posted:

I'm beginning to wonder if all the onlyfans relationships stories are actually part of some bizarre advertising campaign. You don't get "My boyfriend keeps browsing pornhub dot com" you get "my (22f) bf (33m) won't stop looking at porn". There are other can sites. Why only onlyfans mentioned by name.

quote:

Jack Trades posted:

Just because you hosed someone doesn't mean that they suddenly are entitled to your emotional labor. Ghosting is a perfectly viable option when you don't want to deal with the other person anymore.
That applies regardless of the genders involved too. Hth.

Jack Trades posted:

Just because you hosed someone doesn't mean that they suddenly are entitled to your emotional labor. Ghosting is a perfectly viable option when you don't want to deal with the other person anymore.
That applies regardless of the genders involved too. Hth.

Jack Trades posted:

Just because you hosed someone doesn't mean that they suddenly are entitled to your emotional labor. Ghosting is a perfectly viable option when you don't want to deal with the other person anymore.
That applies regardless of the genders involved too. Hth.

Pirate Radar posted:

An interesting theory:

https://twitter.com/2lib2quit/status/1260078929844547584?s=21

Solovey posted:

someone else already said it but it's worth reiterating that this is not at all what the term "emotional labor" means. hth

Chamale posted:

The cook must think the boyfriend is doing it all in fun, and the fights are just impish fisticuffs. I hope that soon he'll be serving handmade meringue, or preparing a bowl of hot Korean soup and cracking an egg into it.

Miss posted:

Me [30M] with my mother [50sF]: She can't use a Computer to Save her Life, Lost all data now, might lose her job and I enable her reckless behaviour at the keyboard. I want this to stop. Help?