lulz.
Saw that in the New Yorker last week.

I'm going to have to print this out, put it in an envelope, and mail it to my parents.

(Since if I email it to them they'll just get all confused and call me twice to figure out how to "see the picture" and two more times to "put it on paper.")

Ah yes, making fun of old people. Evergreen.

Just for that, I bought my granpa a Jumbo Uniiversal Remote. These things are hilarious. They look like a bigass Hershey bar. You should get one just for fun.

@tootingbec: Heh. Yeah. I always wondered how the kids are going to make fun of us when we're in their place.

@FIRST!!!: I got one for myself for when I cant find my bifocals. There are still some buttons on it that I think are connected government tracking stations to let them know I'm trying to watch a movie.

What is even worse is when they have to deal with 3 or four remotes, TV, DVD, VHS, Cable - all with different buttons, not knowing the proper sequence to start things...

@JAV: Between you and me... It's that 'SAT' button. Press it and a governement satelite will be tracking whatever you watch. Avoid it by any means. In fact, just remove it.

My grandma doesnt need a remote, SHE SITS REALLY CLOSE TO THE SCREEN!!!!! Im not kidding here guys, Like not even a centimeter apart, hmmmm maybe I should take a picture when I go to mexico this summer......

@Simpsons-Movie-ruled: Oh man. My dad does the same thing (and, based on your prior posts, I imagine they are about the same age).

He's got this uber-comfy Lay-Z-Boy he reads in, but for TV, especially the news, he usually pulls out a folding chair and sits right...in...front of his gigantic TV.

@ripfire4: I don't need to wait, my kids can already laugh at me right now. I'm just not a TV watcher, so I can't do the instinctual punch-5-buttons-in-a-row-without-looking thing that they can: I have to look at it and figure out what does what the one time per month I actually want to watch something on TV -- and I'm not even remotely (arr arr) close to being old yet. And it's worse now that they've worn the print off most of the buttons... Mind you, I can design and build a complete enterprise network from the ground up, and use just about any OS you plop in front of me -- and they can't, so I'm not a TOTAL luddite....

I utterly adore Roz Chast. One of my all-time flavorite books is her Proof of Life on Earth. Very funny stuff.

speaking of remote my so-called-universal remote works fine with my TV but not with my xbox console,
(why is it everything about xbox is broken?!)

and my DVD remote has gotten the buttons into the wrong place the "mute button" is for "Opening" the disc tray. weird remotes!

I guess my humor is a little skeewed. whenever I have granny over I tell her I need to step out but that I'll turn the news on for her to watch (when it's really Die hard [x], Mars Attacks!, or independence day.

gets her every time

Hey, you complex, unintuitive interfaces, get off my lawn!

My grandma cant even read the remote much less function one.

Ya know, I'm getting a little tired of all these comments about "old people". I happen to be 70 years old, female, and I feel I'm pretty savvy about tech subjects, so back off, Junior!!!!

We had to glue most of the buttons on our Grandparents remote, now they only have on, off, volume, and channels...it cut down on the twice a day technical service calls.

lol actually they usually know how to use the remote, just not all of the features.

Hilarious. I think it makes a good point though. (as most good comics should.) Everything is getting more complex and constantly changing. What does the world really look like from the view of somebody who has been around for eighty years. Thats a lot of change. This sort of stuff probably comes from our relatives who are STILL holding on to that old tv from the forties... you know the one... the one sitting on the floor in the giant wooden cabinets... w/ the *shudder* turn dials. They see something like this when they come to visit us for the weekend and just find it to be unnecessarily complex. Not that i want to give up my overly complex remote though. It keeps your brain working.

I managed to teach my mother how to program the VCR. I was so proud when she managed to do it on her own without calling me.

Another project for the Apple design group. Their solution will have one button. Geeks will complain, flame wars will rage and in the end all remotes will rio off their design (poorly).

Seriously though, why are there so few businesses that can see that this sea of buttons is a hideous fail?

-Steve

Great cartoon with a lot of truth to it. I can't tell you the amount of times my parents called me to set a VCR recording when I was back in college.

Mark, is your story about your wife's grandma supposed to be real or a joke? Either way, TVs can't pick up AM broadcasts...

@packetsniffer: Completely real. And I've read of similar things happening before.

Got a chuckle about the Spanish thing. This actually just happened to my wife and I last Thursday, during "Lost". The frustrating thing was it would sporadically switch between muffled Spanish and regular English. I was desperately trying to keep up with the Spanish, and we were hoping that the presumed station difficulties would sort themselves out soon.

Turns out that I accidentally hit the SAP button on the remote. Don't know what the SAP button is (Spanish And Pimentos, or something), but that's probably what happened to you. More likely than picking up AM stations due to a power surge, I think (unless it was really your fillings tuning in via electron plasma tunneling).

I lol'd because my Grandma leaves her cable TV on the same station for days at a time because she is afraid she won't find the channel again.

Consumer electronics suck. They're like MS Office - they keep getting more and more features (of dubious value) while simultaneously getting harder and harder to use.

Until recently, I had a PDA phone camera with touchscreen, qwerty keyboard, voice recorder, mp3 player and flashlight. It did nothing well, and it took 3 button pushes or more to get them to do it at all. Now I have a simple cell phone. When people call me, it rings. When I open it, I can hear them talking. It's like freakin' magic.

I'm trying to think of product that breaks this pattern, but I've got nothin'. The iTouch looks like it might, but I haven't spent enough time playing with one to judge. The iPod certainly didn't. For all the hype, its UI absolutely sucks.

old uhf televisions can pick up 900mhz cellphone calls, not very audible but they can

i saw this comic in the new yorker and quite literally laughed out loud- something that few comics have ever accomplished. I really like it, and think there should be a less extreme version that would be true for baby boomers and computers. the first time my own mother held a mouse she held it sideways and complained about how hard it was to use.

My mother actually wore down/melted away the plastic around the "mute" button on her last television. I really should have saved it and displayed it as sculpture. Moral of the story:

ON/OFF
CHANNEL UP/DOWN
VOLUME UP/DOWN
MUTE

A smart cable company would offer this simple as an option (with recessed buttons in the back for adult or teen sons/daughters to reconfigure if necessary). It would cost a couple of bucks, but with four companies competing for the same four sets of channels (DirecTV, Dish, Verizon/ATT, local cable), a basic remote control as well as the standard model could differentiate one company from the rest.