My 71 year old mother got a new router during lockdown and if you could bottle the rage I felt trying to talk her through connecting the wi-fi to all her devices you’d have a weapon that could destroy worlds.

She refused to let me change the router name and password to something simpler that she can remember so every time she had to remind herself of the router name and then she’d fuck up the password because she’d get the uppercase and lowercase letters wrong.

All this was done over the phone so I couldn’t see what she was doing. I’d get her to the settings menu and ask her to read out the categories and every time she hit ‘NETWORK SETTINGS’ I’d say, ‘YES! THAT ONE!’ But she’d just carry on reading out the rest of the settings.

Then in network settings she’d start reading them out but she’d get bored and start telling me some bullshit about what the council is doing on some housing estate I’ve never heard of or about a nice horse she once saw on a walk.

Long story short, we connected 2 devices out of a possible 8 and she wants ‘a day off’ from thinking about it today.

The fact that there’s no mass shooting of pensioners by someone at a tech-support center says a lot about the human spirit.