My First Time Asking My Kid for Tech Support

I’ve always prided myself on maintaining a certain grasp of personal technology. I may not be a digital native — those younger folks who grew up in the internet era ­— but I am a member of the Atari generation.

I got my first home computer, a Commodore 64, in the ’80s, while in my teens. I used it to execute simple programming (making the computer spit out jokes to crack up my friends) and to play video games. As I got older, I lost the desire to be an early adopter, to be the first to acquire cutting-edge gadgets, but I always stayed current. Computer software, cellphones, iPods, home TV and stereo setups: I tended to figure them out quickly and help my peers sort through their own struggles.

So my pride took a hit when I recently had to call my son for tech support.

I was trying to connect a new Nintendo Switch 2 console to my (supposedly) smart TV, a process that should have been simple. But when I connected the device to the TV with a standard HDMI cable, nothing happened. In my decades of wrestling with wires, I’ve handled much worse, but in this case I found myself quickly consumed with fury.

Without trying to figure it out myself, I grabbed my phone and made a video call to my son. He’s a college senior working toward a software engineering degree, so I assumed he’d know what was wrong. I showed him the TV screen, panned over to the Nintendo, then back to the TV. “Why won’t this work? What’s going on?”

His calm response: “I don’t know, Dad.”

And with that, I could feel his eyes rolling up and back into his head. Deep into his head. I ended the call.

He was right to brush me off. After a few more minutes of fiddling, I got the gaming console to work. I think the solution was literally as simple as the joke told repeatedly on The IT Crowd, a witty British sitcom about tech support: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

At 58 years old, why was I so quick to throw my hands up in frustration, when in the past, I would have calmly tried to solve the problem?

For one, I now have at my disposal a digital native who is better at tech than I am. It’s like when your kid can finally beat you at driveway basketball. Eventually the youths will surpass us. It’s inevitable. Instead of worrying about it, embrace it.

Our attitudes toward technology often change over time, as tech evolves so rapidly that it’s difficult to keep up. Gen X used to be cutting-edge, with the coolest music and coolest stuff. But it turns out we weren’t the first.

“Microwaves, dishwashers, credit cards and radios are just some of the many technologies that the post–World War II generation brought into the mainstream, and now they are just a part of our daily lives,” says Jared Benge, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Texas at Austin.