I’ve become the tech guy, and family are extremely entitled to my services. My mom especially. BTW I can’t cut her out, because I still live with her and she EXPECTS me to fix anything computer related. She won’t take no for an answer.
I’ve tried to keep track of her passwords with a password manager, I’ve spent literally 8 hours in a single day filling out captchas and replacing passwords, and I’ve spent even more time trying to teach my mom how to use the manager.
She CAN’T learn it, and always makes a new password, which she doesnt keep track of and expects me to fix it. What the hell do it do? She uses firefox, with auto refill on, but it doesn’t autofill on her iphone.
Use something that has solid iPhone support. Bitwarden has integration with iPhone to replace the built in password manager. That’s what I do. It
Then on desktop, I use the bitwarden plugin for safari, Firefox, and chrome.
It even works for passkeys and syncs them between devices. Even between iPhone and desktop. It intercepts the iPhone passkey manager.
Then it even works for her apps on iPhone.
Seriously, it’s a very seamless, elegant solution.
Get a blank notebook with alphabetic tabs and write all her passwords in there. Label it “crochet projects” or something. A non-techy friend of mine does that. At first I was horrified but it’s a lot safer for her than post-it notes on the monitor.
It’s also, in some ways, safer than some centralized password managers.
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Would she use one of those little password-keeper books? It’s not as secure as a password manager, but it might help get her self-sufficient.
You could start not knowing how to do things, give slower answers, just give bad customer service. Or ask her if whatever she’s trying to do can wait until she gets home to get computer.
I know the feeling of wanting to help, it’s part of why I became a librarian. I also know the pain of old folks coming in and asking the same questions. I had one lady, really sweet, that would come in and ask for the phone numbers to maybe 3 businesses a day. Like, we’d show her how to look it up, we’d walk her through it on a public terminal, she’d still ask us again the next day. It gets frustrating and you pick your battles.
At least I could go home after a shift and stop being the tech-knower. It doesn’t sound like you get to and that sucks.
My mother-in-law was super dependent on my wife for everything related to technology. Banking apps, netflix, sending and receiving money, anything related to the government she had her do it. Then we moved a few states away. We came for a visit a few months ago and guess what? She manages to do it all by herself now. Even calling an uber or finding the cat videos she likes she was able to do herself now.
The point being: she doesn’t want to and won’t learn because she has someone to do it for her. Since you can’t make her do it, then you just have to accept it unfortunately.
My mom resented anything tech related. I knew she was smart enough to learn it, she just hated being forced into it so we always had to do it for her.
Go to another account she hasn’t messed up on her phone, and make her watch as you use the password manager to get in. Then, you can tell her for sure that the tech is working, and you’ve done your part, but you cannot fix her behavior. If she wants to keep resetting her passwords all the time, that’s on her, otherwise, she’ll have to put a small amount of time and effort into adapting to using the password manager.
If she isn’t going to follow your suggestions and advice, why is she asking you for help? If she sincerely wants help, she needs to make an effort on her side to follow through.
This is a problem with psychology and boundaries, not a tech issue.
Power of Attorney
Instead of dropping a system on her that she can’t/won’t use, try asking her what she wants to do. You can explain why passwords need to be different, but you can simplify it by sharing passwords across sites that don’t matter. So someone gets her BBC password and finds they can also use it on the Daily Fail, whoop-de-doo. Different pw for the bank.
Simplify your own life. You have to do free tech support for your Mum, and to be fair she changed your nappies for years, but everyone else is expected to trade, especially if they expect you to pay for their services when you need them.
Of course tinkering with something makes it your fault any time anything goes wrong, and the lesson we learn from that is …?
Stop helping, she uses you as a crutch because the option is there
My family used to both say I was the nerd and can and need to fix all their shit, AND anytime anything went wrong it MUST be my fault since I’m the one “tinkering” with and fixing their shit.
This is a minor part of a huge amount of reasons I worked my ass off to get fully independent and no contact with my family anymore.
My mom’s password manager is a pen and paper notebook. It’s not ideal, but it keeps me from having to reset everything every month, and she chooses slightly more complex passwords since she doesn’t have to remember them (even though she is slowly memorizing them)
Can’t you setup whatever manager to autofill the password?
Not every website is set up properly to allow that to work seamlessly.
True but enough do that it annoyed me to the point of disabling the autofill on my system, so maybe for this person it would be an improvement
PEBKAC.
But seriously, she needs to understand that, even though she (presumably) taught you how to tie your shoes, you don’t keep having her tie them for you. At some point there is no problem except that she isn’t accepting the solution.
Keeping with the analogy, if a person just refuses to tie shoes, not wearing shoes is always an option…
She never taught me to tie my shoes. I didnt know until I was like 15.
Both my mom and dad were workaholics, and my babysitter was a far closer parent than they were
Part of the problem isn’t necessarily you or her, I feel like websites are increasingly hostile toward password managers by coming up with arbitrary rules, weird JavaScript hacks and annoying two page sign-in forms.
I’m a web developer but even I get frustrated with how websites want to hijack input fields and do validation with shithole JavaScript frameworks instead of simpler HTML5 validation (only for frontend obviously, the server should still validate on the backend).
annoying two page sign-in forms
What is up with this?
It’s a thing that makes single sign-on easier and more extensible. If you have a login email matching a server side rule, you get kicked over to a different auth provider (e.g. Okta).
Still drives me absolutely fucking bazonkers though.
You can still just hide the password field upon typing an SSO email address — iirc Atlassian does this.
They’re all bad, but Firefox is terrible about this. Twice already in January I’ve had to make new passwords to pay bills. I was in my car when i did it and now i have no idea what those new passwords are. I’m so sick of letters, numbers, and special characters! No one is out there attempting to guess my gas company login password - they’re buying it from someone who hacked the gas company.
Tell her you’ll fix it if she gives you power of attorney.
No, I’m not joking.
If you are having to spend 8 hours to figure out how to help her manage her basic affairs, if you are constantly teaching her how to use a password manager and she cannot figure it out, she has diminished cognitive capacity.
If she has already delegated you to be in charge of all her account logins, she’s basically already given you de facto control over them, already acknowledged she isn’t capable of of managing her own affairs.
Gather a bunch of other evidence that she has trouble with basic tasks, can’t reliably perform basic household activities, manage finances, whatever, approach a lawyer and get the power of attorney document(s) drawn up.
EDIT: // Holy shit, just saw your other comment:
Well I also cook everything, grocery shop and fix everything (basic electrical, plumbing, woodworking, installations, etc).
Yeah, you are already functionally her caretaker.
Depending on the state you’re in (assuming you are in the US) you might be able to actually get yourself certified as her caretaker without much or any actual input from her, before you pursue power of attorney. //
This solves the cut out problem.
…
After that, explain your solution:
Print out a big list of all those passwords and logins for her.
Meanwhile, you’ve got them all as well, presumably you can just use her password manager and have access to it.
If she resets a password and can’t figure out how to log back in, fix it back to something you know, but don’t let her use this account for one week.
After a week, print out a new list for her with the new password you’ve set.
If she resets another password while in a 7 day timeout period, well now it’ll be two weeks for both passwords to become available to her, etc.
This may sound like too much, but she’s a cognitively diminished entitled brat, who has already conditioned you into being a doormat who is expected to waste a seemingly endless amount of time and effort to solve problems she creates, problems that people without a live-in technical support agent pay hundreds of dollars to solve.
She will not learn if she has no impetus to. She’s obviously used the ‘tough love’ model on you, use it back on her.
If she complains about this, doesn’t matter, you have power of attorney, send her to an old folks home, sell the house and move to an apartment, or rent a room out if it or something.
This sounds like Filial Piety on steorids
I’d call it reaping what you sow.
at some point, you gotta throw in the towel and let her use one password for everything. not ideal at all, sure, but it’s not the end of the world as long as it’s complex enough.
or get her a notebook, or a note-taking app, and jot down all the passwords for every account (not the generated ones from the password manager; too complex).
if your issues are more of the “help me, now!!” variety and you want to keep her off your back, tell her that you’re busy and can help in ten minutes or an hour or at some scheduled time. if her stuff is urgent, too bad, your work is too. show her that you’re not at her beck and call, and then help her at that scheduled time; you’d be surprised at how fast the problems reside.
Honestly even though she is pretty abusive, she’s told me that I’m the sole beneficiary in he trust. My sisters went no contact and she’s divorced.
With how much money she has, and how easily she gets hacked and scammed, I dont trust using single passwords. She also makes accounts for EVERYTHING. She even had an account for a fucking calculator. With the variety of stuff she makes accounts for, I wouldn’t trust a single password.
What about a password type? Like the password has the same format, but is different for each site? Like if her birthday is May 25 and her favorite dog’s name is Bunny, she can start it with that and then finish it with a differing sentence?
0525BunnyThisIsMyAmazon! 0525BunnyThisIsMyBank!
, et cetera.
It’s not the most secure, but at least it should keep it from being brute forced and give her things she can easily remember. And if there’s a leak and they have to be changed, you can just change the front part.
