[zrobotics]

How is googling something not the lazy option though? Personally, I think it's far more work to ask someone and wait for the answer over immediately getting the answer from searching and finding a 4 year old forum post with the same question.

[klez]

Tell that to my dad. He just picks up the phone and asks me why the printer is not working. On an OS I don't even know how to use, for that matter.

Also remember, I can find a vastly greater breath of information cause I can search in English. He can't. Now that I think of it, this may even be a counterpoint to "just Google it".

[zrobotics]

Don't worry, my parents still call me for things like that, and they don't even have the excuse of being non-english speakers. I will say, if you have the time, set your folks up with something like Linux mint: my step-dad somehow mahaged to get malware on a Mac, and it's much easier for me to keep an identical Mint VM around so I can walk him through everything screen-by-screen. Honestly, setting up their new printer was harder on my mom's Win10 machine, which greatly surprised me.

[jstarfish]

Asking someone skips the tedious work of filtering applicable solutions from 20+ years of forum posts, memes and SEO shitfarms in exchange for an actual-but-delayed answer.

As I get older I have less time or patience for it myself. The effort required increases with the amount of content available on the internet. Some people just aren't good at research in the first place.

[huehehue]

Important to note that most of us have had years of practice searching for stuff online, and we're very good at identifying this garbage. You can't reasonably expect someone to just hop on to Google and know what to type, which links/sites to avoid, how to spot trolling, and so on.