This is intended to be a reasonably light-hearted vent relating to the ongoing frustration my son and I frequently feel toward my mother... The kind of frustration that leaves one feeling exasperated, and causes one to laugh about afterward, or else risk being driven completely insane. 
A few days ago, my mother (who openly admits she doesn't understand technology) began complaining about an app that had apparently suddenly appeared on her smartphone. Whilst I don't own a smartphone and am equally clueless about them, I was able to establish (thanks to the internet) that the purpose of the app is to manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place. Unfortunately, this app contains ads. As a result, my mother had found herself on the receiving end of a ridiculously high volume of unwanted advertising e-mails.
As my son owns a smartphone and is reasonably tech-savvy, uninstalling this app from my mother's smartphone seemed like the most obvious solution. However, when he accessed her list of installed apps, he discovered this troublesome app wasn't listed. In short, there seemed to be no way of removing it. This caused my mother to burst into tears and catastrophise, fearing that things such as her bank account might be compromised.
It had been agreed that my son would visit my mother on Friday, collect her smartphone, and then take it to be looked at by a local independent tech professional. This would have been fine if my mother hadn't decided on a whim to book a taxi, in order to accompany him. Although there is rarely any evidence to suggest it, my mother frequently gets paranoid that there are major issues with her laptop, and had convinced herself that this needed looking at too.
Only after the taxi had been booked, did it occur to my mother to check that she had cash in her purse to cover the cost of taxi fares. Due to an ongoing mobility issue, my mother has spent the past 6 months or so frequently using a local taxi company, so it concerns me somewhat that she overlooked the need to ensure she had sufficient cash before booking a taxi. When the taxi arrived, it was a matter of having to instruct the driver to do a detour, via her local ATM.
After eventually arriving at the tech repair shop, the tech guy explains that in order to remove the app, he will first need to uninstall Google. To err on the side of caution, he explains that he will require my mother's password for Google, which she can't remember. As a result, he is unable to proceed with uninstalling the app. However, he reassures my mother that apart from the unwanted e-mails being a nuisance, the fact that it isn't negatively affecting anything else on her smartphone means that she can stop panicking. When it comes to the laptop, the tech guy makes it clear that it is fine and there is nothing that needs updating, which is precisely what my son had been trying to tell my mother.
If my mother had stuck to the original plan and not insisted upon accompanying my son, he could have phoned her on her landline to obtain the Google password. Admittedly, it's debatable as to whether she would have been willing to give him that over the phone. Either way, if she had stayed at home, she could have saved herself a small fortune in taxi fares. My son felt so frustrated with my mother that rather than travelling back in a taxi to her house and then making his own way back home on foot, he said he would wait with her until the taxi arrived, and make his own way back to our house from the repair shop.
The saga doesn't end there. The tech repair shop is situated on an extremely busy main road. When my mother had phoned to book herself a taxi back home, she had been standing on the pavement right next to the main road, despite my son gesturing at her to move away to somewhere quieter. It didn't seem to occur to her that the person handling her call might have difficulty hearing what she was saying, due to the sound of the traffic in the background.
My mother was of the view that as a result of her earlier call, the call handler would automatically remember where the previous taxi had dropped her off, and that it would be obvious that this was where she needed collecting from. Well, the only thing the call handler had remembered about my mother was that she needed plenty of leg space, due to difficulties bending her knee. As a result of difficulties hearing my mother, the return taxi ended up being dispatched to my mother's home address. Fortunately, my mother had the sense to phone the taxi company back to double-check they had the correct information.
Regarding my mother, I feel that it has been a rather mentally exhausting week for both my son and me. We are now hoping that she can at least manage to bestow the gift of peace and quiet on us until at least after the weekend. In addition to being on the receiving end of lengthy phone calls, my son and I had spent at least two hours at my mother's house on Wednesday evening. The following day, my son paid another visit, which lasted more than four hours.
