Helping My Mom with Her Smart TV

I Love My Mother

I’m gonna preface this post by stating that I love my mother. I am not trying to make fun of her, just the situation.

Smart TV

I attempted to help my mom get her Directv to work with her new Smart TV this morning. 

Over the phone.

According to my sister, I deserve a medal for it.

It wasn’t easy, and I’m not sure that I even helped her much since I’ve never actually had to connect Directv to my own TV. I do not know what I am doing.

What Happened

I’m gonna share how the ordeal went as best I can:

Mom leaves a voicemail asking for help with her Smart TV, because she is “too dumb” to figure it out. I return her call.

Mom is already exasperated by the whole situation. Not a great start. 

She has apparently tried to access her Directv channels by doing a channel scan. No results.

I ask what buttons she has on her remote to see if any of them would help. It doesn’t seem like it. I tell her it’s difficult to help her if I can’t see what she’s seeing. I request we do a video chat so I can see her screen. She doesn’t want to do that.

Search

After she lists off all of the options on her Home Screen a few times and trying a few different ways, I ask her if there is a Search button on the screen. She says there is not. 

I do not believe her. 

I ask more specifically if there is an icon that looks like a magnifying glass. She says no. 

I doubt this very much.

After a few more minutes of her going through a bunch of different options, our call seems to be cutting out and she hangs up.

Video Chat

I decide “f*** this” and call her back through Facebook video chat. She answers and I tell her to show me her remote. She does, but none of the buttons I can see with the poor lighting are helpful.

I tell her to show me her TV screen. She shows me the screen, but only the left half of it because she isn’t aiming quite right. I tell her to move the camera a bit to the right. She swings it way to the right and now I can just see the right edge of her TV.

Honestly, this was so comical to me. I could picture all of this being part of a skit on SNL. 

Eventually, I was able to see her screen and I saw the magnifying glass Search icon in the upper left corner. Right next to the Home Screen Button, which was highlighted. 

I asked her to read off what was on the top of the screen. She read them out to me, but missed the Search button. I informed her that the magnifying glass next to the word Home was the Search button.

So, we got over that hurdle.

Apps

I told her to search for the Directv App. She was able to locate that and went to click on it to install it. 

At this point, the camera was sitting next to her and pointing up at the ceiling.

She goes to click on the Directv app to open it and suddenly, she gasps, “No, not BET!”. Apparently she had accidentally clicked on the BET app, which must have been close to the Directv app. She thought by clicking on it, she would get charged for it. It was quite the overreaction and I had to laugh.

Once she got into the Directv app, it asked her to enter her username and password and to go to their website is she didn’t already have that information. 

She let me go so that she could do that on her own.

She hasn’t called me back with more questions yet, so hopefully, she got it figured out!

As I typed this out, it became clear to me that this is a “had to be there” story and doesn’t come off as funny through writing. Oh well. I already typed this much.

I wish I had been able to record our conversation or what I saw during our Facebook video chat. It would make this SO much better.