They can alter your devices with surprising results
My ten-year-old son is a bit of a whizz kid when it comes to devices and all things digital. I wouldn’t exactly say I was a dinosaur as I am pretty dependent on technology but last week, I was proven to be less knowledgeable than him.
This is somewhat of a cautionary tale too. Apparently, one of the many wonders of Siri, the iPhone assistant is that you can get it to address you personally when you talk to it. I don’t use Siri very often, the children can often be found asking it to do strange things, but I was trying to find somewhere last week and I asked it something. Imagine my surprise when I said ‘hey Siri’ to activate it and it called me penis. Yes, it called me penis.
I knew exactly who was responsible and at the time, I was not a happy bunny. When I challenged him about it, he and his brother just fell about in hysterical laughter. In the end, I couldn’t help but smile. Apparently they had previously changed it to rainbow but I had never noticed, so they decided to go for something that would stand out more. It certainly did.
The worse part of this sorry tale is that I don’t actually know how to change it back and there is absolutely no way I am going cap in hand to my cheeky sons to ask them. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
They can send strange pictures to your social media accounts without you even knowing
We have had a number of apps on our devices over the years and even at a very early age, my daughter discovered that she could press a button and send an array of weird and wonderful photos to Facebook for me. It took a while for me to realise and it was onlt when someone commented ‘nice picture’, that I realised that she had been sharing a dozen or so creations to my wall every time she played on the iPad.
Fortunately, she does now realise that this is not allowed but when one of her finger painting creations appeared in my Facebook memories the other day, it did make me chuckle (and realise that there was one that I hadn’t deleted too.)
They take videos of things that you might not want them to video
Unbeknown to me, my daughter has discovered her creative side and now when I give her my phone to play with, she secretly videos things. Sometimes, she will tell me afterwards and finds it hilarious, other times I will come across odd videos when I am looking for a photo. Most of the videos are of her, singing, pretending to be on television or just making silly noises and they make me chuckle. Others are me, usually telling off one of her brothers. Last week, I was at physio having my pelvis manipulated, which is quite a strange procedure and A sat and videoed the whole thing. She thought it was very funny and shouted loudly in the carpark, “I thought Daddy would like to see what that man was doing to you.” That certainly won us a few funny looks, I can tell you.
They will fill your device with selfies
When I glance through my photo stream looking for nice photos of my gorgeous children, I find rows upon rows upon rows of selfies. There are hundreds of them. Maybe there is a sign on my phone that says ‘ pick me up and take a selfie’. There must be because I can’t believe how many there are. They don’t just take one either, oh no, there will be twenty or so of them, same face but a different position or expression. I wouldn’t mind so much but when I go to take a photo of my own, the storage is full and I have to delete some of their selfies to make room.
They use a whole language that you don’t understand
I have mentioned this topic a few times recently and I am still often mystified by some of the strange things that my children say online, it really is like a whole new language. I like to think that I have a reasonable clue about what’s going on but sometimes I do lose the plot. One of my favourite examples of this is a conversation I had with my eldest son when once again I had come across an acronym that I didn’t understand on social media. I texted him to ask him what pmsl meant, he response was naturally ‘pissing myself laughing’. Not grasping that he was answering my question, I texted back saying that he was being harsh, laughing at my lack of understanding and he had to reply, explaining that he wasn’t laughing at me, that was, in fact, the answer to my question.
Next time I shall ask Google instead.
I hate to laugh at this but it’s something my own brothers would have done had there been cell phones when we were growing up. Bless you I would tell you how to change it if I knew too. 🙂 I definitely need to up my game before my two get old enough to do tricks on me with technology. Although littlest is great at putting tv in french and me not knowing how to fix it. lol 🙂
This is so, so funny. It’s not long ago that my brother and I stopped doing things like this to our mum. We used to text the phone things like ‘show us your boobs’ and then fall about laughing. Yeah, we should probably grow up.