TALES FROM HAPPY HOUR

January 22, 2025

And then there was that time my 92-year-old mom accidentally changed her Facebook language settings to Chinese.

That time was yesterday.

She called me to let me know that all the email notifications she was getting about my FB posts were in Chinese and asked me why I was posting in Chinese.

I explained to her that I was not posting in Chinese but that I would take a look.

Luckily, I have access to her AOL mail account, so I logged in and took a look.

Sure enough, every notification about a friend's FB post - not just mine - was in Chinese.

I checked the links to make sure it wasn't some nefarious phishing plot to get her financial information and discovered that the links were real and were taking her back to legit FB, not some scammer site.

For that, I used Google translate to read the Chinese email notifications.

So now I had to help her change her FB language settings back to English.

The old login I had for her FB account no longer worked so I called her and asked her to click on the Remote Desktop icon I had placed on her laptop desktop before we moved to Delaware.

Remote Desktop allows me to see and control her computer screen.

She did so and now I had access to her FB account.

But it was still all in Chinese.

I don't speak Chinese.

So, I opened my FB page on one of my monitors and opened her FB page - still in Chinese - on the other.

I then ended up noting which link got me to the Profile Settings on my FB account (seventh option in the pop-up) and then clicked on the corresponding link on the Chinese language version on her screen hoping the links were the same in any language.

Eventually, I was able to get to the language settings and switched her default language from Chinese back to English.

So now she is back online and able to stay up to date with all her FB friends and see their posts in English - instead of Chinese.

As we finished up the call and I prepared to say Good Bye I asked her to do me one last favor.