Technology Help

Do you have those friends or family?  You know the ones, they know what a computer is but have no idea what it actually does or how to ‘go on that internet’.  Well I have them.  One is on the way over here as I type because she needs to order a dress after shopping at Kohl’s today.  She calls me to say, ‘I need to have you order that dress for me online by tomorrow because the sale ends tomorrow, and I just don’t know how you’re going to do that but I suppose I’ll have to get you some numbers.’ So I say, I imagine I’ll go to Kohls.com and we’ll order it up from there.  Then she says, ‘well you don’t have to be a smart ass, you know I don’t know how to do that’.  So I said, thank goodness you know me then, huh.  She can get her email but certainly can’t order a dress.  This ought to be fun.  Not so cute for a 44-year-old.

This little exchange reminded me that this same thing happens when I go to visit my parents.  I better warn you, my parents just got rid of their rotary phone, yes, I said rotary phone.  My Dad’s gigantic remote, you know the one, big as a laptop with numbers the size of China, quit working so I told him I would fix it when I was home.  I asked if he still had the instructions but of course the answer was ‘perhaps in a drawer’.  Well, I knew that was a task I didn’t want to take on as their house has about 736 drawers so I told him I didn’t need them.  I get home, look up the remote on good old Google, find the instructions and reprogram the remote.  It was about 10 minutes of my time, not bad, and Dad was happy.  About a week later my brother calls to tell me he heard Dad talking about me fixing the remote.  Apparently he said “she fixed it in a matter of minutes, you know, she took her computer, plugged the remote into it and it was fixed”.   Now at 80, that’s cute.