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26 june 2000

i showed mom how to use a computer

Note: The Geocities link in this bit acts weird. Don't blame me if it doesn't work.

I taught my mom how to use a computer. A couple of years ago, Mom visited me when I lived in Winston-Salem, NC. My mom is the best one, though I'm sure yours is very nice, too. Aside from being pretty and nice and very funny, Mom is smart. Not "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" smart, but "Jeopardy" smart. She's also a psychiatric nurse at the Indiana State Mental Hospital, so not a lot slips past her. Don't act weird around Mom. She'll diagnose you.

So Mom's in my apartment, and she spots the PC on my desk. "Is that your computer?" she asks. I tell her that it is, at which point she gets all excited. "Oh! Can you show me how to do the Internet? I haven't ever been there before."

Now, for all of her excellent mom-esque qualities, Mom is definitely not technical. Through her eyes, my den looks like Star Trek mission control, and her daughter is one of those glowing pointy-eared people with lumpy eyebrows. Automated things puzzle her. Take the microwave oven, for example. She bought her first digital microwave just over a year ago. It replaced a fifteen-year-old, 300-pound, crank-dial Amana that my dad (the GE engineer) got when they first hit the market.

You can make your own assumptions about her VCR.

Anyway, we sit down and I turn on the computer. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mom shyly poking around the desk, when she picks up the mouse. Before she can say anything, she grasps it firmly, points it at the monitor, and proceeds to click it while aiming at the screen. She's shooting my computer.

I decide that this is a good time for some "New-Fangled Gizmo Orientation 101." She passes with flying colors, though I keep reminding her to please not hit the mouse. We then sign onto the Internet. She is duly impressed.

Once we surfed the usual news and content sites, we clicked over to Stick Figure Death Theatre, which she found wildly entertaining, especially the one where one guy comes at the other with a machete and lops off his head. That's her favorite. She played it three times. We then decided to play the Kill Barney game, at which she also did very well. She shot him, ran him over with a motorcycle, and then stabbed him. She did it over and over again, and rather assertively, at that. At that time, I figured we'd better go eat, or take a walk, or throw the computer down the stairs now. I thought all the radiation in my home was getting to her.

Needless to say, Mom doesn't yet have a computer. She doesn't even have a cordless phone, because she likes the one she has, with the big buttons. Mom has little use for the fancy digitized life, which is fine with her. And it's fine with me. I still haven't figured out a way to make my computer spot the mental patients in a crowded room. Until it does, I'm sticking with Mom.