It’s a titanic and monumental task, and I recognized the daunting challenges it presented.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I comforted myself, before remembering it did burn to the ground at one point.
What the heck was I thinking getting my mother a computer?
My mother’s computer literacy is right up there with penne pasta. In fact, in nine out of 10 laboratory tests, cooked penne proved it was faster when it comes to turning on the computer, logging onto the Internet and searching out a Martha Stewart recipe.
My mother is most successful on a computer when she grows frustrated, bangs her head on the keyboard and, miraculously, something happens. Not what she wanted, but something does happen.
My mother has never owned a computer, and her limited understanding of them means I get constant phone calls asking me to look up things she’s heard on NPR or PBS.
“Brian, I was just listening to the radio and they mentioned a book that had the word ‘The’ in the title. Can you go online and look it up?”
Sometimes the requests are more involved and unusual: “Brian, I need you to go online to my state representative’s site and send him an e-mail explaining how I’m horrified and angry about his idea to import Vietnamese tuna by way of a mule caravan from Georgia. That’s terribly cruel on the mules.”
She’s gone to the library before to try and work on the Internet herself, but the librarians got so frustrated with trying to help her that they now close the whole building when they see her coming.
“Brian, it’s the darndest thing: The library had another liquid asbestos spill, shutting it down. Third time this week. So I need you to go online and look up this disease that is afflicting meerkats and making them lose their toenails.”
I thought when a used computer came my way that it would be so easy to cart it down to Tampa and expose her to modern technology — something more advanced than a toaster.
But teaching her how to use it has proven a more daunting task than I expected.
“So, does it work anything like my iron?” she asked, and I nearly threw up my hands in defeat.
My mother still talks about her first, and really only, experience with computers back in the days when my father was working on his physics doctorate at Florida State. He would use the university’s computers, which, just to date the two of them, ran on punch cards. My mother still thinks this was a more efficient way of computing and wonders why we ever did away with the cards. “What in the heck do I need a mouse for? Give me a stack of punch cards, a pen and 33 days, and I could much more easily calculate 3+4.”
What was I thinking?
I think it will be worth it, though. My little girl is getting older, and bigger. Three hours away in Tampa, my mother is missing most of it. Online she can see photos of her, watching her grow every week. But getting her online is going to be a task. And I can already foresee problems.
When she starts getting junk e-mail from “deposed Nigerian princes” who are writing her asking for help in transferring $35 million out of Switzerland, will she take the bait and invite them to Tampa to stay in her guest room? I don’t know. She might.
Will I get phone calls at all hours of the day and night with strange questions like, “Brian, should the computer make strange humming noises that sound like, ‘Bring me a glass of water. Bring me a glass of water’? Maybe I should give it a glass of water?”
Oh, boy, what have I done? We’ll just see how it goes. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, although I think it burned to the ground in one.