February 5, 2023

Logging onto the computer, entering passwords, and shopping online is second nature to many of us. We don’t think twice about entering credit card numbers or booking trips via airline and hotel websites. How did we learn how to do this? How do our kids know what the latest social media websites are? They just do. Well for my mother-in-law, she just doesn’t.

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely adore my MIL. She is sweet, kind, hysterically funny and afraid of everything that requires technology. She doesn’t use ATMS, still orders catalogs for shopping and she is the one person who asks if she can write a check to purchase a new laptop. Which is where this story begins.

Whit’s mom’s computer was 10 years old. She really only uses it to read emails and browse the web a little bit, but it was slow and clunky. So, she convinced Whit to take her to the Apple Store to buy a new laptop. After an hour at the store, an attempt to write a check for the purchase, and 2 hours with Whit setting it up at home, Whit is going to heaven and she has a laptop that can power the International Space Station. It’s like buying a turbocharged SAAB 900 for grandma who just goes to the grocery store and synagogue to play bridge.

After a week of letting her play around with the computer she had a few questions. So, Whit told her to bring it over one Sunday evening. He had to convince her that it would be easy to set up the Wifi from our house on her computer. After dinner we sat on the couch and she began to show Whit what the trouble was. Everytime she hovered over a picture in an email, a text box appeared explaining what it was. She couldn’t figure out how to make the email bigger and to get the image to appear in a new window. Whit showed her that if you click on it twice it will pop out to a new window. She was so mad! “How was I supposed to know that just by clicking on it it would pop out?” Whit tried to get her to brush it off and just understand how to move forward, but she was so mad that there was no manual or step by step guide explaining how to navigate the email client that she couldn’t move forward.

So, while they sat there arguing about how to close windows and what the little numbers meant on the apps in the dock, I pulled out my phone and ordered the Macs for Dummies Senior Edition. I even used my credit card online! It was delivered two days later.

In my almost 50 years we have gone from long telephone cords, to *69 (really they couldn’t use another number??), to caller id, to cell phones that read your voicemails to you. I can only imagine how weird it is for my parents’ generation to navigate all of the technology changes that have happened in their life. Hopefully there will be a book called Teleporting for Dummies Senior Edition in the future and I won’t have to bug my kids for instructions to use the Teleporter.