I Won

However, Dee and I do indulge ourselves this time of year in a modest wager as to who will be the first one to get the following message. My turn this year and names and places have been concealed to protect the innocent although you will get the gist of it.

"My XXX just gave my XXX a computer for Christmas. Nice, but they live in YYY and the rest of us are scattered around the country. They've been calling me with questions - but I'm in ZZZ and can't be of too much help... [snip]... And the XXX who gave it to them is off on a ski trip and business - I don't think we'll get much help."

(XXX : substitute relationship. YYY & ZZZ substitute location)

A first computer in the house tends to present the same learning curve as the first new baby. It's just as incapable as doing things for itself and requires an equal amount of care and attention. The new "parents" need just as much help and support as any novice Mum and Dad.

How else will they learn to cope with forever being told that "they should have shut down Windows correctly" when restarting from a system crash that was nothing to do with anything they did?

Gardeners, so I'm told, develop an affinity with nature. Others like me go down the wrong road and sell their soul to the devil of a machine that sits there and creates the illusion that you're in control. We need to do all we can to guide those who are facing the same danger from the same crossroads.

Dee most likely will get the other one we tend to expect any time now.

"How do I get connected to the Internet?"

This always arrives by E-mail and hopefully she will resist the temptation of demonstrating bad manners and / or poor etiquette by replying to a question with a question... even if it is the painfully obvious response.

"In the absence of any homing carrier pigeon perched on the the top of my monitor how did you manage to get this message to me?

Those of us who have survived this period in our computing lives and learned to live with the accelerated onset of old age can only sigh and pray for one thing. That this shiny new millennium will finally advance human kind to the point whereby we don't have to go through a whole new education process merely to be able to understand how to read computer instruction books and manuals.

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