Saturday's Post

This is actually Saturday's post although I am posting it on Friday evening. My day is booked tomorrow so I figured I would post before I go off to bed.

Ten years ago my parents purchased their first PC. Being the big spenders that they are they purchased an E machine for $300 in which it was as slow as molasses. The evening they got it I went over and got it all hooked up for them. I am not a technical person by no means but can at least get a PC up and working. As soon as we got it powered up my mom asked me "what her website was?" This woman had never laid her fingers on a keyboard so I was pretty sure she didn't have a website and if by chance she did, I didn't want to know what it was. LOL. I ended up figuring out she was trying to find out what her email address was. Back then AOL was the big thing so we set them up an AOL email account and then we shut it down for the night. The next evening I was in my apartment chatting away on AOL when my mom called. She asked me how to power up the keyboard so that they could get on their PC. My only response was "put it back in the box and take it back." I had no idea at that point the nightmares I would be up against with my parents being PC owners.

There were several issues with the nasty lady sites "popping up" on their PC. My mom even accused my dad of looking at the sites causing the pop ups. At the time they didn't have the security on their PC they do today so they could have very well just be popping up. My dad was notorious for deleting anything on the PC that he didn't "think" needed to be there. He would delete major applications and the whole thing would have to be reloaded. In the last year they purchased a second PC which is a Dell. They seem to have more problems now than they did before. My husband and brother in law cringe when my mom calls saying she is having a PC problem. We have spent countless hours at their house trying to fix whatever problems they are having.

So today I am sitting at my desk waiting for time to pass so that I can go home when my mom calls. She wants to reply to an email to my sister but doesn't know how to. I am thinking to myself that they have had a PC for 10 years and my mom has never replied to an email before?? Oh it gets better! It takes about 10 minutes but I finally get her squared away. I had to explain the reply button and what a cursor was and what it looks like. Yes, I can teach Emailing 101. We hang up and about 2 minutes later she calls back. Now mind you my mom is talking to me on her cell phone which is another electronic device they do not understand. My mom thinks you have to scream into a cell phone in order for the person on the other end to hear her. So I have the phone receiver at arms length from my ear listening to her. She now tells me that she is at the end of the line of her email and she doesn't know how to get down to the next line. For crying out loud! I started cracking up. She can't be serious!!! She has had a PC for 10 years and has never written an email over one line long??? I walk her through hitting the 'enter' key so that she can get to the next line and I also explain the send button when she is done writing her email. We hang up and she calls a third time!!! This time she tells me that she pressed send and her email went away. For the love of God please take ALL electronics out of my parents house!!!

I just got back from my sisters house a little while ago. My parents picked up her dog from the kennel and brought him home since my sister and her husband will be home from Mexico on Monday night. I stopped by to take Norman out before he goes to bed and to visit with him for a little while. He is such a sweetheart. He is like my friend Pam's dog and he thinks visitors are there to see him and no humans in the house. I took him out to potty and then brought him in and gave him one of the organic dog biscuits I made. He loved it too! His tail was going double time while he was eating it. He ended up eating 4 while I was there. I left him a bag that I will give him when I go over to let him out over the weekend. Two dogs down that love my biscuits. The true test will be if Princess Julie Beck (Pam's dog) likes them. She is a finicky one but if she likes them then I may have a future in the organic dog biscuit biz!