by Ray Evans
Personal computers came along pretty late in my life so learning to use one was no easy task. This was a totally new “can of worms”. The old adage is true for sure, it’s really hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
Well we got the thing in here; now what do we do? I had never seen so many wires and gadgets that I couldn’t understand in my life. More wires than a bowl of spaghetti has pasta, in fact that bunch of wires looked like a bunch of spaghetti to me. What was I supposed to do with all of this stuff anyway?
There’s really only one sensible thing to do in a case like this, “call one of the grandkids”. That’s what I always did if I wanted to reset a clock or a watch, certainly that grandkid could figure it out! This was a “grown grandkid”; he worked with computers all the time. In what seemed like no time at all, he had the thing “up and running”.
Now came the hard part, I was going to have to figure out how to operate it. At first I was always wondering how the computer worked, actually it was a kind of stumbling block. Instead of worrying about how “it” worked I should have spent my efforts on ways to work “it”! My grandson gave me some good advice about that. He said, “you don’t know how a phone works but you use it every day, quit dwelling on how it works and just use it.”
Little by little I learned enough to make the computer useful, just a few emails at first, and then gradually I learned to use some of the available programs. I learned how to use the “Word” program and that’s the one I use the most today.
Another mile-stone in my learning about computers is when I learned that they had “gender”. Did you know that a computer is female? They sure are, about the time you think you’ve got her figured out, she changes her ways. You get her mad at you, she’ll freeze up and quit, won’t even give you good explanation! Overwork her and she’ll blow some kind of fuse, leading you to spend a little while on the e-couch. She’ll let you make up eventually but it will take awhile. About the time you figure out where she puts, (files) things, she’ll move them someplace else, won’t even bother to tell you about it! Computers are definitely female, there’s just no question about it!
I had to learn a new language too, regarding computers. When she freezes up and quits, you have to “reboot” to get her warmed up again. Just try that with your wife and see how that works! You have to push the start button to get to the button that makes her stop. How sensible is that? Microsoft doesn’t make it easy! If that wasn’t bad enough, you soon learn that she is so overloaded with bits and bytes that you have to get a new one with more mega “whatever”!
I’ve mastered the computer pretty much as I have the “Geezer Pleaser”, I can try but it will never happen! Couldn’t expect anything else, she’s smarter than I am!
© Ray Evans 2010
This entry was posted by Ray Evans on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Reflection.
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