Teaching Your Mum to IM
After they had many, many problems with dial-up (probably as the PC had been infected with the sasser worm) I finally managed to convince the olds to go broadband. It was a tough job, mainly as they did not use the internet much anyway. The normal procedure to find something out from a website would be to call their #1 son (i.e. little old me) and usually my dad would ask me to "hack-in to the old internet and find such-and-such out for me". Well, I soon tired of this and went about chipping away until they caved in and embraced the 21st century.I can confidently tell you that it is possible to install broadband by phone, but it requires a full bucket-and-a-half of patience.
Stage two was to introduce IM. It was gratifying to note that after only one hour of coaching that even my mother could IM with the best of them, including using the webcam. Imagine my surprise when I came home last week, turned on the computer (or "hacked-to to the old WLAN") and suddenly a message appeared from my mother "chatting" to me as if we were a couple of punk teenagers. I was aghast, even agog. It turns out that, without any coaching, mother keeps the PC on with the speakers turned up very loud so that she can tell immediately when someone from the family is online. Family communications have gone up ten-fold. Instead of the normal weekly phone-call, we communicate much more regularly. I would never have thought it possible, but (if you pardon the expression) you can teach an old dog new tricks.
I am now planning to scare them with Skype by making their PC "ring"....
posted by Enrico @ 8:24 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home