Michigan Rag guides his dad through his first Internet foray -- Victors Board HOF

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Date Posted: 12:00:05 05/28/09 Thu
Author: HOF guy
Author Host/IP: 52.129.8.51
Subject: Michigan Rag guides his dad through his first Internet foray

helped my dad with his first Internet foray
IP: 65.210.13.194
Posted on May 28, 2009 at 11:38:18 AM by Michigan Rag

I walked my Dad through doing a Google search over the phone the other day. It was his first Internet experience. I knew it would be stressful but I took it as a challenge to see if I teach the old dog a new trick. Level of difficulty was high based on his propensity to get flustered and frustrated and his absolute lack of computer savvy, and of course that we were doing this over the phone. I would say it was on a par with the Apollo 13 crisis in terms of difficulty and stress.

As an example, obviously, I couldn�t just say �go to www.google.com�. It was �okay, there should be a long white box at the top of the window. Move the mouse cursor so it�s inside that box and then double click- I mean, hit the left mouse button twice in succession very quickly so that the field is highlighted � I mean, so that all of the text is in a dark box, then hit backspace � no, not on the screen, the backspace button on your keyboard (so far this has taken a full 5 minutes), so the text goes away and you can type in � it didn�t go away? ...� It didn�t go away because he wasn�t in the URL field, he was in the little Google toolbar field, etc. etc. I think in total it took 20 minutes to get him to Google and to successfully enter a search. Of course, having searched, he didn�t know what to with all of the hits, what they were, why they were in that order, how to get to them, etc.. The problem is this wasn�t the first step in a new journey of web-awareness, it was an isolated and temporary need, so he�ll retain nothing from the lesson. I probably would have been better off doing the research for him and FedExing a hard copy of whatever I found.

I shudder to think what technology I will utterly fail to grasp in my senior years. I sure hope it�s not fuckable robots.

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Replies:

ny1995's reply: -- HOF buddy, 14:37:16 05/28/09 Thu (52.129.8.51)