Granny and Technology

Granny’s journey with technology is long, but far from straight, path; specifically the technology used to create this blog.
She is so old that she remembers being excited about a new invention – the electric typewriter. When they added a correction option she was ecstatic.

After a few years Granny was assigned a desktop computer connected to a main frame in another city. All she could do with this machine was to check if a client’s unemployment check had been paid. Paper and telephones comprised all other communications.

Then along came Word Perfect and Harvard Graphics with 3.5 inch disks replacing 5 inch disks. Granny was in typing heaven. Not only could she correct, but she could attach a picture or a graph to her reports then merge them with a list of names and addresses. A friend suggested that Granny could type faster backward than forward. Possibly, but all the retyping gave her an opportunity to do some editing.

Having an IT professional hidden in a tiny basement office gave her the courage to try new things. She knew that if she made any mistake smaller than blowing up the office, the IT guru would rescue her. Then along came Macs, MS Word, burning cds and storing War and Peace on a single thumb drive. Wow! The old lady was floating on air.

After years of growing and learning and doing more fun things with a computer/laptop, she ran into a roadblock — a big one with those cement blocks used to redirect traffic during construction. She expected a steep learning curve when she bought a laptop loaded with Windows 8. What she didn’t expect was that the learning curve wound its way up Mount Everest and when she reached the top she’d just fall off.

Being a cautious consumer she also purchased a copy of Windows 8 for Dummies. That little yellow book showed her how to do some basic word processing and do some things that were not on her wish list. Feeling frustrated, Granny signed up for two Windows 8 classes. There she learned a few more ways to work with the new program.

Then voodoo struck her laptop. It could run basic programs, but attempting to do anything related to the internet was like choosing by eenie-meenie several times an hour. After a few minutes working with email or the internet the wireless connection would shut down. Granny took her laptop to the repair shop twice to no result. She tried a different shop who suggested she call her internet provider. After working with two different IT professionals she learned a trick to keep working and sending messages, though not to its maximum capability. Each time the wireless connection failed, she could restart the laptop and continue her project. This was a nuisance, but it got the job done.

She still faces a problem that no one seems to know how to correct. How does Granny keep the wireless connection working all the time? Does it take gold, diamonds or just a serious threat?

© by Sharon Dillon, May 12, 2014