No Senior Discounts for the Digital Age

My daily post is coming to you a tad bit late today, because my precious blogging time was taken away from me...

My parents were supposed to drop by around mid-morning. In preparation, I actually pulled myself out of my sick bed to organize and clean the house. My son begged to outside for our daily walk, but I said, "No, your grandparents will be here in any moment..."

Well, they weren't. Two hours went by and still no word from them...

I'm past thinking "what if something awful happened to them". In fact, I was hardly phased, since they're always late like this. I've asked them again and again to please, please, please call if they are going to be late, but they never do.

We just carried on as usual. My son went down for his nap without much fuss. I settled in to pay some bills, peruse the thousand or so blog that I keep up with... maybe even write my post for today when I heard a car pull up and a knock on my door.

Annoyed, I told them my son was asleep and they would have to WAIT until he wakes up ON HIS OWN to play with him.

"It's okay," they said, "We need your help with something anyway," and held up their digital camera and their laptop...

I love my parents dearly and am happy to help them with anything, but they are tech savvy like I have five heads.... which is to say, not even close. This was definitely not going to be some quick Q and A.

I've been working with them for years on excruciatingly basic concepts like "double-clicking" and "opening a Word doc". My dad is good natured and pretty easy to teach, provided I write everything down for him afterwards. I can handle that. My mom, on the other hand... Oy!

Stubborn, willful, and argumentative... and she doesn't believe anything I tell her. She requires diagrams of directory structures and lengthy explanations of concepts on which I'm pretty hazy on as well. Somehow, we've managed to make progress and she's all about her e-mail...

Of course, she does still call to ask if I got her e-mail, only to reiterate what she wrote to me over the phone...

Today's lesson was burning photo files on CDs. I've already taught them how to get photos off their digital camera. However, attaching photos to e-mails proved a bit too complex, so now they've asked that I help them make photo CDs to (snail) mail to people. We're talking different people from different events, a different CD for each...

Oh-kay... So to simplify things, I suggested that we start by organizing their 543 photos into folders before choosing which ones to send. Baby steps. Baby steps...

I proceeded to spend the next five hours walking my mom through "cut and paste". FIVE HOURS.

So what am I grateful for today? That the day is over and they've gone home.