I love my parents -- don't get me wrong -- so when I make fun of them, it's really just out of love. My favorite thing to tease them about is their increasing use of technology.
If you think about it, the Baby Boomers got shafted in the technology era. All they got was really just the microwave and the answering machine, and our generation got all the rest of the fun toys (personal computers, PDAs, iPods, etc.).
Most of our parents are proficient at using the computer, and almost all use them at work. The extent to which they use computers for pleasure, though, is limited to e-mail, whereas we use computers as our connection to the outside world for everything from thefacebook to weather.com to AIM.
I will cut my parents some slack here. They use the computer well, if not above average for their generation. My dad is even the one who told me about Urbandictionary.com, and he regularly orders things off of Amazon.com.
I can remember a time, though, when I had to teach my mom how to use Microsoft Word. I have about a 3.76-second patience span, and once you've used up those 3.76 seconds, you might as well forget about me sticking around to help you. (I'm sorry, I recognize this is a character flaw, and every year I make it a New Year's Resolution to work on it. I might be up to 7.54 seconds by now -- I'm not too sure.)
So, trying to explain the mechanics of a cursor, justification, spell check ("WHY ARE THERE SQUIGGLY RED LINES UNDER THAT WORD?") and fonts was about as frustrating as anything I've ever done. My mom simply didn't get it, and my dad had to take over tutoring her.
Eventually though, our parents became computer whizzes. Good for them, because as was the case for most of us, my leaving for college drastically decreased any contact I had with my parents. I would always forget to call, and finally they both figured the best way to reach me was via e-mail. My dad (the more adventurous of my two parents) even tried a brief stint on AIM.
AIM is the classic test of adult mastery of the computer. The concept of away messages, online vs. idle and profiles baffles most adults. This is the transcript of our first conversation:
UncleEddie0254: Hi Linds!
Autoresponse from WahoowaLinds: class... calculus sucks.
UncleEddie0254: How is your day?
UncleEddie0254: Linds? Why aren't you responding?
UncleEddie0254: Are you ignoring me because I won't give you more money?
And so on ... Never once in the conversation with "me" did he realize I wasn't there. I guarantee you've had a similar conversation with a parent.
My dad, in the long run, caught on to how to tell if I was there and how to read my away message, but by that time, he was so disenchanted with AIM, he gave up. I think it was just because he didn't have a lot of buddies or away messages to check (and we all know that's what keeps us online).
About three years into mastering our home computer, my parents were presented with a whole new beast to tame: the cell phone. Our first cell phone was one of those huge blocks of plastic that came with its own carrying case (which looked suspiciously like a briefcase) and a battery the size of my forearm. You know the one I'm talking about.
Eventually we graduated to Zack Morris-sized, and then by high school, we each had our own pocket-sized phones. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and I'd say that's mostly true, except our parents had no option but to figure out how to learn to use these new communication tools in spite of their reluctance ("I'M GONNA GET CANCER IN MY EAR FROM THIS DAMN THING!").
I still program my mom's phonebook each time she gets a new phone and download my dad's ringtones for him, but they can at least operate them and make calls as opposed to before when I had to do all the dialing and simply hand them the phone while saying, "It's dialing!" Please tell me I'm not the only one who's done that.
When I started text messaging in college, my parents always wanted to know what I was doing when I came home on breaks and would press a million buttons on my cell phone at a time ("WHAT NUMBER ARE YOU CALLING THAT IS THAT LONG? ARE YOU CALLING JAPAN? THAT'S NOT ON OUR PLAN!"). I tried to explain that text messaging was akin to short e-mails (likening them to IMs was above my parents' heads).
They honestly thought this was absurd at first -- why didn't I just call? And then they realized the beauty of it was that they could reach me anytime, even if I was in class, and I would respond. 'Tis a great thing when a parent can immediately access his or her child. Now I get somewhat shoddy text messages every so often, mostly on Friday nights, from my mom ("MAKE GOOD CHOICES!").
And so our parents have tried to keep up with us in their efforts to learn to use all these new inventions, and they have even excelled at some -- but with a great deal of humor, frustration and taunting from their kids. I just hope my parents never want iPods. I don't think I could handle it.
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