Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions Read Free Page B

coincide with my visit to them that spring. I
arrived on Tuesday, and the second-day air packages arrived on
Wednesday. I hooked everything up effortlessly and we were on our
way. That week I gave my mom the perfunctory training she’d need to
maneuver around Windows and AOL, and I left Las Vegas confident
that we’d soon be e-mailing and sending instant messages to each
other on a regular basis. After all, how hard was AOL to figure
out?
    I swear on the grave of my Tandy 2000 that I
had no sooner stepped in my door and dropped my duffel bag than the
phone rang.
    “ Hello?”
    “ Linda? Hi! You’re home?
How was your flight?”
    “ Fine, Mom. I just got
home. What’s up? Is everything all right?”
    “ Everything’s fine. I just
have one teeeeensy question, though.”
    Her emphasis on the word “teeeeensy” didn’t
go unnoticed.
    “ Go ahead,
shoot.”
    “ It’s about the
computer.”
    I felt a slight tightening
in my throat, but dismissed it as jetlag .
Everything is fine…. Everything is fine.
    I sat down.
    “ Yes?”
    “ It won’t turn
on.”
    The tightening became a
lump. Never buy a used
computer , I thought.
    “ What do you mean, it won’t
turn on?”
    “ I push in the button like
you showed me, and nothing happens.”
    The lump began to pulse
rhythmically. Maybe my dad had hot-wired it. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here ,
I thought fleetingly.
    “ What do you mean, nothing
happens?”
    “ I mean, nothing happens.
Zilch. Nothing.”
    “ What about the switch on
the monitor?”
    “ Nope. Nothing there
either. Weird, huh?”
    “ Mom . . . Did you turn on
the power strip first?”
    “ What’s a power
strip?”
     
    One problem down. Thirty-seven thousand to
go.
     
    I think I had time to unpack and eat a meal
or two before the next phone call came in.
    “ Hi, honey. I hate to
bother you, but. . . . It’s the computer again.”
    “ Doesn’t it turn
on?”
    “ Oh, it’s on. That’s not
it.”
    I felt strangely relieved. She was
teachable, at least.
    “ Then what’s the problem?”
I asked.
    “ The thingy is
blinking.”
    “ The what is
what?”
    “ The thingy is
blinking.”
    “ Mom, you’ll have to speak
up. It sounds like you’re saying, ‘The thingy is
blinking.’”
    “ It IS blinking!” she
insisted. “And I keep hearing this crunching noise.”
    Twenty minutes and an entire lack of jargon
later, I ascertained that the “thingy” in question was the hard
disk activity light on the CPU. The crunching noise was, of course,
the hard disk activity indicated by the blinking thingy.
    My mother began to get the hang of being
online quickly after that. Soon she could forward joke e-mails to
several hundred of her closest friends and type “LOL ;-) ” in an
instant message window with the best of them. Suddenly I had more
daily contact with my mother than I’d had in the womb. Despite the
cyber-claustrophobia, it was nice to have her feel close again.
    Several months went by. Little questions
trickled in now and then.
    1. “I swear I was just gone from the computer for ten minutes,
and I came back and there were these swirling colored lines dancing
all over the screen. Where did everything go?”
    2. “I saved this letter to your brother, and now I can’t find
it. I think the computer hid it from me.”
    3. “I got the picture of the kids you sent me with your e-mail,
but I don’t know how to open it again to show your
father.”
    4. “Okay, I found the picture but when I opened it this time it
took up the whole screen.”
    5. “I tried to install something, but it wouldn’t let me. . . .
What? Honestly, I don’t know. It just kept telling me
no.”
    6. “I know this was a used computer, honey, but I just found
some old folder on here from the previous owner, called ‘Teen
JPGs.’ Don’t tell your father. He’d die.”
     
    After a lot of trial and
error, my mother learned to write down for me exactly what happened
when an error occurred. She now wrote down the