Mom, this is God talking…
Posted on February 27, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh
Sorry, just had a flashback to seeing “Real Genius”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0089886 in college…
Anyway, my Mom is a switcher. My dad loved his PC. My mom barely used hers outside of work or when she had to. After my father died, Mom tried to use his souped-up-for-its-day computer but it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t help her, and the 233mHz PC was sorely outdated. Rather than upgrade or replace the PC, I talked her into buying a new flat-panel iMac. The draw was the fact that I could install software (”Timbuktu Pro”:http://www.netopia.com/en-us/software/products/tb2/mac/index.html) that would allow me to troubleshoot her system in New York from my couch in Connecticut. There would be nothing she would try on the Mac that I wouldn’t be able to help her through. Men don’t like to stop for directions. My mother doesn’t like to read manuals or help menus. It’s that simple. You have to show her.
Boy, has it been worth it. She calls me and says “Jude, take a look at my screen and tell me what that error message means” instead of “Jude, I’ve got this thingamagic that says I have to do something, what does it mean?” Huh?
Tonight I got an email from her:
bq. Jude .. HELP !! Why can’t I forward pictures. I sent this to _xx_ and she wasn’t able to open it. Take a look on my past mail and you’ll see from cousin _xx_ the post that was HUG. Do you have an explanation of this?
Sure enough, something funky is happening in Mail.app (she’s running OS X 10.2.3…no point in training her in OS 9 now). She can receive mail with inline images, but she can’t forward them. When she does forward them, the images are stripped out. It seems to only happen with mail that originated on AOL (surprise, not). This is a problem sending to anyone, AOL, broadband, etc. whether they are reading from Mail.app or not. Since Mail.app doesn’t allow you to change encoding methods, I’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done. It’s certainly not a setting I can find, and since I’ve switched from Mail to “Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/ I can’t easily duplicate the issue.
I tried to send her an iChat to discuss this, but she didn’t know she had to click on the window in order to reply to an incoming IM. With my mother and technology, I learned to never assume anything is obvious. !../images/blog/wink.gif! It’s very frustrating to watch her through the Timbuktu window, clicking around everywhere but where she needed to be. I remembered that Timbuktu has an intercom feature, I opened it and shouted at my iBook “MOM, CLICK ON THE ICHAT BUBBLE”
It’s probably not nice to make your mother jump out of her seat, but it was kind of fun. !../images/blog/smiley.gif! I’ve been using Mac Slides Publisher (brutally slow, but it works) to keep her screen saver up to date with pictures of the kids. I think that makes up for it.
Comments
One Response to “Mom, this is God talking…”
My dad’s dock has two items in it (aside from the trash and the Finder icon): Internet Explorer and Entourage. Training him on anything else isn’t worth my mother’s time, who is pretty comfortable with Macs having been a teacher for a few decades.