Grandparent Technology

After the downer of the week politically we needed a night just to yucking it up so we had our old friends the Blanks over for dinner. We have been friends for for over 21 years so we have lots of background to laugh about.

We all had seen the story about it being the anniversary of a carbon paper on CBS Sunday Morning this morning, which got us talking about typing. All four of us had learned to type in either junior or senior high school and agreed it was probably the best thing we learned.

We juxtaposed it to our father’s who never learned to type until very late in life when they got computers.

Neither of my parents learned to type as young people and my Dad always had a secretary, even for years after he had retired, but now he is a fairly good typist. My mother is another story. She uses a computer, but does not capitalize or use punctuation, except she does use a comma acting as an apostrophe. I have read her emails out loud to her to show her how hard they are to understand without punctuation, but it doesn’t have any effect on her writing.

My friend Lane thought it was amazing my mom can e-mail, her mother doesn’t even do that, nor text. “But my Mom does have an Instagram account,” Lane said. I was amazed. I kind of think of emailing as required and Instagram as extra credit.

Lane went on to describe how she found out her Mom was Instagramming. “One day I got a suggestion I should follow Judyandrufus, (Rufus being her Mom’s dog). So I did.”

Lane pulled up her Mom’s Instagram account and showed me her screen without saying a word. There was a photo of what I presumed was her desk or counter with just a tiny bit of cord showing in the corner. I practically wet my pants I was laughing so hard.

“That’s not the first photo she posted, but the third. Sadly the first two are gone. The first one was also a photo of her desk with a bug on it. The second was just the desktop.”

Lane texted her daughter Isabel to ask her if she had a screen shot of the big picture. “It was a classic,” Isabel wrote back, but sadly she no longer had the screen shot.

I guess I need to be really proud of my parents for the skills they have. My mother posts real pictures she means to post, granted, sometimes they are sideways, but at least she knew she was posting them.

I started following JudyandRufus because I am certain I am going to need a good laugh in the future and the second I see that desk top I am going to get it.