Devoted readers of this blog will recall that I sometimes credit my 89 year-old mother with teaching me (by negative example) the need to stay current with technology. So I only have myself to blame for deciding it was a good idea to buy her a new Mac Book Pro for her last birthday.

Ursula had been making noises that she was interested in this “new email thing” and that it might be practical to be able to order groceries for home delivery. Given my addiction to electronics I needed little encouragement to hit the Apple store for laptop printer and router provision cable broadband and set up a home network for mom. What I should have recalled was (i) I have never been long on patience as a teacher or otherwise and (ii) the last piece of technology my mother had mastered was the IBM Selectric II typewriter. Never having made the transition to fax word processor or mobile phone let alone first generation PC my mother had missed successive waves of tech learning. We tend not to think about it much in large part because it has become second nature but manufacturers of everything from cars to microwave ovens expect that every half-literate adult can operate a touch screen choose options from a set of radial buttons scroll down a screen and manipulate a mouse. Not Grandma.

Thanks to the good nature of my wife and my occasional emergency intervention my mother has almost mastered the power button and has managed to send a couple of Gmails. There are of course some humorous misadventures and questions. I particularly appreciated Ursula’s query when she was having trouble sending an email to a relative in Israel with a “.il” rather than a “.com” address. In the age of the world wide web (ps. that’s a clue Mom) my mother asked whether perhaps the reason she was getting message failures was that we had not paid for “long distance” service.

Equally charming was the time Ursula failed to send us a welcome home message and her Mac said there was a problem with the “Airport.” I later assured her that we had breezed through customs at JFK but that her wireless Apple Airport was the culrprit. There was also the time I got nervous call from my mother worrying that she would be convicted of trademark infringement because I had set her password to include a very common proper name. I only wish that I had been so good a lawyer as to have worried about such an attenuated claim.

What my mother kept asking for was a set of written instructions which could demystify the computer for her or at least guide her down a narrow path to accomplish the handful of things she wanted to do. While I did hide icons to simplify her screen and set up programs to remember her user ID and password I could not give her a simple set of instructions to cover all issues that might appear or fail to appear on her screen. While she insisted that the kids and I must have learned how to use this “wretched machine” in school I came to realize that we had learned through simple trial and error. Unfortunately my advice that she should “hang loose stay agile and experiment” in the face of confusing warning messages did not have its intended pedagogic effect.

While my mother may not be thrilled that I am sharing her technology travails quite so publicly I think it is a good challenge. I will tell her there are some amusing stories about her on my blog and see if she can find her way here. If she does and then commits a very late term abortion of her only son as a result I know I will have succeeded in my mission.