dixiblog.com

I’ve talked a time or two about my mom and her technological…challenges. Today, I got a tech support call from my mom, bless her lil’ soul. I mean, I’m proud of her that’s she’s not afraid of the computer at her age…but in some ways, it might be easier.  :mrgreen: 

“I’ve got a computer question, Dixie.” Never a good start.

“Ok, Mom. What is it?”

“Well, do I need to open this thing before I put the CD in?”

“Uh…open what thing? What CD? I don’t know what you’re talking about, exactly, Mom.”

“Turbotax. The turbotax CD.” Oh. Uh…Wait a minute! I know.

“You’re asking if you need to open last year’s version of Turbotax to install this year’s version, right?”

“Yeah!”

I didn’t sigh. Really.

“No, Mom. You don’t need last year’s verion on there. Remember? We have this same conversation every year. Every year, you’re afraid to uninstall TurboTax, and every year, I tell you that you don’t need to worry about it. It won’t erase your tax files. It saves that part. And besides, you don’t need to open one program to install another.”

“Oh, ok. We do talk about this every year? Well, I’m afraid it’s going to eat my taxes.”

“I know, Mom. You’re concerned about this every year.” She went about her business.

Later, I got another call. She seemed a little fussy, telling me her computer is locking up more lately, and it ate her tax work. It sounded frustrating, for sure.

“And it came up with that thing, ‘Do you want to report this error to Mircosoft?’ and I said yes. I’ve reported it to Microsoft several times, but they’ve never done anything about it.”

“They won’t, Mom. Microsoft won’t do anything to help you. They just want to know about things for themselves.”

“Oh. So they won’t help me, huh? They will just fix it for other people later?”

“Yeah. They aren’t going to do diddley for you, Mom.”

“Well, I’m not going to bother telling them again.”

“No reason, Mom. No reason.” I went ahead and explained cutting and pasting to her, so she could copy the error messages when the computer crashed to send to me. I’m certainly going to be more helpful than Bill Gates! I wouldn’t have much faith she’d remember, but I think she was writing it down.

She apologized for the computer questions. I told her it was no problem. While it can sometimes be a little frustrating, I do what I can to try to help.

“After all, Mom, I owe you. You did give birth to me and everything. What’s a couple of computer questions next to giving me life? I’m happy to help when I can.”