My mom knows just enough about computers to fear them deeply.  Combine that with my dad, who refuses to install any updates to software or operating systems because he's afraid that the manufacturers are "spying" on him, and you get a very interesting situation when one of them signs on to use their computer.

That's why I cringe when I get emails like this one:

I need to find an article that was published in my local newspaper last week on the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of the Ford plant in Mahwah. I tried to get it online, but it says that my version of Int. Exp. is outdated and the newspaper no longer supports it. If you can dig up this article, can you e-mail it to me?

I briefly considered emailing her a link to the article, which I was able to find without too much trouble.  Then I realized that a link was going to do her no good at all--she couldn't access it with the version of the browser she was running.

I don't even want to think about how old that browser version must be.  The computer is at least four years old, so if Dad hasn't installed any of the recommended updates, then...yikes.

So I copied and pasted the text of the article into an email and included the link "just in case."  Then I advised her to use Firefox, hoping she had a more recent version of that than IE.  Her followup phone call informed me otherwise, and I wound up in a fruitless argument with my father, trying to convince him that it's perfectly OK to install operating-system updates.  That got me nowhere.

I guess the next time I'm up there, I'll have to sneak into the computer room and get those updates going without Dad knowing about it.  Otherwise, Mom's going to keep emailing me here to tell me that the Internet doesn't work.  (Um, Mom, if you can email me, the Internet works just fine.)

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