Hi There, Africa!
BY GRACE GROTE
Y
ou think I’m a computer dunce, don’t you? You’re wrong, sweetheart: I know a really big computer word: Skype. My dog walker, a very smart lady, has set up her brother-in-law’s computer so that he, she and her little dog Minnie can see and be seen by their family in Nigeria, chatting (and barking) back and forth across the world. Skype, I say, is a truly dazzling and useful modern miracle.
Skype, I say, is a truly dazzling and useful modern miracle. And I use some other computer words too. (No, I am not referring to those dark hours when it flat-out disobeys and I am surprised at some of the words I shoot at it.) For an unemotional everyday example: suppose there is something I want to bring up
on my screen, I say I’ll download it. Does it bother me that when I need to bring something up I say I’m going to load it down? Not anymore. When I got my new PC years ago, my nephew turned it on for me and in very short order we were looking at Felix the Cat, whom I had not met since childhood. When the nephew went home, I tried to get rid of Felix. He would not go. I tried to turn off the computer. It would not turn
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Lifestyles After 50 • September 2013 • page 24
off. Desperate, I called in my neighbor, a keyboard virtuoso, who said, “It’s simple: You want to turn it off, you just hit START.” Well, of course—anybody should know that if you want to make something stop, you hit START.” It hit me like ice water down the spine that I was in the dead serious language-challenged world of High Cyber Tech where I spotted Alice and the Rabbit whizzing by. But what I see now is a bunch of smart-ass little boys who have built a tree-house and sit in it making up their secret language: “If we say red it means blue, and if we say blue it means green and if we say up it means down and…” And so on happily, giddily, into the night! Isn’t it time somebody’s mother called them in for supper and handed them their English homework? On the other hand, if they invented Skype…
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