Of Nice Uncles

I've either been too busy to blog or the comp. has fallen sick and the net won't work. Which reminds me, BSNL's Data One customer care is quite good and reliable. Though these days the net is slow, its quite fast almost always. Yesterday, I called the customer care service because I was trying to get the connection to work on the old khadoos Win 2K pc and it just wouldn't. (Especially when I was so eager for everything to work in one go after I had installed the LAN card (Yayy!! :D To think of the ignominy if I hadn't been able to do that! My mom would have declared my to-be-received Comp. Sc. degree useless! :D)

So two uncles showed up around afternoon. They were uncles you know, because they were around fifty and were quite nice. Though NiceUncle 1 had a photocopied manual with him with full screenshots and all and he was following it meticulously, I think they were better acquainted with telephone lines etc than with setting up a net connection. Like my mom, when she started using the comp, NiceUncle suffered from the clicking disability. I reminded him in a gentle way, 'Umm .. you have to double click there, not single click' and he got it after a few more tries.

Uncles had to install a special software for win2K which XP has by default. But Uncle got stuck and didn't know what to do. So he took out a cellphone (which looked as old as he was) and called someone up for a solution. Then followed a conversation which also had the following words in it
'Double clickaa?'
'Single clickaa?'

And so on till Nice Uncle and yours truly got the hang of what was to be done. Nice Uncle being familiar only with XP didn't know about My Network Places and he couldn't figure out where to start the connection from till I showed him the folder in an as un-teacherly way as possible. Finally, we were done.

I'm sure if it was someone some twenty years younger they would have finished it in half the time.But its nice seeing old, Nice Uncles do this kind of work. It takes some patience to get used to how they stare at the screen through spectacles perched on their noses and how it takes them some time to understand and do exactly what you're saying. Sometimes you want to snatch the mouse away from them and do things yourself. Quite a few of the old generation including parents seem to suffer from this so-slow syndrome. Then I think of the patience that they had with us when we were younger and I repress my impatience. Some kind of a role-reversal. Only we're better off because we don't have to do any (as Dooce calls it) ass-wiping. :)