Wednesday, July 13, 2005

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. :)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

my dad is also a victim of so0slow syndrome :)

and I know how frustrating it gets when u have teach others how to double click

Anonymous said...

old uncles were nice but oldie goldie win2k isn't...

actually win2k is known to be a much stable a s/w as compared to XP which i guess u shld be aware of, my dear comp sc student :D

it's just that the data one's logging s/w isnt backward compatible and need dependencies

and just think of what gadgets wld ur kids have to declare u "so-slow" :D

:D

but cheers to ur installation work :D

GratisGab said...

ROTFL coolcat! One of your funniest posts. The staring thru spectacles while the wheels slowly turn..the clicking issues..so so relatable!

Ah, you a dooce fan too...:)

manuscrypts said...

maybe so-slow isnt so-bad :)

Ravi Handa said...

atleast u got win 2k... i m still working with windows 98 :(

Anonymous said...

playboi .. hehe .. my dad is fine .. my mom's a little bad :)

burf :P, by khadoos i meant .. that pc is very slow .. and lots of things wrong with it .. i wasnt defaming win2k, so please dont feel so bad :D :P. Yeah .. guess the soslow hting wll happen to us too :) and thanks for the cheers :)

gabby, thanks a lot :) That's quite a compliment coming from you :) Are you a victim of that syndrome too? :)

Manu, did i touch a raw nerve? :)

Handa .. but is your pc slow because of other problems too?