“Okay, this time you get to do it all by yourself. Turn on the computer.”
“No, that’s the keyboard.”
“Those are the speakers. Yes, I know you know that.”
“No, gramma, that’s the mouse.”
“Of course you’ll understand this! Just not all at once. No, that’s the monitor, and you’ve already turned it on.”
“Gramma, you’ve tried to turn on everything but one.”
“That big box by your right knee, gramma.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured you’d forgotten about it, too.”
So I take it Computer 1, Gramma 0?
Are you sure you want to teach her how to use one? I bought my mom her first PC and I have lived to regret. Ninety percent of all my glurge is forwarded to me by her. Not to mention all the calls I get for tech support from her.
She knows enough just to be dangerous but not enough to be knowledgeable.
We gave my husband’s parents (in their 70’s) one of our old Mac’s a couple years ago. It took time but they can do simple suff now. Of course, they still have to ask how to empty the trash about once a month, when their e-mail doesn’t work anymore. :rolleyes:
We gave my MIL an older computer, and she somehow managed to learn how to open programs, but not to shut them. So she’d end up with 15 or 20 copies of each program running, slowing the computer down to useless, till my BIL would go over and clean it up for her. Which he had to do like once a month.
She finally gave up and gave it to our niece. We all heaved a sigh of relief.
I managed to shepherd my mother as far as figuring out how to open and play Solitaire. Anything else was confounded by her incredible paranoia, apparently because she was afraid she’d accidentally click on something that would make the whole computer fuse into a solid block of useless plastic and metal…
Every one of you whipper-snappers line up! I’m gonna hit you with my cane. And yeah; the only reason I’ve got so many posts on the message board is because I can’t figure out how to exit this damn place. So THERE! 
My MIL retired from a secretarial position back when a Selectric was the most advanced machine in the office. Leading edge techno was never her strong suit.
For some reason, at the age of 75 she got herself a DOS 286 & taught herself to use it. Did great with it.
Now, at 80, she’s got a modern box with XP and she still does just fine. She’s a terror on the online bridge circuit & spends hours making glurge-ful graphics with PSP.
She “got” email in about 12 seconds although I still sometimes get mail from here with an embedded image whose URL is C:… which doesn’t display very well on my machine 
She’d be lost of she had to fix hardware, but she’s fine with most software.
So not all Gramma’s are a total writeoff on computers.
That’s exactly what gramma’s doing now. She’s under orders to play at least three games a day and is doing pretty good - she’s even started poking around in other stuff. She’s not as dumb as she thinks she is.
I’m going to let her go for a few more days then set her up with dialup, Firefox, and a Gmail account and see what happens.
“Ok, gramma? If Nancy sends you something, do NOT send it to me - I’ve already received it at least once this week…”
Wasn’t it the same thing in her in her case?
My Grandma lives in the U.K., so I don’t get to visit often. The last time, she knew I was taking courses on those computer dealies, so she asked me for help tweaking this computer-type thing she had.
I owned 4 PCs, ran Linux, soldered custom PIC hardware together… I’ll eat your personal organizer for lunch Gradma, give it here.
So she shows me this 4 foot long knitting machine with built-in 12" monitor, funky keyboard with strange symbols all over it, 386 processor running some embedded OS, comes with a stack of custom disks for holding sweater, hat, etc. patterns. :eek:
Maybe it’s just 'cause I barely know a crochet needle from a yarn skein, but I never even figured out what she wanted it to do, much less how to do it. 
When she passed away, mom was 70. Had she lived just a bit longer, one of us kids would probably have tried to set her up with a computer & email, and I’m certain we’d have regretted it.
She’d type one of us a letter, and by letter I mean three or four pages of single spaced type. She’d type it on carbon paper so she could literally carbon copy each of us. Even with snail-mail, she kept us with a constant backlog of letters we hadn’t gotten to yet, backed up with phonecalls “did you read that last letter yet?” “Mom, I haven’t read your last eight letters yet.”
She would have figured out email, and that woman could type like the wind. I’d probably still be catching up on her email.
Kinda miss her though, and wish she was around to harass me with her email.
A few years ago, my grandparents decided to get a WebTV. Within a few months, they had taught themselves how to code basic HTML by looking at the source-code of various webpages and browsing through newsgroups! 
I have cool grandparents.