Kicking and screaming

I have two sisters, both older than me. I also have three older brothers. In fact all of them are over 40 and I’m not…haha! This is besides the point, I just enjoying pointing that out whenever possible.

My oldest sister Joan E. (by the way, much older by 9 years!!!! - tee hee, I know that makes her feel special), refuses to come into the 21st century. She can not possibly use her advanced age as an excuse either, because one brother who is even older than her, is a computer whiz. We all know how to use computers. Hell, even our parents, now in thier 70’s both use computers and *gasp* even the internet!

She teaches third grade and the school has provided her with a laptop and internet connection at the school. She hates it because the blasted thing never works. Emails and important files mysteriously disappear, it crashes, the internet doesn’t work and is so frustrating…yada, yada, yada. Most normal people would know that this is a PEBCAK problem. (PEBCAK: problem existing between computer and keyboard i.e., its her more often than the computer or her network! She isn’t the first one to try to use the old gremlin in my computer trick! She’s not fooling anyone.) It’s so much easier to just call me or one of her other five siblings to look up things on the internet for her. We have become her internet concierge service and we don’t even get paid.

I have badgered her for years to get her some internet access at home. Maybe just start out simple with this thing called techology. Hook up some cable or satellite TV to start with, this is pretty simple to operate. Her biggest fear is that if she hooks it up, she will never leave the TV. Her kids would starve, the house would turn into a toxic waste dump, she would lose her teaching position and then how would she be able to afford the cable bill. It’s like a crack addict knowing to stay out of the seedy part of town where all the crack dens are. She doesn’t want to have to start prostituting herself to pay for her habit, because that would just be annoying trying to crane her neck around her John to see the new episode of Meerkat Manor.

Honestly, she is correct. When she came to visit me a few years ago for three weeks, it was all I could do to rip her away from my cable enhanced idiot box to see the sights of lovely North Georgia. I would walk past her bedroom at three o’clock in the morning, only to see the tell tale bluish lights eminating out from under her door. No wonder she was sleeping in until noon! Crackhead, TV addict, it’s all the same.

I shouldn’t be so hard on her, she did finally get a cell phone a while back, after much proding. Half the time she doesn’t have it on or with her, so I don’t even see the point. But the really aggrivating part is that you get her voice mail that actually (swear to God) states that you should NOT leave her a message on her “cell phone answering machine” because she doesn’t know how to retrieve them still after like two years of owning the phone!!! I really think she can’t retrieve the messages because she actually thinks there is a “cell phone answering machine” box that she would need to buy as an expensive accessory and that would just be one more complicated thing to figure out and there is just no more space in her house to store this monstrosity.

In case you were wondering if this post will get her all fired up. Nope. She won’t be reading it, because she can’t work her computer! Nanny nanny boo boo!