... the horror of parental net savvy
hands up who gets emails from their parents ?.
when my early-sixties and kind of groovy mother announced her intention to go "on the line" (hee hee), i was initially pleased. after all, it has been proven that "use it or lose it" also applies to the old grey matter, and the longer she stays "with us" in the upstairs department, the better, right ?.
so when she recently took a short class entitled "seniors new to the net". i was all for this at first, until it became apparent that the major topic of this course was "using the internet to find new and more effective ways to pop up out of nowhere and ask your children probing questions no matter where they are".
it was all they wanted to know. the old dears were melting away years of parental frustration by whooping with joy over the invention of the email. there was apparently a near-riot when it was revealed to them that they could sneak a "read request" in with an email. the idea of having "proof" that their offspring were indeed "listening" was astonishing. imagine that ... proof.
these classes are not full of groovy old people !. they are all hard-assed, sinister, tech-savvy grannies with an inviolable determination to stay in touch, dammit. whilst the over-sixties club may not be able to keep up in every aspect of life, they have it nailed as far as finding every possible way to say the same thing through a truly stunning variety of ways.
so, as you may well imagine, my pleasure in my mothers' newly found net knowledge has somewhat diminished since she started using it to stalk me.
since my mother and i have differing views on what is "important", she frankly occasionally drives me berko with her "news". for example, on the phone last week, she said this:
"do you remember so and so ? ... no ? ... well, i'm sure you do. let me see, he was friends with that fellow jack used to know and then he married cathys' sister, you know, i'm sure you knew cathys' sister val ... her daughter married that fellow who owned that restaurant you and mark used to go to ..."
ok, mark i dated for 6 years. but the rest is total blank. after enough of this, i finally say that i remember (whether i actually do or not ... usually not). and so, having gone to so much trouble to explain this person, (whom i forgot 15 years ago if i knew them at all) and their entire life history, she always says the same thing:
"he died"
why is it that as people age, they have a tendency to inform you when other (less fortunate) old people have died ?. my mother loves to do this. i tell her not to, but she still does it. i think they're just glad it's not them or something ... woo hoo, the wheel went off again and we still didn't come up. bummer about old hank, though, huh ?.
no longer content with using my answering machine to scare the crap out of random house-guests with these and other such missives, my mother now has the wonder of email. i regularly receive emails which i am able to sort into three categories.
1/ "now, i don't want to nag" .... followed by lecture
2/ "now, i know you haven't forgotten" ... followed by reminder
3/ "now, i know it's not my business" ... following by rapid-fire inquisition-style questioning
when i asked her not to fire off so many email questions to me, she got an msn id !.
she really did !. she added me !!!!. i should have known when i saw the id "nannaj**** " ... too late .... there it was ...
"did you ring nana for her birthday tuesday darling ?"
argh. somebody kill me.