My mom, the gadge-a-matic

She came into my room asking for some help to fix the net on to her laptop, in other terms meaning to configure the modem. I asked her to give me 10 minutes, I’ll finish what I was doing and come. Five minutes later I find her, spectacles perched up on the nose, leaning towards the screen with each step she reads on the instruction manual. She tells me it’s all done but it won’t connect. So the techy that I am, I check on it, and after rummaging around my brain come to the brilliant conclusion that it requires a difficult troubleshooting procedure of pressing the restart button. Viola! Problem fixed.

I turn around to go back to my book, when she goes “one more thing please”, “I want Google Earth”. I look at her for awhile, confused.
You want what?
Google earth, child.

My mom the almost 60 years old this year, old OLDD lady, is not supposed to know these things. Not supposed to even know about Google Earth yet along want to find our house on it. That’s was her reply to my, ‘ayyo you have to download something and do a lot of work, and WHY?!?! why do you want Google Earth?’ So she wants to look at our house, our aunts house, my fathers workplace out of town and so on and on. On Google Earth.
THAT’s my mom.
The tech-gadget freak.

Seriously. She is! Looking back, I think it started with a computer. Somewhere in the early 90s our house had a pc, thanks to her official work, eons before computers became very popular in SL. And I still remember the rules. It’s very very expensive. Don’t break it. Don’t switch it on without her around. Wait until the blinking light stops before you go ahead with the next mouse click. Don’t break it. etc etc. I remember staring at the little blinking yellow light waiting for it to stop blinking and whirring. We were kids then, and all we did was play the only game available on it, a black and white space game, where the mouse was like a small rocket shooting at huge space boulders coming at it, and breaking them into smaller pieces and continue on to break those pieces up. It was white lines on black space. I can’t remember what it was called.

From then onwards, now and then, we had upgrades to the comps at home, and now that I look back at it, I bet it was all her doing. Not my fathers! She’s owned numerous gadgets since then till now. Presently she has 2 pendrives and one of them with an mp3 player. She also has two phones, and has changed her phones and sims more than me during the past 6 years. That reminds me, she had a pendrive before none of us kids did, an external cd player and writer (back in the day when they didn’t come with the comp), and she had one of those ziplock drivers. No no, not the ziplock bags, but there was some gadgeamatic external drive that allowed you to save more to this special diskette than to the normal diskette that was available those days ( before CDs came to life). Somewhat like winzip. Yes, she found it on a trip to the US of A, and brought it home, excited like a little kid about being able to save all her files in one diskette. My mom is ever so curious about these things and it used to drive us kids, crazy. Mainly coz once we passed a certain age, we naturally caught on to the techy stuff faster than her, and it used to frustrate her that she didn’t catch up as fast as us. And she’ll come asking us, what is Bluetooth, what is infrared, how do you use MMS, what can you use that for. Sometimes she’ll get slow patient answers; sometimes it’ll be like ayyooo it’s too techy to explain! Go check on the net will you.

As annoying as parents can get sometimes, it’s quite amusing as well to see her almost child-like thirst to find out about all these techy stuff. My father is the complete opposite, I have had to teach him about 50 plus times (no exaggeration ) on how to click the start button, find the firefox sign, type hotmail, and locate his email. Finally he has managed it. My mom learned this a good decade before him. My mom the gadge-a-matic! :)