Sunday, January 31, 2010

Last night’s TV

tvwatching
I really enjoyed the BBC TV programme ‘The Virtual Revolution’ last night. At the time my husband was seeing if he had successfully bid on a toy on e-Bay. My daughter was on facebook (and very annoyed that I’d commented on one of her photos—so I won’t do that again). My eldest son was listening to music he’d downloaded from the internet and my next son was catching up with revision using the BBC bitesize website. So, the whole family a testament to the internet revolution.

Meanwhile my father is living in luddite ignorance. I feel for him. He left it too late. He really thinks that getting on-line is an insurmountably difficult thing to master. I have taken him by the hand and led him through the process innumerable times. And at first he’s absolutely fine – in fact he thinks it’s fascinating as he looks at websites form his former homes of Uganda, Fiji and Hong Kong. And I say to him ‘you must do this every day or you’ll forget’ and he does for 2 or 3 days and then he loses interest. And then I get a call a month later asking me how he’s supposed to get on the internet or send an email. And despite him having a completely different computer set-up to mine I try to help him over the phone—then after half an hour of giving up my time to help him, he loses patience half-way through the exercise and gives up. Almost every time I go through this exercise I show my father Judith’s wonderful blog ‘Not Dead Yet’, in the hope that she will inspire him to persist at it.

3 Comments:

Blogger Judith said...

Ah yes, Julie, but you don't start with a blog - well I didn't. I started small aged 71, emailing and typing up committee papers,and gradually acquired more and more skills, until suddenly six years later I was captured by the idea of blogging. But you are so right about doing it every day. Fortunately I was a competent typist to start with, which was a great help.

1/31/2010 10:17 PM  
Blogger Julie Oakley said...

I'd be happy if he just e-mailed. I've shown him loads of times. Promised that I'd send him an e-mail every day (so he has someone to write to before he ventures any further) but he had to promise he'd reply and he's been fine. But then after about three or four days of competently replying to e-mails he gives up - I keep e-mailing him, with no replies, so after about a week or two of unreplied e-mails I give up. Then a month later he wants to send an e-mail to someone and we go through the whole torturous process again.

2/01/2010 10:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you think he might have a laptop he is not using which he could return to his daughter in Hong Kong?

2/02/2010 4:39 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home