My mother asked me to help her set up the printer on her first home computer.
This was the mid-1990s. I was in my early twenties, I’d had an IBM computer since I was sixteen, and I’d been earning a good salary as an IT consultant for the past couple of years. My mum, though, had trouble accepting that I could possibly be a fully functioning adult.
She had the computer all set up and her copy of “PCs For Dummies” at the ready.
She wanted me to walk her through the steps in her “For Dummies” book so that she could reference it if she needed to do it again, so we turned to the section on installing a printer.
She had already managed to connect the cables, and all we needed to do was set up the driver. This was back in the days before USB and plug-and-play; the driver came on a 3.5-inch floppy disc and had to be installed before we could use the printer.
The book said to open the installation file and run it.
Mother: “How do we do that?”
Me: “We have to put the disc with the driver in the disc drive, and then we can find the right file.”
Mother: “How do we do that?”
Me: “We put it in here.”
I reached to put the disc in the drive.
Mother: “STOP! How do I make sure it’s the right way round?”
Me: “It will only go in one way, and this is the right way round.”
For those of you unfamiliar with 3.5-inch discs, they were hard-shelled and had a little spring-loaded door at the front that slid out of the way to let the drive read the disc, and there was a notch on one corner that ensured it would only go into the drive one way
Mother: “What if you’re wrong?”
Me: “I’m not. This is the way they go in. This is the only way it will go in.”
Mother: “Show me where it says which way to do it in the book.”
Me: “It doesn’t say that in the book.”
Mother: “Why not? It has to tell you; otherwise, how would people know?”
Me: “People just know. It’s not something they put in books because it’s so obvious.”
Mother: “Show me where it is in the book.”
I double-checked the book. Even the “For Dummies” series assumed that you could work out how to insert a floppy disc for yourself.
Me: “It doesn’t say. But this is the right way to do it.”
Mother: “How can you be sure?”
Me: “Because I have been working with computers for eight years and for the past two I have been paid a lot of money to do it.”
Mother: “But why can’t you show me in the book?”
Me: “Because it isn’t in the book.”
Mother: “But why isn’t it in the book?”
Me: “Because they don’t think they need to tell you something so basic. Now, can I put it in the drive so we can get your printer working?”
Mother: “No. I am not going to let you until you show me where it says in the book.”
In desperation, I went through the printer manual and the PC manual in the hope that they would contain something that might convince her. No such luck.
Me: “I can’t show you, because it isn’t there. Now, will you just let me put it in so that we can do this?”
Mother: “No.”
Me: “I do this every day. Why won’t you let me just do it?”
My eleven-year-old sister sensed the frustration and came into the room.
Sister: “It’s okay, Mum, we did this in computer class at school. It goes in like this.”
She put the disc into the drive in exactly the way I had been trying to, without the slightest objection from Mum.
Mother: “Now, why couldn’t you show me how to do it like that?”
And that’s how I learned that my mum was more prepared to trust a kid with the benefit of forty minutes on a school computer than an adult twice her age who worked with computers for a living.
