Two phone calls this morning: one from the mother of a mediaeval friend, for whom I had bought a laptop last February. I had set it up with Windows 2000 and two accounts, and Administrator one, and a User one for her, so she couldn’t screw anything up too badly. Somehow she had messed up the password for the User account, so I talked her through the business of logging on as an Administrator and resetting the user password. “I think I’ve done pretty well”, she said. “92 years old and I’m still teaching myself all this. Why are you laughing?” I was sharing her joy, I explained.
Then another friend rang on a wholly unrelated matter and mentioned in the middle of the conversation that his two-year-old son’s teletubbies CD wasn’t working any more. It was giving errors about being unable to read from Drive E:. What had you done wth it? I asked. “Well, Thomas hasn’t done anything with it. He just puts it in his toybox when it’s not in the CD tray.”
Have you noticed the real difference between mobile and landline calls today? In any landline call, it’s almost certain that the person at the other end will be fiddling with their computer as we talk, just as we are.