Tangled Green Thoughts

If I can sit and watch my mom try to double click icons for five minutes, I can teach and educate any student. Tutoring my mom how to use the computer has been the ultimate test in patience and restraint (a lot of counting to five in my head). Sometimes I feel like ripping the keyboard from its place and smashing it on the ground, but instead I sit there beside her and slowly tell her, with an angry quiver in my voice, that she needs to open Microsoft Word to write documents, and close Internet Explorer (she would try to open Word documents while in Explorer).

One time I nearly went insane when she tried to double click to get in a folder. Two things you need to know:

1. You can get in a folder by a quick double click or a single click plus enter
2. If you double click too slow the folder will flash blue and you can rename it

So my mom knows both the double click and single click + enter methods of going into a folder, but doesn't know about the renaming. So there she was double clicking to get in. She did it too slow so it switched to rename mode. She then thought to herself (since it looked blue and highlighted) that a single click would do it. But that just verifies that you want to keep the name the same. So she was back to square one. Then she tried the double click again but was again too slow so she tried hitting enter again (square one). She looked at me with that "Wtf? There's something wack about this computer" face, like it wasn't her fault. So she then tried to double click again. Again too slow, so again in renaming mode. Keep this merry thought in your mind while envisioning the scene: My mom's speed is that of a three-toed-sloth tranqualized. At this point it was either me pulling out some of my hair or grabbing the mouse from her and hitting enter two times, which I did. At any point if she double clicked quickly enough, hit enter two times, or single clicked and hit enter, she would have been in, but she instead continued the infinite cycle of Joe frustration.