Public Ponder

By Daniella Mini

Mother and daughter — My mom and I, 2019

Have you ever encouraged someone to embrace technology and then regretted it?

Me, I’m starting to lament pushing my mom to up her game. Look, she’s 79, and as bright and energetic as anyone half her age. But let’s face it, if you never even cared to know how to use a TV remote, chances are today’s tech is way over your head.

It all started with the iPad, one of the two devices my mom uses (the other one being her cell phone).

Hers was one of the first versions released, way way back when Obama was in the middle of his first term. My mom used it for email and to type her ESL and bible class homework on the Notes app.

Then the virus came along and forced my religious and eminently social mom to learn how to get on Zoom and click on YouTube links. So old and slow was the device, you could prepare a pabellón criollo from scratch while it pulled up a video.

Thus, around Christmas time, I finally convinced my mom to buy a new iPad, one with a keyboard no less.

It arrived when I was away and my mom wouldn’t think to let anyone else set it up. Daniella had to do it. For whatever reason, she decided the iPad must be handled by the person who selected the model and did the online purchase.

It’s been a couple of months since I set up my mom’s iPad and showed her how to get to the home screen, and to fold the keyboard into place so the screen stays upright and the keyboard horizontal. Everything else was pretty similar to the old iPad.

And that, dearest friends, was just the beginning. The tech support calls started the very next day and have continued since. Though my mom never skips the ‘how are you’s’ and ‘how did this or that go’, it’s obvious when she’s calling with a tech question.

I’m hardly what you’d consider tech-savvy, but now my mom thinks I’m the only human on the entire planet who can assist her when she can’t pull up a YouTube video. She could contact any of her other three daughters or two nieces who live nearby, but no, it has to be me.

“How come I can see the video but there’s no sound?” she called to ask the other day.

My diagnosis was that the volume was off and I did my best to explain that she needed to click on the little loudspeaker icon with a line across it. I was, sadly, unsuccessful, and my mom couldn’t pray the rosary broadcast straight from Lourdes that afternoon.

I showed her in person the next day — one of those tiny tech support lessons that’ll make a huge difference I hope.

Then there are the popup messages:

“There’s a message from Google. It says something about a device and delete and security something.”

“Ok mom,” I proposed, “Just hit cancel whenever something you don’t understand from Google pops up.”

“But I’m scared,” she said, as if the Google monster might suck her into the screen and up to that Cloud she hears about.

Do you know what else is kinda funny but causes me to take deep breaths? The way my mom jots down every single step of what I do on one of her many notebooks. I was showing her how to join a WiFi network the other day, and here’s what she wrote down:

Settings (including a little drawing of the settings icon!)
Press settings (as if she could do anything other than press?)
Find Join Network
Find 4ADF740
Press 4ADF740
Type password: 123456789
Press Enter

She’s terrified of pressing the wrong button as if her error could lead to the deployment of the whole US nuclear weapons arsenal.

I love the saying “No good deed goes unpunished” — possibly because we have no equivalent aphorism in Spanish, my native language, and it took me some time to “get” it.

What do you know, my good deed led to this request from my mom: “Could you help my friend Maria set up her iPad?”

“I’d be glad to, mom,” I heard myself answer. After all, how can I say no to my mom, who gave me life and is the most generous and loving person in the world?

Plus I’m proud of her. She’s finding interesting videos all by herself on YouTube now, positioning herself nicely on the screen while on Zoom and using the mute/unmute function proficiently. And helping her tells me exactly why my 25-year-old-son takes so many deep breaths when I ask him to help me with my tech issues.

One more tech support anecdote:

I had to show and explain to my

mom

about 72 times that she didn’t need to press “enter” to move to the next line when she was

writing an email or using the Notes

app, the way one had to back in the day of the typewriter. I think she didn’t believe me! Then when she’d make changes to her composition, the spacing

would be all off, just the way it is in this paragraph you’re

about to finish reading.

FYI: My mom gave me permission to publish this post.

By Daniella Mini

It’s no exaggeration to say my 27-year-old autistic son lives for holidays and birthdays. He’s already talking about turning 28 and he turned 27 less than a month ago.

When Diego began nagging me to help him make his Valentines in mid-January, I reassured him we had plenty of time and that he’d have to wait until February. He was OK with that, but it didn’t stop him from reminding me every other day that I’d help him in February.

“Yes I will, Diego. In February.” I have no choice but to help him, given that his independent writing is illegible. Neither the recipient would be able to read the message nor the mailman the address on the envelope.

Lucky for Diego, we happened to have a big snowfall in the Northeastern United States on February 1. There’s this thing about snow days that makes you feel as if you have free time. Which means you have a decision to make: What should I do with this gift of time?

The February snow day was the perfect day to tackle the making of this year’s Valentines and learning to use iMovie -both things I kinda wanna / kinda need to do.

I need to clear my schedule and find zen to help Diego with his yearly Valentine making ritual. It takes forever and, unlike Diego, I don’t have forever. Our perceptions of time don’t match up and I must move things along if I want to get to anything else at some point.

Each Valentine is a four-page booklet. On pages 1 and 2, I drew small boxes for Diego to form legible letters spelling H-a-p-p-y V-a-l-e-n-t-i-n-e-s d-a-y, like so:

Pages 3 and 4 contained Diego’s personalized message, which I took down for him. This is the most laborious and lengthy part of the process.

Take page 3 of Diego’s Valentine for cousin Eu:

As soon as Diego mentioned anything he wanted me to write, his associative thinking kicked in.

Diego: “Your friend in Miami looks like Jake Gyllenhaal” (Sorry, Jake, for misspelling your last name.)

The mention of Jake Gyllenhaal begot the recitation of movies the actor’s in: “Jake Gyllenhall’s in The Day After Tomorrow, Spiderman Far from Home, Stronger… Stronger‘s about the Boston Marathon bombing. Eu and Ivanha were safe…,” Diego went on.

“Ok, ok, Diego,” I said finally, feeling he’d said enough and it wouldn’t be disrespectful to redirect.

“I wrote ‘Your friend in Miami looks like Jake Gyllenhaal’. What else do you want me to write Eu?”

Diego: “Your friend in Mexico looks like Gail Gadot.” (Sorry to you too Gail.) “Gail Gadot’s from Israel. She’s Wonder Woman. Gail Gadot looks like Andreina, your friend we saw in Maine. Tia Monica likes Wonder Woman…”

Page 3 done. On to the fourth and last page. Here’s what Diego had me write:

Every chance he gets, Diego tells people to come for a visit and what he’d like to do with them. He always mentions things he knows the other person enjoys.

Eu, for instance, loves sushi and was really into the sitcom Friends. Diego doesn’t care about Friends but he’ll be game for anything that’ll ensure he’ll get to spend time with you.

Though Diego may test in the “very low” IQ range, he knows that, as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman notes in Thinking: Fast and Slow:

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”

Of course, each page-4 sentence spawned a whole string of associated ideas Diego dove into. Don’t let the brief content fool you. Time and output are not closely correlated in this endeavor.

This year’s lucky Valentine recipients will be his same-age cousins Eu and Ivanha, caretaker and friend Pati, and former teachers/ babysitters (now friends) Caro, Davina and Jessica. So far at least. I suspect over the next couple of days Diego will come up with more people he needs to make Valentines for.

I’m kinda hoping he has enlisted someone’s help to make a Valentine for ME!

Public Ponder

You’d Better Be Kind When Giving Tech Support to Your Mom

One more tech support anecdote:

Autism and Valentine’s Day: An Exhausting Love Ritual