Bay 12 Games Forum

I was riding home from school today, and my mother inquires as to my sister's homework. For World Geography, my sister uses a Gmail account. My mother's computer uses IE, which, coupled with the slow speed from long exposure to her*, can't open Gmail. I tried installing both Chrome and Firefox several years ago, but those somehow magically made her computer go slower. This is the woman that, mind you, went into a screaming rage when one of the programs she downloaded added another toolbar to IE, accusing me of installing a new browser that somehow looked exactly like IE except for another toolbar.

So I say to my sister, well, I'll get you to Gmail on mom's laptop. My mom says, no I won't, her laptop isn't working. I ask her about it, and she gets dodgy, but when I press the issue, she goes into a screaming rant about 'security breaches' that somehow got her laptop to start showing her some random student at the younger children's school's grades and schedule, or something. I try to get her to clarify, and she says that she won't, because [rant]my dad (a senior-ranking computer geek) and I don't believe her, and never do anything, and bla-de-bla-de-bla-de-bla.[/rant] I tell her I'll take a look at it, and she specifically orders me not to look at it, because she's sending it back, because Dell can magically fix whatever it is, and she doesn't know how to use it, because it never came with a user's manual, and it's somehow totally and incomprehensibly different from every computer she's used before (she didn't say this last bit, but I inferred it from the rest of the rant).

After she drops me off and leaves to take my sister to voice lessons, I look at her computer anyway, and guess what? There is nothing that resembles what I could discern from her rant. Her complaints seem to be loosely related to her original issue with her logging in to her laptop, a Windows computer, with her Hotmail credentials and *gasp* it showing her her email. I "fixed" this "issue" by removing the email tiles from the main screen.


If my writing in the post seems different, it's because I'm trying to mimic what it sounds like to be on the receiving end of one of her rants, i.e., a rapid-fire stream of sentence fragment complaints that frequently are not germane to the subject of the rant and may or may not have any correlation with reality whatsoever.


*I'll explain this another time, let's just say that my mother has a documented(fo' realsies) detrimental effect on technology.

She says that he was trying to talk her into buying a pair of skull earrings the day before one of his victims escaped. Creepy, to say the least.