Kathy and Computers

KATHY AND COMPUTERS
There's an episode on Andy Griffin where Jerry Van Dyke plays a character who can do nothing right. Every job he attempts he ends up messing up more than he is supposed to fix. He's just an accident waiting to happen. And that's the way my wife and computers are. She can walk by one and the screen will start to twitch.

Well, it's not that bad, but it is pretty bad. She just doesn't understand them and I can't seem to help her with it. I admit I'm a bit impatient because I work with computers for a living and expect her to know stuff she doesn't. I've been trying again to help her learn more and I'm making myself sit back and let her do it. She's picking some things up now that will help her but she still gets very, very frustrated when she has to do more than read an email.

She called me into the office one evening and I could not believe what she had accomplished without even trying. She had apparently laid her arm across the keyboard which triggered a key sequence that caused the screen to switch sideways. I had personally never seen that happen and could do nothing but laugh. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to fix it back but still can't figure out how she caused it.

Another time she messed up her email view so bad that it took me nearly 30 minutes of pouring through the help files to get it set back up. I just sort of looked at her side ways with that old "what have you done" look.

Last night she was trying to print labels for her client base from an old laptop up in my computer area. She was using my printer since it was closest to the laptop. Well, the laptop is old and the printer doesn't feed right all the time, which led to a day of frustration for her. The first problem I discovered when I came home was that she hadn't plugged the printer into the computer's USB port. When I fixed that and she tried to print the printer fed 3 or more sheets of paper at a time. She decided to print one at a time but the print queue hung up on the computer. I can't get a command prompt or computer services to come up on the computer, so I couldn't get it un-hung without booting it. I googled the problem and found a script that would reset the print spooler but it didn't help. I tried deleting the files from \system32 directory but couldn't because the spooler had them tied up. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr

At last I decided to boot the computer, take it to her office and print them on her printer. That sounds easy enough except the screen gave up long ago on the laptop so I had to move a monitor too. And it's an old piece of lead monitor that probably weighs 20 pounds. So, I lug it all down stairs and hook it up, set up the labels for her and hit print..........Yeah!!!!!!

Now, I really need to take the time to sit her down and teach her how everything works, sigh.