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The dreaded call came at 10:14 p.m.
“Yeah, I’ve got a problem with my computer,” my 90-year-old father informed me.
My insides went cold, and I fought mightily to suppress a scream. Dad always has a problem with his computer… or his printer. And it’s never his fault. He’s never downloaded a virus from a sketchy website. (Dad, I can see the search history on your computer, and ya did.) He’s also never opened a spam email and clicked on some phony link. (Dad, you call at least once a week in a panic to tell me that a bank you’ve never used is suspending your account.) And—how dare I even ask—he’s never sent sensitive personal information back through said phony links. (Yeah, all those trips to the Social Security Office were just for fun.)
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The printer is another problem entirely. Dad’s computer normally connects wirelessly to the printer. But, somehow, the connection fails a few times a month. It’s usually because a setting has been changed. How this happens is a mystery murkier than the Bermuda Triangle. Dad insists he hasn’t changed anything; the computer apparently just does these things on its own.
Now, his laptop isn’t HAL 9000. It hasn’t achieved sentience and decided to upend Dad’s preferred settings. It’s a basic, inexpensive Lenovo with just enough memory for Dad’s primary tasks: simple word processing, surfing the web, and answering the occasional email. That’s it. |
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Mostly Dad uses the computer to look up recipes and then retype those recipes into a Word document. He then prints the recipes, hole punches them, and stores them in a huge three-ring binder. If he makes a mistake, he goes back, retypes the entire recipe and prints it again. I’ve tried to show him how to save recipes once he’s created them, but it doesn’t seem to stick. He has his “process,” and that’s how he’s going to do it.
So, when the printer won’t print, either my sister or I have to drop everything and get to Dad’s to fix the connection. The last time my sister tried, she couldn’t get it to work. She finally gave Dad a USB cable that he could use to physically connect his laptop to the printer. But he didn’t like the cable. Using it meant he couldn’t just press “print” from his favorite spot on the end of the couch. Hence the 10:14 p.m. phone call to me.
Even though this was a DEFCON 1 emergency (in Dad’s eyes, at least), I didn’t go over that evening. I had already washed my face for bed, and reconstruction would have taken far too long.
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When Hubby and I arrived the next morning, Dad never mentioned my sister working to try to restore the wireless connection for hours the previous day or giving him the USB cable. (I knew because she’d texted me in frustration, saying that she was about to chuck both the computer and the printer into the trash.)
After rebooting the Wi-Fi and tinkering with the laptop, Hubby was able to restore the computer-printer connection. Instantly, Dad’s printer began churning out pages and pages of recipes that had been stuck in the queue. The three-hole punch was about to have a very busy day. |
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Then Dad mentioned that an annoying “Your antivirus software is about to expire” message kept popping up on his computer every few minutes. That was my cue to book a same-day appointment with the Geek Squad to clear any viruses and malware off Dad’s computer. Every time we go, he has multiple viruses on his laptop. And, every time, he tells the Geek Squad experts the same thing: He hasn’t visited any dodgy websites or clicked on any email phishing links. He has absolutely no idea how these things end up on his computer.
Yep, it’s a mystery.
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