I know most of my stories and posts will be about people who don't know much about that device they call the computer, but this one is a bit different. This one is about my own mom.
My mom was never one you would call tech savvy when I was growing up. She knew how to use what she had, and had no real need to learn more. Now my mom is by no means an unintelligent person, so it's not that she didn't learn more because she couldn't, she just didn't need or want to. That is until recently.
Until a few years ago, if my mom had issues with her computer, she went to my dad, and if he couldn't fix it, well.. I don't actually know what they did. I've never been told. I like to believe that my dad had all the answers back then. But as I got older and started learning more about computers than what my dad knew, my mom started coming to me. I would help her with what I knew, but most of the time I just googled the answer (now class, pay attention, because this is what's called foreshadowing). And I knew how to google the answer to almost any problem.
A couple years after high school, I finally moved out of my parents place and moved into town, partially because I wanted to finally live on my own, but mostly because I wanted good internet, and my parents had no options where they lived. Once I moved out, my parents didn't get to see me much. My mom started to miss me, so she'd call me up asking me for help with things, and I'd do what I did before, and simply google the answer and fix the problem quick and be on my way.
Now, my relationship with my parents back then wasn't the greatest, so when my mom's issues started to become repetitive, I started to get irritated with helping her. I stopped wanting to help, and so I'd make up excuses about why I couldn't come fix her problems. Finally, because she wanted to see me again, she started to bribe me with home-cooked meals, something I didn't do enough for myself, and still don't for that matter. So she'd call me up with an issue, I'd come fix it and stick around for food, because mom is one of the best cooks on the planet, and we all know that.
As I became more mature over time, and my relationship began improving with my parents, I tried to find time to spend with my parents, regardless of helping them with anything. But I wanted to make that clear to my mom what I was doing. So I took on the task of teaching her how to google.
Now, I'm sharing the tech industry's number one secret, and may be outcast by my peers for this, but knowing how to google is every computer techs number one tool. You could literally have never seen a Windows operating system in your life, but if you know how to google, you can do almost anything. In fact, I'd say 90% of the time when you talk to a tech over the phone, they're just googling the answer if they're not on a script. And I taught my mom this secret.
It started with something easy. I taught my mom how to use Google Now on her phone. I very vividly remember the very first thing she googled, because it was probably one of the funniest things that has ever happened in our family, but given the nature of it, I'd rather not share this particular part of the story over the internet, but will be glad to tell you should you ever ask me in person. Her first few things were asking google how to spell certain words, because though my mom knows everything a person could know about the human body (she's a nurse), spelling was never her strong point. That's fine. She just has to ask google, and it'll read off the proper spelling for her.
From there, it went to minor technical problems. Her laptop was having issues connecting to the internet. She googles it on her phone, and it tells her to try restarting the computer. It happens to work, and she's back to doing work on her computer. She has trouble with saving a word document to her flash drive. She googles it, it gives her the instructions, and she saves the document without any problems.
Then one day, she takes on a task that I wouldn't even be comfortable with unless I was the supporting tech for this piece of hardware. My mom and dad used to own their own medical clinic, my dad being a family physician. They needed a file server to keep all of their patients' records backed up as part of HIPAA guidelines, but one day their file server starts beeping. To give a little background, this particular file server was an older model Dell server, running Windows Server 2003, with RAID. To the non-techies reading this, the server is like a giant file cabinet, keeping copies of all of the files. RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. What that means is there are multiple hard drives all working together, kind of like having multiple file cabinets. In this particular kind of RAID setup, if one of the hard drives goes bad, there are copies on the other hard drives of everything, and when you replace the bad hard drive, the others work together to repair the server, and replace the files on the new hard drive as needed.
My mom had learned to google many an issue, but this was something I would have thought a bit beyond what she'd learned to do so far. But she managed to find the model number of the server, google what the beeping meant, figured out which hard drive needed to be replaced, then found where my dad kept an extra hard drive, pulled out the old one, put in the new one, then sat and waited for the server to repair itself. And she didn't have to do any of that either. My parents have a tech service they pay for, and could have just had the guy come out and fix it. But she fixed it all on her own!
When my dad told me later the story of what happened, I was amazed. I figured my mom would be able to handle her day-to-day issues no problem, but I didn't expect her to progress that far! I started joking with her that if she kept that up, she could do my job. She didn't think that was quite as funny as I did, but she's become quite capable with her google-fu. Here's the moral of my story: It doesn't matter how old you are, you can always learn something new, and the best skill in this technologically advanced age to learn is how to properly use google. If you know how to google, you know how to do almost anything.
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