A case in point.
I get numerous calls for help from aging members of my community who somehow know that I'm willing to be helpful. Usually I can afford to be helpful because from the description of the computer-related problem over the phone it's clear that I'm probably only going to have to click on a button, and in that way make someone think that I'm a magician. Of course I have ulterior motives as well - I usually expect to have something to write about as a result of these encounters. The following story only proves my point.
A woman of almost 80 called me and said she was having a problem with her computer. She'd received e-mail from her nephew overseas with the title Urgent Message and she didn't know how to respond. It was obvious to me that this was some sort of chain message, but my attempts to ease her concern over the phone weren't successful. I had to make a house call.
It turned out that this was one of those messages of the sort that tells you that if you pass the message on good luck will come your way within a few days, but that if you break the chain bad things will befall you. My caller told me that she knew there was such a thing as computer viruses that could attack her computer, and she wondered if this was what would happen to her computer if she didn't pass the message on.
In the end she accepted my reassurances that, from this letter, at least, she had nothing to fear. And I learned something about how people new to computers conceptualize what this whole computer thing is about. Or at least I think I did - when I realized that the picture in her head allowed for the possibility of the hardware of the computer being affected by the content of a message, I had to admit that I was actually quite far from really understanding how she understood that the machine worked.
Go to: Paranoia strikes deep - redux, or
Go to: The Return of the PC.