The key to cyberspace

Ae and I have been friends for over forty years. She is just three weeks older than I. So our life experiences have been similar.

Ae was a primary school teacher for most of her working life. I was always under the impression she was very good at her job and highly regarded. The latter was confirmed by the glowing testimonials provided by her Principal and colleague teachers at her retirement function where I was one of the only non teachers in attendance.

Ae often relayed stories about her classes and her teaching methods. In later years the lessons included guiding her pupils through developing technology; computers and the like. Of course her pupils were pre-teens and so the level of guidance may not have been advanced but I imagined that Ae had a better than rudimentary awareness of operating a computer.

Since her retirement, however, I have realised that Ae's capacity to operate a computer, or more specifically to sort out problems, is in reality less than rudimentary. To an astonishing degree, in fact. I've lost count of the number of times I have been called to solve her computer 'problems' from Je has deleted all my photographs (she hadn't), to my computer is frozen (it wasn't), to my address book has disappeared (it hadn't) or my computer won't connect to the internet (it did). When Ae called late one night recently asking how one sends a reply to an email I really wondered whether she was losing it.

Problem after problem resolved in a matter of minutes, or less, simply through my own, quite basic, knowledge of computer operations. This weekend the latest problem was that she was not receiving any incoming emails that she knew from the sender's telephone calls had been sent. Ae had asked several neighbours to fix the problem but none had succeeded.

I called in this morning to check her account. I could see there had been no incoming emails for a few weeks. I made a few routine checks but could not see where the problem lay. Then it occurred to me the loss of incoming emails seems to have coincided with the installation of a new wireless modem. The new modem had been installed as a 'freebie' by a telephone technician who had called on another matter altogether, a faulty telephone line. It occurred to me, the loss of emails might be connected with how that modem had been installed.

I called the Internet Service Provider and was put through to the call centre in the Philippines (where else). The operator seemed more interested in discussing my time zone and weather but eventually he discovered that Ae's email address had been incorrectly recorded in the Properties section of her account. It looked like the problem had been solved but in fact it wasn't and unfortunately Ae has to wait whilst her fault is 'escalated' to another Technician.

Whilst I was on the phone to the operator Ae kept raising other issues for me to address one of which was that she had 'lost' Microsoft Word. When I investigated I saw that Microsoft Office had not been activated on the laptop which Ae had purchased earlier this year. I asked Ae did she remember whether she had purchased the laptop with Microsoft downloaded and if so had she had entered the product key. A silly question, I knew, given that Ae had no idea what I was referring to.

Luckily Ae is diligent in keeping all documentation relating to her purchases and whilst she may not always be able to readily locate where she has filed them she did eventually produce the purchase documentation for her laptop and (of course) the product key card to activate Microsoft Office. Not having the faintest idea what the card meant, Ae had simply filed it away unactioned; many months ago. Another 'problem' solved in minutes.