Kick in the Head

My mom is by no means in any sense of the word senile. In fact, if you met her you’d probably under guess her age by I’d say 10-15 years. Still though, computers are still hard to grasp even though she can capably word process, email, youtube, stream and Skype. When she was visiting recently she was using a borrowed PC laptop and couldn’t figure out how to save, so she left the document open until she could ask my sister’s husband how to save. He showed her how by pressing the floppy disk icon on the top left.

I told her that Microsoft Word still has a “File” menu on both versions and they should be in the same place. Unfortunately, the “top” of the screen isn’t “top” enough on a PC because of the way the windows are set up. So she didn’t do the next logical thing which was search in the vicinity of the top.

It’s also funny to me that she doesn’t realize she had a PC before. Somehow she doesn’t realize that there are basically only two computers she’ll ever need to know about: Mac and PC (no way in HELL she’s ever going to touch a Linux box).

Oh well, like I said. She can email, youtube, word process and even Skype, so I should probably count my lucky stars.

As I suspected, my dad had merely turned down the volume on his computer by accident. I don’t know if there’s a keyboard shortcut on Windows to lower the volume, but that would be my first suspect. My dad’s keyboard isn’t new enough to have a volume control so there aren’t many possibilities. The sound wasn’t showing up on the bottom right of the start bar so I had to direct my mom to the control panels and then to the sound control panel where she confirmed that the volume slider was nearly all the way down. As soon as it was fixed my dad came rushing into the room after hearing that it was fixed.

I’m just glad that the problem was exactly what I thought it was. If it was something else then it would’ve been a much bigger headache.