You Called Me!

I've been bailing my mom out of her computer calamities for at least the past decade.

It could be as simple as a basic email mishap or as complicated as the time she did a mail merge from an Excel spreadsheet to a Word document and somehow managed to delete the Excel Spreadsheet. Either way, despite my having at least two nephews who are much more computer literate than I, she calls me.

Unfortunately...

I don't mind that she calls me. I mind that she argues with me when I try to help her.

I end up like a raving, stuttering Italian mother with my hands waving and spittle forming in the corners of my mouth!

It's ugly.

Years ago I purchased a MacBook Pro and was able to take a break from my roll as Emergency  Technician because she had a Windows based computer and I could get out of things by saying, "I don't know mom, I have a Mac."

Well that hiatus ended when she bought at MacBook Air and chose not to take the three free lessons at the Apple Store.

I was once again her Help Desk.

Most of the time I don't mind until she argues and then I want to rip out my hair all while desperately attempting to be calm and speak in a non-techie language so she can understand what I'm saying.

Words like dohickey, thingy and hooha are used as if those things really exist.

If the computer doesn't respond when she hits a key, she hits another, and another, and another...

You get the point.

Anyway, the computer doesn't stop taking the commands, it just gets slower which causes her to press more and more keys while I yell, "Stop TOUCHING!" into the phone and my children look at me as if I were insane.

She called me the other night while trying to print her boarding pass and luggage receipt for her flight on US Airways and couldn't get it to appear in the print preview window properly.

My mother has one of the most impressive vocabularies of any person I know or have known but her love of the English language goes out the window when frustrated.

She could make a sailor blush.

I do the usual with her and walk her through the print screen stuff but can't figure out why it's coming up funky so I tell her to take a picture of the screen and send it to me in an email so I can see it.

She does as told, for a change, and sends it to me so that I can figure it out and call her back. Right before I hang up she says, "I'm going to reboot my computer while you're looking at the picture."

Yeah, um...don't do that because it negates the point of taking the picture in the FIRST PLACE!!!!

Did I mention that she has the patience of a gnat?

I finally get her to agree to stop touching things and wait for me to call her back.

I get the picture, it's odd and I still can't figure out how the hell she got there so I call back and ask her to send me the email that she received from US Airways so that I can see it and figure out how to print it.

She does and I immediately figure out that she had been trying to print something in Gmail from the top of the screen where it says: File, Edit, View, etc. instead of using the print option IN the email as opposed to the entire page. I tell her to open the email from US Airways and she replies, "Which one?"

God grant me the Serenity...

The one you just sent me.

"Where do I find that?"

To Accept the things I cannot change...

Um...your inbox?!

"I can't see it."

O! M! G!

She finally manages to find the email and I ask her to tell me what she sees in the upper right hand corner which turns into her telling me not to yell at her. I wait what feels like and eternity until she's finished and say, "Can I speak?"

I walk her through printing the email which again turns into me yelling, "Stop, Stop, STOP!!!" When she tried to change from printing 'All' pages to 'From # to #.' 'All' is the default and was selected but because the 'From 1 To 1' was visible she thought it was only going to print one page.

Dear God in Heaven...

She finally just clicked Print and lo and behold two pages appeared like magic in the top of the printer.

Mom breathed a sigh of relief and asked, "What would I do without you?"

I don't know, I just wish you wouldn't argue when you call me for help!

HELLO!!!

I've discovered that there is a very distinctive succession of events that lead to tears.

It usually goes like this: Thump, "Whoa!" and then screaming.

This doesn't happen just anytime, it happens when my hubby is with the boys. They love to play with daddy and daddy loves to play with them. The problem is that they get so wound up they lose the ability to control their movements and he doesn't always know when to stop.

The perfect example of this happened yesterday while I was well...shall we say, indisposed?

The master bath is located directly above the family room and the sound carries right through the floor! I could hear the boys - all three of them - giggling away then heard Thump, "Whoa!" and then screaming, followed by, "Oh my God!"

Oy Vey! OMG means blood!

Unless it's his own, hubby doesn't handle the sight of blood well. Anyone else's, especially one of the kids, and all bets are off. Composure goes out the window and panic sets in.

He began to scream for me and I foolishly tried to yell a response.

I then heard him wrestling with the gate at the bottom of the stairs while I desperately tried to finish my "business."

He yanked the bathroom door open just as I pulled my pants up and stood there, with a bleeding stuntman in his arms, looking shocked to see me by the toilet. Not sure what he thought I was doing but, "I have to go to the bathroom," usually means one of two things.

I grabbed the first aid box (not kit, we've learned that the small kits just don't cut it for us) out from under the sink and got to work.

Stuntman had bitten his tongue.

Saliva made it look like he was going to bleed to death, but as far as actual blood goes there wasn't much and it stopped bleeding very quickly.

Hubby announced that he had to go back downstairs because, in his state of panic, he'd left the Engineer on the sofa!

Seriously?!

His panicked states are pretty much the same regardless of the circumstances. His ability to think or act rationally just goes right out the window!

The other day while changing the Stuntman's diaper, the stuntman decided to poop. I had the Kitchen Aid whirling away and didn't hear him screaming for me. Suddenly there was loud banging followed by louder, "HELLO!!!"

I sprinted up the stairs to find hubby with a screaming stuntman on the table, legs up in the air as daddy desperately cleaned up the poop. The Engineer was on the floor screaming because daddy's screaming had frightened him.

Ummmm.....Yeah... really?! You were screaming because of poop?!

OMG! 

Despite his panic and gagging, there really wasn't much I could do. So I picked up the hysterical Engineer and tried to calm him while trying desperately not to yell at my hubby and upset the babies even more.

Most of the time he's a really laid back guy. Evidently, poop and blood are his kryptonite.

He's one of the handiest hubbies on the world. Need recessed lighting installed? How about hardwood floors? Sheetrock? He's the guy. He really can do anything except walk through a room without hitting a toy.

He. Never. Looks. Down.

We are 13 months into this parenting thing. He has tripped over countless toys. He has fallen down, stubbed his toes, and made things squeak in the dark and yet he has not adjusted his walk.

It's weird. I noticed early on that, while in the house, I had developed a gate that allows me to move forward, without scuffing my feet, by barely lifting my foot off the floor. This way if I do contact something I don't step on it or trip over it, I push it out of the way. Sort of along the same lines as the old trains with the cow catcher on the front.

We have a play-mat that we keep upstairs for the boys. We use the mat more as a home-base for the upstairs toys because we can move it from room to room as needed. At night we usually put it in the hallway out of the line of traffic so we don't trip over it in the dark.

Hubby decided the other night that he would leave it on the floor in the bedroom, precisely placed so as to not trip over it if he had to get one of the kids.

It didn't work.

He tripped.

And tripped.

And tripped.

The mat has these tube things that arch up and connect diagonally at the corners. Once in, it's like trying to get out of a crab trap.

The toys rattled, the one set to come on with motion began to play music and he even stepped on the praying Angel, "Now I lay me down..."

"Shit!"

Snark.

"Shut up," he said with a laugh.