You Cant Teach An Old Dog New Tricks – Or Can You?
I was being made redundant from work and my husband said that I needed to learn to use a computer.
“Not me! I hate computers,” I said. “They terrify me!”
“Won’t you just look at them?” asked a very patient husband.
“No!”
I was taken to the computer store and given a tour around all that was on offer. He chose one – I ignored it. He bought it home – I ignored it. He set it up, and I refused to have anything at all to do with it. He set me in front of this ominous looking thing and told me to just switch it on and play around with it.
It didn’t inspire me that he hadn’t a clue how it worked either, but I persevered and got some interesting results. I’m a trained typist so the keyboard didn’t intimidate me and I realised just how easy it was to create a document in Word.
I found an old manuscript of mine that needed re-writing and realised what a laborious task it would be to do it by hand – voila! the computer would allow me to make light work of such a task. I had found a use for it after all.
The rest is history. I live on the computer and my young son-in-law rings me when he has problems with his processor. I have suddenly become a font of knowledge for all things connected with the computer.
Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks after all!
I was being made redundant from work and my husband said that I needed to learn to use a computer.
“Not me! I hate computers,” I said. “They terrify me!”
“Won’t you just look at them?” asked a very patient husband.
“No!”
I was taken to the computer store and given a tour around all that was on offer. He chose one – I ignored it. He bought it home – I ignored it. He set it up, and I refused to have anything at all to do with it. He set me in front of this ominous looking thing and told me to just switch it on and play around with it.
It didn’t inspire me that he hadn’t a clue how it worked either, but I persevered and got some interesting results. I’m a trained typist so the keyboard didn’t intimidate me and I realised just how easy it was to create a document in Word.
I found an old manuscript of mine that needed re-writing and realised what a laborious task it would be to do it by hand – voila! the computer would allow me to make light work of such a task. I had found a use for it after all.
The rest is history. I live on the computer and my young son-in-law rings me when he has problems with his processor. I have suddenly become a font of knowledge for all things connected with the computer.
Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks after all!
This article originally appeared at The Long and the Short of It site in July 2008.
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