'Try My Product'

Matt and I take daily medications for thyroid and high blood pressure. Unfortunately for Matt, he never had high blood pressure until he met me, but that's another story. Since we don't have prescription insurance, I thought it would be a good idea to go online and see if I could purchase them cheaper.

After two days of surfing the 'net, I found a site where the prices were unbelievably low. I was thrilled that my tenacity seemed to be paying off. I plugged in the names of the medicine and the dosage, and began the ordering process, complete with credit card information. Then the re-cap came up. I hadn't ordered anything but a year-long “membership” to a Mexican pharmacy.

I'm fairly sure that the pharmacy has my photo up on their wall, complete with a large inscription, “Mujer tonta, el Internet es para ninos” (silly woman, the Internet's for kids).

Swell, now I'm an international idiot. I had to call Matt in on this one.

Matt's normally an easygoing guy, not much bothers him. But I don't think I've ever seen the veins on his forehead bulge like that in our 23 years of marriage. On a purely educational bright side, should you ever hyper-ventilate around me, I'm fairly equipped to handle the situation. Still, it took him over a month to un-do what I'd done in less than five minutes. He wasn't amused when I said that every boy needs a hobby.

Still, I'm trying to learn. It's not fun being the butt of familial jokes. Whether or not  the learning sticks is a whole other story.

You can imagine my happy surprise when shopping at a second-hand store, I came upon a stack of DVDs from the “Video Professor” (most famous for his infomercial where he says “Try my Product”). On the covers of the discs was his smiling face, and he promised that he could take me from a novice to a professional on just about anything computer-related. I bought them all.

When I got them home, Matt actually complimented me. Both he and the kids thought it was encouraging that I had taken the initiative to learn at least a modicum of computer technology.

I was anxious to soak up every morsel of the Video Professor's wisdom as I could. I even got up early the next morning to begin my enlightenment process. I grabbed the first DVD, and eagerly approached the television. I just knew I was going to be programming computers in a week.

Problem was, with four different remotes, I couldn't figure out which one turned the DVD player on. After trying, unsuccessfully, to find the correct remote for the DVD, I called Boy. He took the DVD, looked it over and walked from the television set to my laptop and popped a button. Out came what looked like a miniature CD player; he inserted the disk.

I had no idea my computer had that - I was learning already! Turns out, the disks weren't meant for television viewing as the next thing I knew, the Professor was smiling at me from my computer.

Boy looked at me and said, “Good luck, mom. You're going to need it.” In my mind, all I could think of was how proud I was going to be when I was designing Web sites and zipping around the Internet like a pro.

It's a good thing I'm an optimist.

I decided that my first lesson was going to be, “Learn the Internet.” After the prescription debacle, I figured that would probably be a good place to start.

About five minutes into the presentation, I started getting bored. I looked at my watch and noticed that it was almost 4 p.m. I should be thinking about getting dinner ready.

At about 4:03, I began to wonder if I'd taken anything out of the freezer. A few minutes later, I thought I'd better check to be sure there was something to cook. While I was in the kitchen, I figured I'd better put some baked potatoes in. Then I remembered that I didn't have any fresh vegetables, so I took another dive into the freezer.

When I got back, the Professor was saying “so now you know the danger signs.” Wait, what? What are the danger signs? Oh, no, I'd missed something vitally important. I may not be technologically inclined, but my ears perk right up when the word danger is thrown around.

Desperately, I tried to rewind. Of course, I couldn't figure out how. When you think about it, if I had no idea I had a CD disky thingy in my computer, I pretty much had a zero chance of knowing how to rewind it.

I hung my head and headed back to the kitchen to fix dinner and quickly forgot all about Internet danger signs.

The next day, the Professor was going to teach me to navigate my computer's file system. I can't remember why he said it was important, but he seemed to think that it was. I got a pen and a piece of paper to take notes.

As he droned on, I began to doodle. Then, while I had the paper and pen, I thought I should take a moment and jot down my “to do” and grocery list. Before I knew it, the Professor was complimenting me on keeping up with him, and boy, wasn't I glad I can navigate my file system? I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I just nodded in agreement. Since I'd taken the time to write my grocery list, I figured it would be a good time to go out and get them.

The next day, I was going to learn about databases. As I watched, though, I noticed that there was a little bit of dust on the desk and there was a smear on my monitor. How could I become a computer master when I could barely see the screen? I spent the next half hour dusting, and then realized that I should probably do some other chores.

The next morning, at the stroke of 11:30 a.m., I toddled out to find out what nugget of wisdom the Professor was going to bestow upon me. Today's lesson was learning how to write HTML.

He started saying things like, “All lines of code must be put in tags. You have to be sure to open the tag, insert the command, then close the tag.” But what he was calling tags were greater than and less than signs that don't resemble tags at all. I've been shopping for a long time, and I know tags. Those weren't it.

As I tried to soak up the wisdom that was coming from the television, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. There was a pretty red bird on the deck, looking in. I had to go get my camera and take a picture. I mean, how many times does one have a bird on their windowsill trying to watch your computer? Maybe he was interested in learning how to surf the 'net.

He'd probably be better at it.

Finally, I realized that no matter how good the Professor was, I was better – at getting distracted. In fairness to him, he really did break things down and make them easy to understand. But he'd never come up against someone with such a short attention span, or general lack of interest.

On the bright side, my mind isn't cluttered with technological information that I'll never understand or use. I've got room for more important things like what I'm fixing for dinner, planning a get together with my friends, or . . . .

Ooh, look, a rainbow!