Mom, Me and a Matching PC
For months, my mother had been talking about getting her own computer. Perhaps the interest grew from a sense of generational curiosity, or a more banal instinct to communicate by e-mail with two daughters living on the East Coast. Or maybe there was a stab of competitiveness with my father, who had mastered the computer years before and seemed baffled that his wife did not want to share his Dell.
For whatever reasons, I found myself taking her to a Circuit City in Culver City to inspect the accouterments of the computer era.
At 80, my mother is the image of manners. She has always valued rectitude--along with biographies, Nobel laureates and Neiman Marcus--and brought this sense of style and standards to her search for a computer.
I would not say that our salesman was exactly on her wavelength, but he tried.
She wanted to touch the keys on the laptops, to see whether they were a good fit for her fingers. The salesman explained that the laptops were, for security reasons, locked in place, far above her head. He also tried to explain why a desktop PC was a better buy. She smiled, and asked whether she could touch the laptops. He found the key. She pronounced the laptop hard to manipulate.
My mother is a black belt in shopping, with a fabulous eye for markdowns of the finest goods. Ordinarily, the argument that the PC is a better value would have appealed to her straightaway. But--attention computer designers--the laptop seemed less intimidating to her, with fewer parts and wires, requiring less space and maintenance. I think some part of her heart broke when she decided against the laptop--so functional, so slim, so unobtrusive.
So we moved on to the desktops, staring at us like a row of microwave ovens on sale at Sears. I tried not to influence her choices. It was her money, her computer, her brave new adventure.
But when I saw the Hewlett-Packard flat-screen monitor, I confess that I became a shameless advocate. “This is the newest thing,” I offered. “It will make Dad so jealous.”
And, most beguiling of all: “This way you can help those two lady executives at Hewlett-Packard.”
The problem in prevailing on the flat screen was the price. My mother did not want to spend a lot of money on something she knew she might abandon quickly. And my father had not helped her confidence level any that morning when he presented her with her Mother’s Day present: a Toys R Us computer for children 6 years and older that none of us could figure out.
My father found this failure quite amusing. My mother did not.
The salesman responded to this concern by suggesting that we pair the HP monitor with a Compaq keyboard and computer. Perhaps this is when she noticed that he was sporting uneven silver earrings in his right lobe.
My mother gave him her sincerest look and said, “But they don’t match.”
I thought our salesman looked a little disgusted then, but he tried to hide it. The place was not crowded.
Still working on the problem, he next visited us with a flood of rebate offers that had the effect of making it dizzyingly difficult to calculate the costs of our purchase. Late in the game, I realized that if we bought her a very slow HP computer, we could meet her budget and still get the flat screen. Plus, everything would match.
Never one for math, I counted one rebate twice, for the ultimate betrayal of my mother. But the salesman did not correct me. He smelled a sale.
Imagine his surprise when I explained that no major decision could be made without a break for coffee--time to savor the details, weigh the options, consider the pitfalls--all within the warm embrace of a Starbucks mocha latte and crumb cake. He looked as if he was sure he would never see us again.
But return we did.
The salesman was so happy to see us he started offering a lot of things we didn’t want--like a service contract. He sold my mother a really juvenile mouse pad depicting four cocker spaniel puppies. I have since replaced it with a Persian rug mouse pad of which my mother said, “Why, it matches the one in the living room.”
There were issues about the appropriate desk. Issues about hooking the machine up to the right phone line. And then finally, the machine was in, the system was up and my mother was part of cyberspace.
I can’t say she’s a regular correspondent. She never did learn to type in school, so she is forced to hunt and peck on the keyboard.
She has some difficulty with her eyes, so I bumped her to 14-point type, with the result that her messages look like direct edicts from God.
Owning a computer has hardly made her a member of the modern set, feeling as she does that automated teller machines are inherently untrustworthy.
But my mother is online, and she is a marvel to her friends and to me.
To see my mother’s little face light up at conquering this new world, to see her pride at the achievement of learning something new, something technical, something post-generational, is worth even my father’s derisive insistence that he still doesn’t know why she couldn’t have used his Dell.
And best of all, she signs her messages: “Your Dot Com Mom.”
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Johanna Neuman is an editor in The Times’ Washington bureau.
