Fresh

When I was down in Miami for a recent conference, I had the good fortune of staying a few extra days to visit my grandparents in Southern Florida. Despite being in their late eighties, my grandparents are full of life and still have their wits about them. And, after being married for almost 65 years, they’re still completely in love. They’re incessant bickering over the years is legendary, and is one of the most hilarious things to experience.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that my grandma pretty much runs the show. Upon my arrival I usually have a small list of chores to help them out with. On the list this year were the usual suspects: dusting light bulbs on the ladder, lifting heavy stuff, a lot of Windexing…and replace the computer!

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I am the bridge between two very different users of technology – my mom and my daughter. The thing they have most in common is that everything in this digital world is new to them. My mom has the advantage of living through inventions such as a car phone and answering machine and just about everything is new to my 2 year old daughter. My job is to help them navigate through this fast paced, hands free, Google alert world.

I am about to make a visit home and my mom wants a new phone. Frankly, she barely uses her existing phone but she wants to start communicating with my younger siblings the only way they know how – via text. I don’t want to send her into the phone store alone because she will walk away more confused then when she walked in. Just throw out a few buzzwords like tweet and app and she’ll be halfway to the car.

Nothing “makes sense” to her and rightly so. After doing a few trainings on Windows, how to double click the mouse and avoiding the pop up ad I have come to see that not everything is as easy-to-use as it claims. With her I like to eliminate the clutter and focus on just a couple features that will truly make her life easier and more fun.

Making my daughter’s life more fun is the easy part. She has a blast copying everything we do and part of that entails trailing us around with her fake phone and pushing buttons, or as she calls them “butts”. The amazing thing is when she has my touchscreen phone in her hands she already knows how to navigate through the icons and slide the windows up and down. She can pull up the pictures and scroll through them by herself. Very impressive and a thumbs up to user interface designers. It seems we are finally at a point where working these gadgets is intuitive. At least for a toddler!

While I’m not actively pushing digital devices and Internet browsing upon her, we’re still happily watching the old standby television, I do need to be aware of what is happening as one day she will be showing me what to do.

Keeping  up with new inventions is top of mind. So far so good as I work in the interactive field but there will be one day when she is taking me to some store to decode and translate what to do and what to get as if I don’t speak the language. If the world seems fast paced today, I don’t know what it will be like tomorrow… but I am sure it will hit me over the head in the form of an eye rolling teenager.

For now, I am good to go, channeling my efforts as a happy medium minding the generational gap. I’m confident I can find my mom the right phone (so there won’t be a need for the technical support package) and keep the electronic toys at bay for my daughter so we can control the pace… for now.

Perhaps I should just send the two of them out for a day of shopping and stay home with a coffee and that large, smudgy black and white package that my parents call the newspaper.

My parents have a love affair with technology.

Let’s take my dad, for example. He’s in his sixties and super tech-savvy when it comes to computers, software, and general computer hardware. If the computer isn’t working, he’ll find a way to troubleshoot it, reboot it, reinstall something, call Apple Support, or whatever it takes to get it up and running again. He subscribes to MacWorld magazine, loves to learn new tips and tricks, and helps his co-workers when their computers begin dying. He does not work in the technology field; he just has a passion to learn new things, think analytically, and solve problems.

My mom is pretty savvy when it comes to using technology to connect with people. She was one of the first people I knew (outside of eROI, that is) to create a Facebook profile and use it to stay in touch with friends and family from across the country. She’s connected to some of my friends (that’s an entirely different story and post) and will quite often know about what’s going on with them before I do! Crazy, but true.

I would imagine that my parents are pretty similar to a lot of other folks from their generation. They love technology – to a certain extent – but shy away from things that they either deem irrelevant to them or that are daunting to learn. My folks tend to have a hunger to learn and try new things, so they adapt really well to new technology.

These two clips below – the first paying homage to the fathers and the second to the mothers – were funny representations of parents trying to adopt new technology, and using their son, Darren, as their teacher. They come from a video series on Current, called SuperNews!, and I found them particularly great because they poke fun at what I’m sure many of us twenty- and thirty-somethings have experienced with our own parents.

I’m curious about those real-life technology scenarios that you’ve experienced. Anything similar to these videos? Any funny Mom and Dad situations? Please share and commiserate!

In thinking about what key pieces of technology make up a great website, I went to my teammates to collaborate. When the team at eROI was asked “What piece of technology is strongly underutilized?”, I anticipated people to almost exclusively mention website-related technology. This is eROI – this is what we do; that seems like a logical assumption, right?

Boy, was I wrong. Although several website-related references were mentioned, it appears as if other pieces of technology are underutilized more and noticed more poignantly. These non-website items could use an upgrade according to my eROI cohorts. And, since random bits of fun are a cultural staple around here, I threw in a few other questions into the mix to keep us on our toes.

I’m curious to see what your take is on these three questions. How would you respond?

1. What is the most underutilized piece of technology out there?
2. If you have a half-hour to kill in between meetings, what do you do?
3. What’s your favorite cocktail to make at home?