Kids Can Be Useful

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I think I’m going to make this the banner image on my home page for a while. Maybe I’ll be banned in Mississippi.

You know how you get applications for credit cards in the mail? (It helps a little if you opt out of pre-approved credit offers at 1-888-5-OPT-OUT.) And how all the banks and credit card companies tell you to tear them up if you don’t want them, to prevent someone else from filling them out in your name? Guess what—doesn’t help.

And people think I’m being paranoid because I bought a paper shredder.

I put my little strength training log into an Excel spreadsheet. Just because I’m that much of a geek, or that anal-retentive, or maybe both. I thought it would be kind of cool to have a graph over time of how much weight I’m using.

I didn’t actually know how to make a graph, since I rarely use Excel for anything more than a glorified calculator/list sorter. But that’s what we have kids for, right? My teenage son was quite happy to show me how to make a graph, and all the various options I had. I think he was a little disappointed that all I wanted was a simple line graph.

This isn’t a new phenomenon for me, by the way. As tired as the cliché may be, my kids are much better at gadgetry than I am. They were on a par with me, techie-wise, by the time they were two—my youngest was figuring out how to work the VCR¹ by the age of two. But I knew they had surpassed me when my youngest, at the age of six, told me the purpose of a button on my CD player which I had never figured out. The CD player was older than he was.

I don’t mind being the old fogey who needs help with the new-fangled gizmos. I figure by the time they’re adults they’ll be firmly convinced I can’t do a damn thing for myself, and so I won’t have to. I’ll just sit and do my little cross-stitch projects on the sofa while they wire up my new entertainment system for me, and make awed murmurs like “Thank goodness my children are so good at this. What would I ever do without you?” It’s pretty much what I do already with my spouse.

¹A “VCR” was a device used in ancient times to watch movies at home. Back then movies were on tapes, called “videos,” and the acronym stood for “Video Casette Recorder.” These devices were notoriously difficult for the older generation to control, particularly in regard to setting the clock.