Copy and Paste

My sister Treebee is not what one would call computer literate….at all.

This realization came as quite a surprise to me, as she grew up with the internets. Me? Not so much….I remember playing Oregon Trail on the old skool DOS, wasn’t even our DOS, it was our neighbors, I’d trek across the street and spend hours in their basement playing that game. This was probably my first clue how addicted I would soon become to playing video games.
It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that we even had computers with the internets on them, and hardly anyone had internet then, specially in my little scanty of a town. The first time I got on the internets was when a few friends and I were over at the Heitman’s house, they had the internets because they were rich, rich at least by our standards, a product of the Kool-Aid fortune. One would think with our first web surfing experience we would do something productive with our search…but no, we went to chat rooms. I was both fascinated and disgusted with what we found there, I was definitely too young to be chatting.

This digression has a point, it really does, what I’m trying to convey is that most of my formative years were spent internetless, while Treebee had access to all this throughout most of her high school experience. We both went to college, where the only time I spent on the ol computer was writing papers, or doing research for some project, as I’m sure the same was true for her. However, she has probably always had a computer in her home, she has had some of the same access to learn as I, and yet she still didn’t know how to copy and paste and switch from one program to another without closing out the first program to go to the next program and back again.

I got to witness this lack of knowledge first hand when I recently tried to help her with one of her speeches. This wife, mother of three and who happens to work full-time as a LPN (licensed practical nurse) is going back to school to become a full fledged RN (registered nurse). So she is going to send me her speech so that I can take a look at what she’s got so far and help her with some of her research, and so that I don’t repeat what she’s already done.

First she tries to send it to me as an attachment, but I have a Mac at home and I can’t open up her Works Doc., so I tell her, “Just copy and paste it into the body of the email and send it to me that way.”

“What?”

“Just…copy…and…paste…it…into…” I start to say before she interrupts me.

“I heard what you said, how do you do that?” Oh boy, here we go.

So I explain to her, “Ok, go to your speech document…”

“Wait how do I go back to it?”

“Um Treebee, go to your little “start” button at the bottom of the screen and go to your Works program and open it up like you normally do, or go to ‘recent documents’ either way should work,” I explain.

“Ok, but what about my email do I need to close it out?”

“No don’t close it out, just open your speech.”

“Ok, now what?”

I say “Push ‘ctrl’ A and then right click on your mouse and go to copy.”

“Ok?”

“Now go back to your email…”

“How do I get back to my email?”

Ugh...“At the bottom of your computer screen you’ll have some rectangle boxes one of them should be your email unless you closed it out.”

“Oh I see it,” she says. I decide not to take anything for granted at this point, seeing how she has no idear what she is doing...

“Ok now in your email compose a new message, put my email address in the ‘To’ and then go down to where you would normally write a message and right click and paste….and um Treebee…how is it you know nothing about computers? You grew up with this crap…”

“Ya, well I’m sorry, Lynnette," She says with that exageration on the 'Lynnette' so I know she's pissed. "I don’t sit in front of a computer all day like some people I know".

Hmmm point taken….she got an A on her speech.