patndoris TechnoGeek

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Sure, like any good teenager he can IM with the best of them. Often he has 3 or 4 IM's going while gaming online in one of those fantasy real time things I believe is called Runescape....or so it says on my credit card bill (since he managed to convince me to pay $5 per month for all those so called special benefits he gets by being a member.) And seemingly he never misses a beat in any of it. But tell him to empty a recycle bin? "How do I do that?" Start a spyware scan running and it's "Mom, can I get on the computer while it's doing THAT?" And goodness me! If anything "unexpected" happens on the PC it's "Mom!!! Something's wrong with the computer!!" When we got the Vista PC I told him to go to the Start button and increduluously heard "Where's the Start button??"

Recently, he developed the need to obtain a years old game called Monster Truck Madness 2. While he was quite capable of installing it, he kept insisting there was an update he didn't have. I Googled and found only 1 - a patch - which I downloaded, only to be promptly informed "It didn't DO anything." I assured him it did SOMETHING just maybe not what he wanted...but I was repeatedly advised it had done nothing. I finally gave up (in exasperation) trying to explain something had been updated (undoubtedly) even though I couldn't tell him precisely what it was, and simply agreed - he must know better than me and yes, NOTHING was updated by it.

Then we discovered (after his repeated and incessantly annoying insistence his friend has trucks and tracks he doesn't...but when I asked where they got them was told his friend's brother got them for him and he's over in Iraq) you can download and install those others have designed. It simply involved downloading a .zip file, extracting it to the game folder, and a quick edit (adding 1 line and changing another) to the .ini file. When he asked for more trucks I cringed....I didn't want to spend MY evening doing it. He insisted if I showed him how...he could do it. I shrunk back in horror!! Surely something was going to get messed up beyond belief that I'd be expected to miraculously fix with a single mouse click. But, in the pursuit of inspiring some level of techno-geekiness, I forged ahead.

He flat out refused to take notes, but did pay what resembled a bit of attention (as much as any teenager can manage to pay to a parental unit) to what I did, promptly running off with the XP laptop to try out the new download. A few minutes later he asked me to watch him do it. With only slight hesitation and prompting he managed it! And the next? All on his own!! It was going great...my son had edited his very first .ini! I was SO proud!! He made one error at some point, but after a brief tutorial on how to open and explore for the file, he corrected it with little trouble.

Ahhhh...there's hope for him yet! If and when I can EVER get him to understand "page not found" or "cannot connect to this site" is not something I cannot fix, or that websites have trouble, servers go down, and sometimes updates to websites prohibit you from accessing them - all will be right with the world. (But alas, it's a conversation we have every other day...he simply can't seem to grasp something as awesomely powerful as "the internet" has problems too sometimes.)

He's expressed interest in learning to design his own trucks and tracks, but has yet to browse thru the needed tutorials....I'm hopeful he'll pursue it one day soon and eventually graduate to a full blown techno-geek. For now, I suppose I'll have to settle for commenting on what a pair we make when we both sit, laptops in lap, doing our own thing.