(note: I wrote these next few entries during the weekend while my blog was down)
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My unofficial goal for this weekend was to spend as many daylight hours outside as possible.
I did have some work to do however, so I couldn’t just sit and read/craft in the park all day long. So the result was that I ended up spending a lot of time at coffee shops’ patios with my laptop.
I don’t usually consider sitting on a patio with my laptop. I mean, people are walking by all the time… what stops one from grabbing my laptop and sprinting down the street?
The computer isn’t tied to anything, and a metal fence separates the patio from the sidewalk, so if someone grabbed my laptop they could make a clean getaway while I struggle to get out of the patio area.
Anyways, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit indoors, so I set my cautions aside and enjoyed the sunshine with my laptop.
Nothing eventful happened during my stint on the Starbucks patio, so on Sunday I decided to visit the Second Cup patio by Davisville Station (have I mentioned the FREE WIRELESS at Davisville?).
I settled in fairly quickly and soon after I sat down, an elderly man sat down at the table beside mine and starting smoking a cigarette while coughing up a lung.
I was copying pictures from my camera while a steady stream of people walked down the street.
“Hi.”
A different elderly man was standing infront of me – let’s call him Bill.
Bill was standing outside of the patio area, and had started talking to me.
I took my earbuds out of my ears.
Bill: “– that I use. Is that a good computer?”
me: ‘yeah, it’s alright’
Bill: “what kind is it? Aker?”
me: “Acer, yup it-“
Bill: “I have a Macintosh. I’ve had it for a long time. It’s old but it still works. All that PC stuff goes right over my head.”
So we have a discussion about computers. Turns out Bill is 85 years old, and is going to buy a used Mac for $900 from some guy who sells computers. The $900 includes installation in Bill’s home, and the guy will show Bill how to use the applications he needs.
I told Bill that that sounds reasonable. (I feel like a used Mac would be around $700, and then the hours of installation and teaching would be another $200).
Eventually, the conversation ends:
“Thank you, you’ve made my day!”
We shake hands, and Bill walks off.
How cute was that!
30 seconds later:
“You’re popular! I was going to ask you a question too!”
That was the guy sitting at the table next to me – let’s call him Gary.
Gary is a retired pastor who got a computer degree in 1991. He used to do programming with DOS, but 6 months after he graduated, Microsoft launched Windows and his degree became obsolete. (brutal!)
So we reminisced about the old computers – DOS, Dot-matrix printers with the paper with the holes along the sides and pages that you had to rip apart. (those were the days!)
Turns out that Gary has a 7 year old daughter who wanted a computer and Gary ended up getting a new Dell computer (for free!), and he was asking me how to use it to send pictures to people.
He told me that he had a disk from Loblaws that has pictures on it, so we discussed sending the pictures via email.
He wondered about how my computer didn’t have any wires coming from it, and I described the internal battery and how his laptop has one as well. I showed him where the battery was on my computer and I think I blew his mind.
He asked me about connecting to the internet – someone had told him that sometimes there’s a password for wireless internet – and I explained password-protected networks. He asked how he would access them and I told him he would have to go into the Control Panel – he laughed.
In the end, we established that he had to turn the computer on to do anything. We were joking of course, but he took this away as one of the things that he got from the conversation.
It was cute.
I think I’m going to get a latte.
