My mother does gmail
Friday, July 28th, 2006
Los Angeles, California. I’m out visiting my 91 year old Mac Geek mother again and one of our “projects” for this visit was to fix her email once and for all. She’s had a pop account with verizon for years but it’s been giving her problems and it’s hard for me to support from a distance. My friend David and I came up with the idea of gmail for her. I can help her from a distance and even log into her account from my computer to fix things when she gets into trouble.
The only hitch was, her old iBook running Mac OS X “kitten” (or so it seemed) with a very early version of safari, could not handle all the ajax and other modern web technologies that gmail uses. So, we “trickled down” my PowerBook to her and I got me a 15″ MacBook Pro. When we walked into the local Apple Store with her wearing that shirt heads turned.
After the incredibly simple task of migrating my stuff from the G4 onto the MBP (Apple makes this incredibly easy), then making her user account on the G4, then migrating her small bit of stuff onto the G4 from her iBook, then importing her email addresses into gmail’s contact list, we were ready to start teaching.
We both dreaded this moment and I decided to see if my camera would record the smoke that might be coming out of her ears as her gears ground to a halt. No such luck.
It went surprisingly well and she made a new group to send her jokes around (don’t ask) and sent a group email announcing her new email address.
In all seriousness, web-based email is just the ticket for people like my mother in that it’s easy to support from a distance. Gmail has a very clean and uncluttered UI and so far, seems to be working for her.
You go mom!
That’s the best excuse to upgrade, Richard. You couldn’t wait, could you? :)
Two birds, one stone :)
Mayank: works for me! Actually, I wanted to wait and was all set to buy her an iMac but she saw it and said she wanted something smaller like mine. So, I told her she could have mine but she had to decide right then and there so I could get a new one. Then I had to make the 15/17 choice which in the end was pretty easy: the 17 just seems too big and awkward to me. So, here I am with essentially the same machine except with Intel inside. Oh, front row, remote, camera, etc. I’m going to buy some more memory for it in the next few days and put it in myself (it has 1 gig). It’s a great machine but I’d have waited for the next version. So, maybe we’ll be trickling this one down to Anne when the time comes… who knows?
You are a good son.
Navin: debatable but she is up on gmail. Thanks.