Modern moment

Who's learning from whom when John Butler logs on with his father?

Who's learning from whom when John Butlerlogs on with his father?

There's nothing like having a loved one on the other side of the world to whet the appetite for e-mail and internet telephony. I am back at my parents' house for a while, and my dad is keen to learn how to e-mail my brother, who lives in Australia. I am optimistic that Dad will learn quickly. He enjoys logic. He worked with numbers for 40 years. He's a sudoku guy. But, though nothing is said, we both know this giant step for mankind will be an even bigger one for the old man.

Class begins after 10 o'clock Mass. He hangs up his cap and we go into the spare room. The computer in the corner seems to know something is up. With a palpable sense of ceremony we plug it in and turn it on. It hums a few notes nervously while I drag the phone cable to the socket in the next room. We sit down.

"What do I do now?"

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"What do you want to do?"

"I want to write a letter, I think."

"Okay. For that you need to find Microsoft Word on the screen."

He cautiously moves the mouse to the icon.

"Is that the fella there?"

"Yes. Click on it."

"Click it once or twice?"

"Double-click it."

Click. Pause. Click. Pause. I look. The Microsoft Word icon is highlighted, but it's asking Dad if he wants to rename it.

"Try again."

"What did I do wrong?"

"Nothing."

Pause.

"That's the kind of thing that'll shag me up if you're not here. I could break the fecking thing."

"You couldn't break it. Believe me."

"I wouldn't count on it."

Click. Click. Nothing. Click. Nothing. Click click click click. Four Word documents cascade down on top of each other. He looks at the screen, alarmed, then at me. I never thought we'd need mouse practice.

These are the early days. After some teething problems with the clicking, and a few more lessons, we are flying: filing, highlighting and pasting. As I expected, he gets the hang of it quickly, but we do get stuck from time to time, and more often than not we get stuck because of me, not him.

More often than not I can't explain why he encounters the problems he does. I know how to perform certain tasks, but I don't know why my way is the way, and not his. I don't know why things are the way they are. I know only that they are. That's not great for a teacher.

Those of us born many years after my dad perform certain tasks without thought. I don't remember learning about mobile phones or remote controls or online cinema tickets, but he does, because he was born many years earlier.

That I just know how to use these things does not make me smarter. In fact, my blithe assumptions about modern life are short-sighted, and his inquiry into the logic of things is smarter. Take the cursor. I don't think I have ever thought about it. It has always been there, blinking. It just is. You type, click somewhere else and it moves there for you. It's the cursor. Or the "ladeen", as he calls it.

"Where's the ladeen?"

I reach over to the screen and point it out, blinking in the bottom right, where we left it.

"There."

He moves the mouse to the cursor and leaves the arrow resting above it for a moment. Then he moves the arrow to where he wants it to be. Then he starts typing, giving his full attention to the keyboard. He powers through a sentence. Then he looks up and notices, with fury, that the letters have put themselves where the ladeen used to be, even though he distinctly remembers moving it to the new place. Why is this? Why must he click to move it? I have no idea.

He's still getting better at using the computer, although sometimes, when he's typing a letter, a bubble appears, saying: "What are you trying to do?" Dad really hates being judged by inanimate objects. But he appreciates all the absurdities of modern life and never stops trying to find out why things are the way they are. He'll take the Luas at 11 o'clock on a Wednesday to buy a bagel or a jacket or a spark plug and return with a comic story too complex for Seinfeld.

He's going to love the internet. Of course his children slag him about all this, and he slags us right back, because he knows we don't mean a word of it. I can send an e-mail, but at my age he had a wife, a daughter, a mortgage, a good job and a car that ran. I have one of them - the one you don't want.

What I know about our relative merits is this: if I were transported back to the Stone Age I could tell them all about a toaster, but I couldn't build one to save my life. I couldn't even make a piece of white sliced bread, and I would die in a boiling pot above a camp fire, surrounded by dancing savages, whereas Dad could probably distract them with a sandwich, then slink away to the time machine. That counts for something. Learning how to work the buttons on the time machine is next week's lesson.