After months of procrastination, I finally called my mother’s school district to see if they would accept the donation of her iMac. She doesn’t use the thing, and her frustration with it causes her to get a knot in her stomach every time she sees it, much less turns it on. No one will believe this, but it was her idea to buy the thing in the first place, not mine.
For many years I was a passionate technology missionary, believing that everyone’s life would be enriched by a computer (and in later years, internet access). But I’ve learned that for a substantial portion of the population, a computer will never be anything more than an intrusion into their daily lives.
I still think that’s a shame. But I’ve given up promoting it.
My mother spent $2000 on a piece of crap Gateway and only uses it to play solitaire. A very expensive deck of cards, if you ask me. She bought a scanner along with said computer and has never taken it out of the box.
It pains me to see this total waste of technology, but I guess some people are just not to have computers.
And now she tells me she wants a Palm Pilot. I just cringe.
It can also go the other way. My mother wouldn’t even touch a computer until she went to college where she couldn’t survive without one. Now, I get 600 e-mails from her daily, she gives the parents of her kindergarteners an annotated disc with all their work on it at the end of the year, and she publishes a weekly newsletter for the parents online. Crazyness. I call her when I don’t know what I’m doing now. It’s all about motivation.
So… did the school accept the iDonation?