Crispy

My parents and electronic equipment do not get along. It’s a generational thing, my parents are not stupid just not technologically savvy. Nor do they care to be, they claim that is one of many reasons they produced children.

For the longest time after receiving a state of the art answering machine for Christmas one year, the outgoing message was “the button is flashing but nothing is happening, maybe we should just wait for Wicked to drop by and we can….beep.” On the plus side, the telemarketers didn’t leave messages for a while.

My dad has a computer and until last year he had a dial up connection. We and he figured why waste the money if he wasn’t going to play with the computer. He gradually increased his surfing abilities and last year we got him a years DSL connection and the largest and most affordable monitor. Dad has set the font of his computer to the largest type possible and the standard monitor could not handle the display. Whatever makes him happy, always our motto.

Yesterday I got a call from my B-I-L. He asked me if I had heard from my dad and his tone was weird. My thoughts immediately jumped towards illness or injury and I replied that I hadn’t. BIL took a deep breath, my heart stopped, and he said I think Dad has killed the computer. OH MY GOD. Stop the presses. While I was trying to get my heart rate back to normal speed, BIL gave me the strange details.

To make a long story short, the power source has fried the CPU. BIL has taken it upon himself to do the research to get dad a new computer for Christmas. Sounds good to me, I had purchased the last one. Hopefully the crispy critter did not also kill the monitor.

Note to self, remind BIL to deliver any news about my parents in a less dramatic way. Another note to self, chill out!