Cheaper Than a Real Repair-Man...

Either out of love or something resembling guilt, I usually visit my 'ol grandmother once a month on a Saturday to help her out with her technical woes i.e. cable TV problems, Internet, etc.. There was one visit that seemed to domino out-of-control that happened a few months back.

First she told me that there was something wrong with her VCR. This ended up being a very straight-forward problem with what I thought would be a simple explanation:

"See, what you did was press the wrong button on the wrong remote. You want to use the VCR remote first. If you change the channel from 3 to L1, you can then get the signal to the DVD player, and you can watch DVDs. Okay? So don't touch that remote (the DVD player's) until you use the VCR Remote, change it to L1 and you should be all set? Got it?"

She smiles and replies, "Okay."

But I know things aren't okay yet.

After a brief pause, she goes, "Now, can you explain that one more time?"

This is hard enough doing this in English, but to translate all these instructions to Cantonese and demonstrate one button at a time on every single remote is downright "punji-stick into the fingernails" painful.

But I love her, and calmly keep my cool while repeating the steps about 5 more times. Oh, why not just get a switcher box for her, you may ask? Uh, yeah - had a tough time getting her to work with that before, so that option was exhausted eons ago.

Next up was her connection to the Internet. She kind of sprung this one on me by surprise, but hey, what's life without a bit of the unexpected? She still uses dial-up, and for some reason, her connection just couldn't be completed. After ruling out line failure, cable failure, and performing a voo-doo cleansing ceremony on the PC Box, I was still nowhere near a solution.

An hour later, it hit me - her program was requiring an area code number to be inputted first in order for the dial connection to be correct. LA is famous for expanding area codes all the time, and I thought the computer compensated for it, but it didn't. So a few magic keystrokes later, and voila! She was surfing the net at a lightning fast 48k! Woo-Hoo!

After a successful visit whereby all her woes are solved, she usually pays me with freshly cut fruit to eat. That day it was Asian pears. All and all, it was totally worth it... ;)