With Father’s Day just a couple of days a way, I thought I’d share a recent story of an interaction between my father and me.
Like most of the parents of “my generation”, my parents have always been a little technologically behind (somewhat paradoxical since they both have worked in tech). I’ve been LOL’ing and IDK-My-BFF-Jill’ing away for about 10 years now (anyone remember AmishY2k?), but my parents have generally avoided things like “instant messaging” and “broadband internet”, sticking to their comfort zone of dial-up, and- more often than not- actual, real live phone calls. From land lines!
However, they did recently make a switch to a low-cost, barely-beating-dialup DSL service. And while home for one of the holidays last year, I created some GMail accounts for them, but only recently have I been able to get them to actually try using them. (My mother, bless her heart, refuses to let go of her Hotmail account because that’s where she gets her forwards from, AND WE CAN’T BE GETTING RID OF THOSE NOW CAN WE?) Slowly but surely, I’ve tried to get them to use their accounts by only emailing them at those addresses (“Why haven’t I called?…Because I emailed…Yeah, CHECK YOUR GMAIL.”), and my father actually seems to be making progress on becoming a full convert.
So it was a late evening a couple of weeks ago that I fired up my own computer and noticed a new green dot next to my Google Talk contacts list. My father was checking his GMail. My gut reaction was to sign off – he surely doesn’t have that many GMail ‘friends’ yet, and I was likely to be the only green dot on his own list. But my father and I had never done the instant messaging thing before, and I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for it yet. Signing off seemed to be an easy way to avoid this uncharted, potentially awkward territory.
But then I thought, “This is nothing but an opportunity to build a new connection with my father. A new way to communicate and stay in touch. Maybe we’ll become even closer, and have fun little shorthand conversations. ‘WAYGM’,'NASCIHSM?’, ‘NASCYMMO’ (When are you getting married?…Not anytime soon, can I have some money?… Not anytime soon, call your mother more often.”).
So I took the first step. And here, for your reading pleasure, is MY FIRST EVER IM CONVERSATION WITH MY FATHER.
me: hey dad
Dad: hi
me: what are you doing
Dad: just checking the email and getting some work done. What are you doing?
me: nothing much, just watched a movie
Dad: How is your 401k doing? have you checked lately?
me: i was looking at the balance earlier today but didn’t look into too much detail
Dad: It should have done good since end of march. I need to go to sleep. I will talk to you some other time. Bye.
Thanks for always looking out for me dad. Happy Father’s Day.
