"My David came to visit me and he brought me a present," said Aunt Dee.

"How nice!" I enthused.

"Not nice," she responded. "It's a computer."

"But you've been interested in computers," I said. "Now you can send e-mail, and play games, and find all kinds of information."

"First of all, why do I need e-mail?" she demanded. "What's wrong with the telephone, where I can talk back and forth to anyone I want? What's wrong with regular mail, that gets there the next day? With e-mail you never know when the person you're sending it to gets it."

I didn't know how to answer that, and she went on, "And I don't like to play games with myself and a machine. The machine doesn't care who wins! And if I need information I can call the library. True, it's not up in the middle of the night, but neither am I. But the main thing is, I don't know how to use it! David showed me how to turn it on, and then he said, 'It's user friendly.' With such friends why do I need enemies? It's different from the one in the library."

"Didn't it come with a book that tells you how to use the computer?" I asked.

"I got 10 books: a warranty book, and a book of telephone numbers of people I don't know, and a book that tells me how to stay safe, and a book of short cuts -- I don't know any long cuts! -- and a user's guide in four languages, but no English. And none of them tells me which of the hundred little pictures on the screen to put the mouse on."

"The keys are marked. Doesn't that help?" I asked.

"They're marked wrong! There's one named 'Enter' that doesn't enter anything. All it does is move down. There's CTRL that has nothing to do with central, and a bunch of numbers with F in front of them. Why do I need two sets of numbers? And there's a Page Up, and a Page Down, and on the right side of the keyboard there's a bunch of those same numbers, only upside down. I tried writing a letter on the computer and after the first paragraph it disappeared. I pushed all the numbers, but I could never get it back."

"Maybe you should try another computer course," I suggested.

"It will just be another one like the one at the library, only I have even more questions now. I guess I'll have to wait for David to visit again. Maybe I can talk him into taking the computer back and getting me a new typewriter. The typewriter never lost anything I wrote on it," she said.