Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

“oobleckin’ frizzin-fit. drool.”

Monday, Oct. 6, 2008
7:49 p.m.
My husband is a very intelligent man. He has a doctorate and he teaches upper-level university courses and he is admired and lauded in many circles for his accomplishments. He teaches a course on computers and music and you would think that he is pretty good in that area himself. Well, at that which he teaches, he is very good. He knows the history of electronic music inside-out, he can compose in that medium, and has taught himself how to use many computer programs in order to teach them to his students so they can then use them for composition. That requires a certain amount of smarts, no?

However, when it comes to the kinds of things that I take for granted, that school children count as mundane, he is totally stymied. I was ready to just throw my hands in the air and leave him in his own stew earlier. Oh, wait, I did exactly that. Sorry. Forgot.

He is interested in buying a second amp for his guitar, one that is lighter, with tubes, and he found what he was looking for on ebay. Good old ebay. In the long-distant past, he made an account with that organization but had since forgotten what it was. So, with me coaching him on password and account name retrieval, he went to the page they directed him to, and typed in his email address. Eventually, he received a message that he should click on a link and then answer the security question posed.

The security question was: What is the name of god? This sounds like something he would have made up himself. I mean, this is not a standard security question. He looked at me and asked, “What is the answer?” and I responded, “How should I know? It’s your security question, not mine!” Needless to say, he could not remember the answer. He could not make a new ebay account because he already has one listed under that email address.

The obvious solution is to make a new account with a different email address. He happens to have a gmail account which I more or less forced him to create. He could barely remember the name on it. He definitely didn’t remember his password.

As a brief aside, when he started making up internet accounts for himself, he would make a different password for each one because he was terrified that he would get hacked. Okay, that’s fine, but you have to keep track of these different passwords. He didn’t. End of aside.

So he went about trying to retrieve his gmail password by answering the security question: What was your first telephone number? Every answer he gave was wrong. Was he supposed to leave spaces? Put in hyphens? Use parentheses? Wrong! Then I see a link at the bottom of the screen: Click here to reset password using secondary email address. So he did that.

At that point I gave up and came upstairs where I can tool around on my own computer because I know all my passwords and user names. I started chatting with a friend or two on gmail (Ahah! You know what’s coming, right?) and lo! his name appeared on my buddy list. So I did what anyone would do in this case: I messaged him. He totally freaked out. Here is our conversation:

Me: You signed in. Hurrah!
Now, the question is, will you see this in the lower right-hand of your screen and actually respond.

Hubby: what the hell is going on here? How did you get onto my computer? How did you know that I signed in? Huh? HUH???

Me: hahaha
I happen to be signed into gtalk, or google talk, or whatever the program is called. When you signed on, because you are one of my contacts, your name lit up on a list, so I double clicked it and there you are.
See? Or rather, there I am.

Hubby: Arghh!! There's no escape?

Me: hahaha
I can just close this window and ignore you. Would you prefer that?

Hubby: stop the infernal hahaha! I'm going insane!!! boink. boink. boinkbonk....

Me: Did you make a new ebay account with a password and security question you’ll remember?

Hubby: whaa? oobleckin' frizzin-fit. drool.

Me: You’re funny.


And that is today’s entry.



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