I will be scolded for this entry.

I'm teaching my Mom how to use iTunes. I'm mainly doing this so that she can listen to all the podcasts I love and get her back to listening to NPR. (One of my favorite memories growing up was listening to All Things Considered on the kitchen radio while my Mom made salmon latkes or shepherd's pie or spaghetti and meatballs.) Steve Jobs and the rest of the people at Apple have done a very good job of keeping things simple and easy for their product users. But apparently, not easy enough for a 50-something woman who refuses to get an actual pet but fills her South Beach condo with metal, plastic, and stuffed animals to which her husband assigns names like Rusty (a metal dog), Pelly (a stuffed pelican), or Doug (a ceramic fish..."doug" is the phoenetic way of saying "fish" in Hebrew).

We're talking on the phone while I'm at work the other day....I mean.....we're talking on the phone the other day after I spent a long, grueling day filling out spreadsheets and TPS Reports....and I'm walking her through the steps of downloading iTunes, populating her music library, showing her how to log on to the iTunes Store, and assuring her that just because she has downloaded iTunes that her songs will NOT disappear from her WinAmp. Progress is being made. All her songs are now in her iTunes music library (though she's unsure of what some of them are and is hands down CONVINCED that Apple has furtively downloaded Middle Eastern sounding artists onto her computer without her knowledge) and I've successfully instructed her how to find podcasts online. But when I tell her to download NPR's weekly hilarious quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," she says "No. It's too liberal." Something tells me she won't be subscribing to Obama's speeches podcast..... And yet, I somehow managed to coerce her into downloading The Onion's video podcast. Weird.

I tease my Mom about her (lack of) tech savviness, but she's actually pretty good about picking stuff up. She even emailed me that night to tell me that she really likes the streaming radio on iTunes, which I didn't even tell her about. Who knows if she'll continue to use iTunes (I will have to secretly uninstall WinAmp the next time I'm in Miami) or, gasp, attempt to put the new podcasts on her mp3 player like I told her to, but I'm glad she's at least open to trying something new. My father, however, is a different story. There is no hope for him. How can there be when his biggest computer accomplishment, according to my mother, is that "he Googles things now." I've also heard that 90% of his emails disappear. He'll be typing and then, from the other room, my Mom will hear "Janet! It disappeared again!"

I feel like there's a huge untapped market for technology targeted towards old people. (I'm not saying you're old, Mom.) But it can't require more than three mouse clicks. And it can't take longer than 10 seconds to boot up. And it can't ever break. Or run out of batteries. Or cuss. Or show nudity. Or support Democrats.