I was worried about my friend Ernie. He wasn’t up on the latest gossip. He never got invited to the right parties. People pretty much ignored his existence.

You guessed it. He didn’t have e-mail. No modem connected him to the outside world. In fact, he didn’t even own a computer.

Imagine my relief when he finally entered the modern age. "Lincoln," he said happily to my answering machine, "I’m now the proud owner of a…uh…PII-333 with 8MB of RAM, 1 Gig hard drive, and 3x CD-ROM. By the way, do you know where I can get a…monitor? I think it’s like a TV set."

I left him a message directing him to Sassy Sal’s Cyber Shop and Salad Bar. It was a week before my answering machine heard from him again. "Lincoln, Ernie. I’m finally online. You can reach me at chump@disconnect.com."

I sent him e-mail suggesting we get together for lunch the following week. Two weeks later, still having not heard from him, I gave him a call.

"Did you get the message I sent you two weeks ago?" I asked.

He puzzled over this for a moment. "Y’know, maybe I’m doing something wrong. Would you mind coming over Sunday afternoon and helping me with my computer?"

This required thinking on my feet. "I’d love to, Ernie, but, um, Sunday’s my day with the Historical Deconstruction Society. We’re re-enacting the Watergate burglary.

"How about afterwards, for dinner? I’ll make my famous Tofu Torquemada."

This was a man who understands me.

I arrived at 5:00 Sunday disguised as G. Gordon Liddy. "Dinner’s in the oven," Ernie said by way of greeting me. "Just leave your crowbar on the couch and let’s take a look at my computer."

He led me into his den, where the computer’s hard drive and fans whirred away. The monitor was blank. "It’ s been like that since Thursday," Ernie explained. "I can’t get it to show me anything."

"Have you tried turning on the monitor?" I asked.

"Should I?"

"Yeah. That big button on the front." I pushed the button.

Ernie picked up a pad of paper and a pencil. "Press big button to turn on monitor," he said as he wrote. He glanced up at the screen. "There’s still nothing there."

"You have to wait a few seconds while it warms up," I explained.

"Wait a few seconds," he mumbled as he wrote.

Sure enough, the Windows 95 desktop was soon visible. "What do you want to learn next?" I asked.

"I want to check my e-mail. And maybe send some."

I motioned to the chair in front of the computer. "Have a seat."

He jotted something down on his notepad and sat down. "Now," I explained slowly, "click the Start button."

Ernie froze. "The what?"

"The Start button. That button in the bottom-left corner that says ‘Start.’ Drag the mouse over to it and click it."

Ernie jumped out of the chair and motioned me to sit down. "Maybe you better do it."

I sat down at the computer. It didn’t take me long to find and launch Outlook Express. "Is this what you’re using for e-mail?"

He studied the screen, then smiled. "I remember that. The man who set me up told me to use that to check my e-mail." He jotted down another note.

Before I could answer his voice took a disappointed turn. "It’s empty! I’ve had e-mail for almost three weeks, and no one’s sent me any mail. Why’s that? I called everyone I knew and told them my e-mail address."

"Have you clicked the Send and Receive button?" I asked.

"The what?"

"The Send and Receive button. That’s what you click when you want to send and receive mail."

"Boy," he complained as he wrote all this down, "how do they ever expect us to figure that stuff out."

I clicked the button and the usual dialog box appeared. "My password is password," he told me. I entered it and the modem came alive. "Type in password," he mumbled as he wrote. We sat and waited while Windows made the connection and the inbox filled with 638 messages, most of them promising easy money or sexual gratification.

"I’m popular!" he cried with joy. "Now, how do I read them?"

"Easy. You click on the top message, and it appears in this pane here. You see--‘Earn $5,000 a week for only pennies a second.’ That one you can delete." I pressed the delete key and verified that I really didn’t want to see that message again.

"Wait, wait, wait! I didn’t write down what you did. Can you do that to the next message?" I complied.

"I still didn’t get it. Could you do it again."

But the next message was from his lawyer and marked Urgent. "I think we better keep this one," I suggested.

"You mean I have to make decisions about what messages I keep? This is all too complicated!" he sighed. "Do you think you can stay here so we can go through all of the messages together?"

My stomach was beginning to growl. "How about after dinner?"

"There’s a bit of a problem," he admitted. "I don’t think it’s ready. You see, I checked the casserole just before you arrived, and even though it had been in the oven for over two hours, it wasn’t even warm."

"Did you turn on the oven?" I asked.

A worried look came over his face. He picked up the tablet and wrote something down.

© Copyright 1998 by Lincoln Spector

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