IPOD Hell revisited

For those of you who will recall, I hated my IPOD.

So today I call the parent of one of my students because she has a lesson today, but the email I received last night quite clearly indicated that everyone had a stomach flu. And there was NO WAY I was going anywhere near that house if that were the case.

But no, that was not the case, thank goodness. But the mother has a favor to ask. Now I'm good friends with her, so it's not the imposition you would think. Her brand new IPOD broke. It just one day died. The IPOD store replaced it with a new one, but she was unable to get her Itunes downloaded.

So she asked me.

She is technically challenged.

So she asked me.

Has she not been reading my Blog?

I spend the better part of an hour after the lesson screwing around with it. I finally grab mine and plug it in to her cable. It recognizes mine. That's good. that rules out the USB port AND the cable.

But it doesn't seem to be good new for the IPOD itself.

Which is new. Did I mention that? Brand new. And a replacement.

So I write down the serial number and we call tech support.

Thankfully the answer is a quick reboot. That enabled me to transfer her playlist. Now things work fine.

I wrote the reboot command down. And told the tech support that they needed better documentation sent with the unit itself. 6 pictures and 12 words AIN'T gonna cut it.

It just makes me crazy when they tailor technology to a generation that applauds the inability to read and follow directions.

Is that smart? Is that shrewd? or is it just STUPID? ( I can't take credit for this one - Jamie Lee Curtis A Fish called Wanda).

It's Stupid. I have lately noticed that people in my generation fall into one of two categories. Those who raise their kids to be good, upstanding citizens (and I would have to tell you that most of the people I associate with fall into this category) and those who do everything for their kids but their kids grow up with an unbridled sense of entitlement. I teach kids who have fallen into this category every year but this year. By and large the kids I teach fall into the first category. The ones that don't drive me banana's.

As a society I am concerned when things like reading and doing chores to help out in the household are tossed aside. This episode with IPOD only enforced it for me.

The ten year old could figure it out, but me with a minor in Information Technology couldn't? I was an IT director for 10 years, I could program in 6 languages and take a PC apart and put it back together in 20 minutes without one pause. But the IPOD directions were overly simplistic. What does that say? That we are a society of idiots? Obviously not, if their overly simplistic instructions were so ambiguous that I still had to call tech support just to learn how to reboot the thing. Meanwhile that was a tip I had personally learned from Jax, but I didn't think to apply it here.

The point is, I can admit when something is beyond me, but don't oversimplify and expect that I am going to read your mind. That implies that I am stupid and I am not.

What bugs me more, the kids have no problem with the instructions. I think I am more frightened by that than not. I have students who are too lazy to read. They are raised with excellent value sets but I write the instructions for them to practice with in their assignment book and I find that in order to make sure they read it I have to test them on it the following week.

It's a scary world out there and due to the information being so readily available in so many mediums, it's small wonder that kids today don't have to work as hard as we did to get the same answers. But I think that loses something downstream for these kids when they become adults. The propensity for demanding adults who expect their jobs to be handed to them on a silver platter is huge. There is a large population of 20 somethings who already fall into this category. The ones that I am close to are wise beyond their years and have an awesome work ethic, but I can't say that is the large majority.

I am not expecting to be a parent and not sure I would be up to the challenge. I don't know if I am brave enough. But I sincerely hope that all the things I see and learn about from my friends with kids would prepare me somewhat for that job should it arise. I have some fantastic role models around me, Maple Mama, The Digital Father, Peet Fointed, to name a few and I urge you to check out their sites. They are all easy to read, but make you think. I enjoy all three and I am always looking forward to the new ideas that are brought forth, the challenges, the opinions all of it. I find a lot of my answers to the things I encounter during teaching from these folks.

So my hats off to my friends and readers who are parents. You guys and your spouses do a marvelous job and I am always amazed and enlightened at the challenges that come up and how you all handle them with intelligence and class. The world needs more parents like you!

And Apple needs to actually write NOT DRAW their manual.