This evening Sylvia received her Christmas gift. The gift happened to be a black 8 Gig iPod Nano. She had been talking about getting one for months. I had already made all of the proper preparations. iTunes was installed, her music was synced up, and the application was hidden in a system folder on her netbook. All she had to do was open it and ask any questions. Or so I thought.

I decided, to make things easier, I would demo the things that she needed to know to use the iPod fully. We went over navigation, the video camera, and iTunes syncing. I was confident that she knew what she was doing.

As I was walking to bed I heard “Andrew, how do I play a song on here?” I knew that she had the iPod plugged into the computer, so I walked in to help. She was using the iPod as a kind of remote to try and play music in iTunes. I asked where she actually wanted the music to come out and she decided she wanted to listen on the iPod. At this point, she was getting frustrated and I was trying not to burst out laughing. I told her to get as far through each menu as she could, and then I would help her. She made it to the songs menu, and then tried to scroll by what I can only describe as gently caressing the select button. I then showed her how to scroll and asked myself how on Earth she got this far. She scrolled through and selected the song. Finally, the song began to play. I said goodnight and began to walk to bed.

The song was coming out pretty loud. For those of you that don’t know, the iPod Nano now has an on-board speaker. When she mentioned the song volume, I made the mistake of asking if she had her headphones plugged in. She said yes, and that they had been plugged in the whole time. I told her to use the scroll wheel to change the volume. At this point, the volume increased to a level too high for even the greatest headphones, much less iPod headphones. I walked back in and found that her headphones were plugged into her netbook. I told her to plug them into the iPod and that they were in the wrong device. She laughed at that one. As I looked over, she was trying to insert the headphone plug into the poor iPod’s camera lens. I then demonstrated the proper headphone jack, only after freaking out because she almost destroyed the camera’s lens.

As I walked out of the room again, she said that she wasn’t a good night learner and that we may have to go over it again tomorrow. I am sure that tomorrow will bring new abuse for this poor iPod, seeing as we haven’t even looked into the radio feature. I guess we shall see. Wish me luck!

(buhbyes)

The Bill Gates Empire

I hope you enjoy!