I did not jump off the roof of my office yesterday. I may have played a role in keeping other people off the roof, as well. Not too sure about that one.

It’s not like there’s anything horrid going on; the Horrid Convoy left harbor and promptly sank last year, setting The Benchmark of Horrid and this is nowhere near that. It’s just death by a million papercuts…

One cool, no strike that, VERY cool story from yesterday, which I hope stands as The Besst of Grandma, Interrupted’s day:

I am my mother’s IT support. She is 80-something and is very wired in: she communicates with email all the time, and orders clothes and home furnishings and yes, even her groceries online (the shopping cart doesn’t fall very far from the cart stand, apparently).

Last year? we realized that she needed a new computer so we got her a boss all-in-one. Even I hate learning new operating systems, so we had it fixed up with a virtual machine running XP. The techie people who set it up were really impressed with the fact that an 80-something great grandmother was so plugged in. She’s been using it fairly happily, calling me on occasion for technical support.

Last night she called and announced that she needed to do something with her computer, as she understood that XP support was going to be turned off soon.

I say, “Well, it’s not like you won’t be able to use it; it’ll keep running.”

She says, “But then I’ll be open to malware and scammers.”

The support desk is officially impressed: I know people half her age who don’t understand this stuff nearly as well.

So today I get to move her stuff over to the Windows 7 operating system on her box. Go, Mom!

What is the Besst project? 

And why is it called Besst?

© E. Stocking Evans 2014