This is a computer. Any questions?

This is an fragment from The Red Fish Page 7 : The Hardships of being a Fish in the Net, part II.

    My older brother, One Fish, is the complete opposite of me in mostly any way. One of the implications of that is that he doesn't know the first thing about computers; the last time he's touched a computer was when computers were apples. Yet even he was somewhat swept in the excitement around the Internet, and he asked me to show him how to make it work.

    "Okay", I started slowly, "First thing you do is double-click on the 'My Connection' icon here."

    "What's a double-click?" Asked One.

    That was the end of his lessons.

Quoting from myself now. How low can you get?

(By the way, One is having his own World Tour right now, eastwards. The amazing thing is that there, of all places, he learned a little double-clicking, to be able to send us e-mail home. But nevermind that, let's get back to the subject.)

I like computers. I also like movies. I, you might say, am interested in computers, and in movies. That's why I went to college that teaches computers and cinema.

A lot of other people also went to that college to study the same thing. So far, no surprises. Here's the surprise: some of them, apparently, are not interested in computers. Or in movies.

How do I know? Easy. I'm interested in computers, and that's why I didn't just sit and watched them work. I learned how to make them work. First, I learned where the button that turns the computer on is. Then, I learned how to make various applications - games, mostly - work. This is done by - yes, you guessed it - double-clicking on icons.

I'm also interested in Movies. So I did sit and watched many of them work, and I also may have pickup up a book or two on the subject and read them. I also spent a lot of time in movie-related sites on the internet, (which, by the way, requires some double-clicking to get to).

Since it's totally obvious that some of the students in my class have never read a book about movies (or, it sometimes seem, seen a movie), and have never even came close to a computer, I have to assume that they're not interested in these things. Which raises the question - Why are they there?!

Answer: money. Dum-dum-dududum-dum.

Good answer, maybe. But still, I expected people to know something about computers. It really, really surprised me that some people in my class had to be taught both where the button that turns the computer on is, and, what "Doubleclick" means.

Maybe One has a future after all.