At work I frequently deal with customers who either have never operated a computer before, or simply haven't done it enough to be familiar with anything. This isn't that big of a deal, everybody's got to start somewhere, and computers most definitely have a learning curve.

I have spent almost 30 minutes trying to get a customer just to load a specific web page. Most people don't understand the various components of their browser, and don't even understand the difference between their computer and the Internet. We frequently get calls where a customer wants a credit on their Internet because their computer says "Operating System Not Found", or "Application quit unexpectedly" when they try to load IE (it's always invariably IE).

However, I've never seen anything that showed the difference a generation makes more than a call I got last night. This woman I spoke with put her 4 year old son on the line. I was a little surprised, but I figured it couldn't hurt, they were both on speaker phone. I asked him what the problem was and he said the browser said "This page unavailable while you are working offline". This is an easy fix, but usually involves several minutes of having the customer try to find their toolbar and then explaining that I have no idea how it got checked. I asked him to select File. He did so, then said "It's got work offline checked, that's wrong right?". I said "yes, go ahead and uncheck that". Before I was even finished, he said. "Hey, I'm online".

Wow.

I asked him if there was anything else I could do. He consulted with his mother and eventually came back with a defeated tone and said "she wants me to setup her email". This again, is very simple but I've had it take almost an hour. He gave me is mom's email, then hesitated on the password and said "I don't think I am supposed to say that", I said that's ok, I don't need to know it, I just need him to go to a page for me. I directed him to the webmail signin. He got there, entered the login information, and was singed into the webmail in less than 45 seconds. I asked him if he wanted to setup a bookmark for it just in case, he said sure. I was getting ready to tell him how to do it and he said "ok, done". Again I asked if there was anything else I could do. He consulted with his mother again. "No thank you very much".

That 4 year old just did in about 4 minutes what I've seen self described "computer guru's" of the previous generation take over 10 minutes, and the average person the generation previous that take over 30 minutes.

I am fully convinced that my children will come out of the womb writing C#, and with some footnotes scribbled on a napkin about how to improve the efficiency of the MySQL database of this site.

It's gonna be scary.