There are two 80 something year olds living downstairs from me. She won't go near the computer and he sops up everything techno.

I LOVE him. His grandchildren get a big kick when he does email and he sends them photos (He knows what he is doing). Everything on his computer is in italian because they don't speak any english.

They called me downstairs the other day saying there was an error message. I go downstairs and I see "you have an infected file, " blah blah blah.

I turn to him and say "you might have a virus or spyware, what anti-virus software are you running?"

He stared at me blankly. Now how am I supposed to explain viruses, spyware, malware, adware, grayware (any kind of ware), to an 81 year old man who LOVES THE INTERNET but no one told him how to protect his computer.

He has the Cable package. All three things in a bundle.

I call up His Optimum Online person, and they said "sorry, that's a computer problem, not a cable problem". So I translated. Then I wrote everything down for his grandchildren who are coming on Friday. He had some sort of Trojan thing going on. It kept changing his home page from Italy to something else. I got him his Italian page back.

So the next day he's outside taking a walk and he runs up to me all excited.

It seems that he got his daughter on the phone (she lives in Arizona) and shes going to marry this engineer who is also A COMPUTER SPECIALIST.

Well, you should have seen the little man's eyes light up as he told me what happened.

The computer boyfriend asked him (through a translator), if he could take over his computer. The guy downstairs says: "what do you mean, take over my computer, you're in Arizona???"

The guy told him what to do and in 5 minutes, the guy downstairs was sitting in front of his computer and the daughter's boyfriend had control.

Well, I looked at him and burst out laughing and said "yeah, it's called remote hosting, I do it all the time with Verizon".

Well, the guy could not get over it. He kept shaking his head and saying "oh my god, someone in Arizona was moving my mouse around the screen, and he got rid of the error message, and he did this, etc. etc".

I thought he looked like a boy on his first trip to the circus. His eyes were all round and big and he just stood there explaining it to me like he discovered America.

I so thoroughly enjoyed this older man's enthusiasm, I cannot tell you.

I have never met anyone older than me who did the videos, and the photos, and the uploading and downloading.

It's quite neat that when you get to your golden years, that you don't just wind up on the front porch knitting.

YOU DO REMOTE HOSTING!!!!

lol lol lol