Ironically enough, just as I’ve been looking for ways to go offline a little more often, my in-laws are becoming more plugged-in than ever. Now that they’ve relocated permanently up north (which means no more stops at our house as the migrate from one end of the country to the other), they’ve decided to ditch their dial-up service.

For ten years we’ve been trying to get them to do just that. Being senior citizens who feel there’s something shameful about watching TV at night, they shunned our recommendations to get cable television and internet. So every time we received ATT internet offers in the mail we’d send them to the in-laws in the hope they’d sign up. Nothin’ doing. they remained convinced the internet was just a fad, and that dial-up service was good enough for anyone.

After their last visit to our house, though, they got hooked. My mother-in-law had just bought a new laptop so she can play Solitaire to keep herself entertained (and from watching the road) while my father-in-law does the driving. Then she realized she could tap into our home’s WiFi and spent the next 6 hours cruising from one recipe site to another, downloading and saving data faster than she’d ever thought possible.

Then there was the evening when she discovered the blessings of watching time-shifted TV, and how nice it is being able to pause the DVR so no one missed their TV program when she’d start talking. (That wasn’t so much of a blessing for the rest of us, as you can imagine.) By the end of their visit our DVR’s hard-drive was bulging with recordings of Walker, Texas Ranger and Matlock… shows we’d never watch if they weren’t around.

Yesterday I got an email from her complete with a dozen or so family pictures. That’s not something she was able to do with her old dial-up connection since uploading the images would tie up their phone lines for hours. It seems that, as soon as they settled in to their new residence, one of the first things they did was sign up for ATT satellite tv with DVR-service included. Plus, they’d taken advantage of one of those ATT offers to bundle high-speed DSL with the television service, and now she’s hooked.

Do you have any idea how strange it is to get an email from your elderly mother-in-law raving over the latest Two and a Half Men episode or dissecting the first airing of Living Lohan? I swear to God, though, if the woman starts sending me pr0n I’m canceling our own internet service pronto.

Thursday, May 29th, 2008, 10:24 am   |   My Venomous Life, Technology Bites  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.