Hannah: My Five Year Old Computer Guru...and Destroyer

Yes, I'm still confident that Hannah contributed to my hard drive crash...but maybe the brownouts we experienced during the ice storm played a role, too. Destroyer status aside, Hannah LOVES electronics. While I "play" on my computer, Hannah plays on her Barbie computer...well, not actually her Barbie computer, but the computer left here by the neighbor girl.


Hailey loves electronics of every kind, too, but she was not given the...opportunities...Hannah has been given. When Katie and Hailey were younger, I scoffed at parents who allowed their children to play "mindless video games" or who allowed the television to babysit for them. Once again, Hannah has her own rules. She has spent more hours in front of a television or computer screen in her five years than Katie and Hailey have spent in their entire combined lifetimes. Maybe I exaggerate, but not much.

For her birthday we gave Hannah a "Leapfrog ClickStart My First Computer" that turns our television into a computer controlled by a wireless toy laptop keyboard. As a result, and in spite of the Dandy-Walker, Hannah excels at using a mouse and has accumulated 99 "bones" for Scout the ClickStart puppy. 99 is the limit--a design flaw as I see it. I've been surprised and amazed at the things Hannah has taught herself while using these toys...things she wouldn't have learned if her control freak mother had "played" on the computer with her.


Maybe all this pre-adolescent practice will make Hannah so proficient on the computer that she can make up for the massive amounts of computer damage she has accomplished in her five short years: damaged hard drives, keyboards relieved of their keys, strange happenings (for example, an unusual code appears every time I hit "page up" or any other key in the far right column of my keyboard.)


I must digress for posterity. In 2005-06 Hannah made it a practice to remove keys from my laptop keyboard every time she was left unattended for any length of time...which is probably more often than I should admit. I purchased a replacement keyboard on ebay, but could never figure out how to install it, even with the help of two computer-savvy acquaintances. In 2006 my hard drive crashed. Because it was still under warranty, I sent my laptop in along with the replacement keyboard. When I asked the computer geek at the counter what it would cost to have them replace the keyboard at the same time as the hard drive, he said, "To be honest, it depends on the technician."


Great. "What do you mean? How could it depend on the technician?"


He said, "It depends on whether the technician declares it normal wear-and-tear."


"You're kidding, right? Who would ever consider twenty-four missing keys to be normal wear and tear?!"


"You'd be surprised," was all he said.


He was right. I was surprised. They charged nothing. I wonder if they would have even supplied the keyboard.


Maybe someday Hannah will be the next Bill Gates and I will look on these computer-problem days with a laugh and a bulging wallet. For now, though, I'm not laughing.