Welcome to the 21st Century!

My in-laws have accessed the Internet via a dial-up modem for as long as I’ve known them (which is about seven years.)

For the whole of that time I’ve been gently suggesting that they really should think about broadband but they always said that they were happy with what they had, even if it did take twenty minutes to open my wife’s Flickr page and even when I have to login to their webmail account when someone sends them a couple of pictures…4mb attachments aren’t a big deal most people!

They finally made the jump this week and I popped round yesterday to get everything setup

I get a kick out of people’s reactions to technology and seeing their jaws hit the floor as pages were opening hundreds of times faster than they were used to was great. It got even better when I showed them a live video stream on the BBC news website

One of their arguments against going to broadband was always

“we don’t use it that much. we check our e-mail, do online banking and that’s it”

I always countered that they would find a ton of other reasons to use the Internet once they moved to broadband and as if by magic just as I was getting ready to leave one of them said

“What’s Skype?”

My sister in-law is spending a year in Australia so I imagine she’s mentioned it to them

Technology the enabler!