Yesterday I got a voice mail from an associate of mine, a fun and attractive woman in her mid-40s that I do MonaVie presentations with. I love my MonaVie friends. They love to get together to sing karaoke, drink wine, talk about how we’re all going to make it big if we only just BELIEVE! It’s just enough crazy to hold my attention.
Network marketing people are a special breed. You probably already know that if anybody has ever tried to sell you Mary Kay cosmetics or invited you to an Amway meeting. But it’s actually rather endearing, they don’t really eat your brain or make you spend your life savings on laundry detergent. It’s a nice change of pace from my actual reality—a relatively passive income stream in a highly social industry that requires that I bathe ... it works for me. A lot of people I meet come from non-traditional educational and career paths, and it can get interesting.
I am amused that they call me the “girl who is really good with computers.” No I’m not. I’m good at designing websites and even that’s debatable. It’s like saying that a chef is really good with appliances.
Most of these folks have access to computers but only at work, they have email but they don’t use it as a form of communication, but rather, a way to forward on information that people forwarded to them. You remember the 90s too right? It’s just so ODD to me that people aren’t plugged into their computers all day long like I am. What do they do?
One of them, a 70 year old woman, bought herself a computer and a blackberry for the first time, but it didn’t take me long to realize that she doesn’t know how to type. And to not contact her that way because she’d just call me to respond to every message. And I hate that. She even told me that email is good but only if you follow it up with a phone call to make sure they read it.
Aarrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhh.
This is the same woman who volunteered her laptop for a PowerPoint presentation for an audience of 100 people, complete with a guest speaker that flew in from Oklahoma, and when “it didn’t work,” handed it to me. The “really good with computers girl” then discovered there was no software installed on this machine. Software such as PowerPoint.
Then the woman asked me to “just fix it.”
Back to my voice mail. So this woman is extremely frustrated because she needs to type something on her computer and she doesn’t understand why she can’t just type something and print it out. I can imagine that is frustrating.
The guys down at Best Buy told her they would charge her $130 to install Word Perfect (what?) and that was so ridiculous, and do I just have a disc she can borrow?
I didn’t return her call and funnily enough while I was writing this she called again. Such a sweet woman and I do understand her dilemma, but I had to tell her about this new thing called “licensed software.” That I understand that it’s expensive ... but try buying the Adobe Creative Suite and then tell me about it.
At the end of the day, I just can’t fathom how people get to 2008 and at the age of 44 without having ever purchased a copy of Microsoft Office.
