Drop-In Time toots! I made a few little social media posts (thanks Canva!) about the fact that drop-in time exists and it was busy today.
First: a pregame request to track down a fiendishly expensive textbook in a... less expensive form. It's in the 15th edition and I could find the 14th. I respect the rights of authors to make money off of their work but the "No you have to have this edition and we print a new one every year" textbook scene is a racket. Could I find it? Of course I could.
Frequent flier Joanne was in wondering why her camera app no longer made noise (the volume was down, I taught her how volume control worked). She wanted to know if she could "send photos" using her Kindle Fire. I said sure but she'd have to use email instead of texting. She barely uses email and said she'd stick to texting "...but my daughter said I should be able to..." and I said yeah she totally could but her way worked and was likely easier unless someone didn't have a cell phone.
Mette and her husband came in. He mostly wanted to commiserate about Windows 11 (I hear ya, buddy) but she's been using Excel (EXCEL 2003) to transcribe census records from her town. Their town has 718 people, had twice that in 1840. She wanted to know how to do some things with the spreadsheets because she'd been watching some Zooms of a MA historical society who did some neat things. A few things we did that were so magical to her that she gasped: charts, find, replace, split cells.
Sandy brought a young person who had clearly been through a rough patch, now staying with her. This person had two broken phones with locked-up SIM cards, part of an SSD drive that needed a new enclosure (and a proprietary one?) and a Google account they couldn't access because the recovery number was on one broken phone and the logged in Google account was on the other. The kid had moved, was nowhere near their old IP addresses, had no other devices. Messy. A great argument against passkeys
Jamaica (who has a sister named Jessamyn and who grew up one town over from where I grew up) came in with two ancient Macbooks. "All I get are family hand me downs!" She couldn't log in to one, had tried every password. "Did you try... no password?" She did not know that was a thing. We tried it and presto! She had to go because she had some loose sheep at home, I told her to update from Mac OS Sierra when she got the ewe back.
Pat has an old laptop with a lot of good browser add-ons and anti-virus stuff on it but she likes to watch Colbert via CBS.com and it was sometimes blanking on her. We walked through turning off browser add-ons (or even trying another browser) and, of course, it worked when I was sitting there. I explained how computer CPUs can get overloaded and we both commiserated. Then we chitchatted about the other nearby town (pop 678) and the past and present librarians.
On my way out the door, I ran into Irene who I had not heard from since her "I can't get my email" emergency during the blizzard. She's in her 90s and I was sort of concerned I hadn't heard from her since. Turned out her daughter-in-law and Xfinity signed her up for a new email address and instead of using Outlook she's using the web browser. She mostly doesn't mind this "But I get so much spam!" Had to remind myself that while I maybe could have fixed this problem, I also would have owned it.
Talked to the YA librarian about our various bird watching adventures as I left. Walked home and ran into my local pal who I go dog walking with (her dog) and I walked another 45 min with my laptop bag on. Ran into neighbors getting rid of stuff at "free corner" (where everyone knows to leave your good free stuff) and a bunch of other people out just enjoying this great day. Couldn't even text a flower pic to my SO b/c my cell signal is so terrible here. Not entirely unhappy about it. EOM.
@jessamyn All of this is so great. I love hearing stories of people helping others with technology, even when it’s frustrating for all involved, because there are so many moments of delight that can also happen like the Excel 2003 example. Things a lot of us take for granted are so often the key to opening up people’s worlds for the better.
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