Once upon a time I needed to look something up on my home computer, so I phoned my mum from work and tried to talk her through clicking on a few icons. This was

Once upon a time I needed to look something up on my home computer, so I phoned my mum from work and tried to talk her through clicking on a few icons. This was with Windows 3.11 and the task was far from rocket science. After getting nowhere for twenty minutes I discovered what was wrong. My mother - bless her - had the mouse held the wrong way up. She knew that mice - as in the sort that scurry around and work very hard in laboratories - had the tails at the back. Consequently she held the mouse upside down, with the cable coming out the back. Before arriving at this simple mistake I had got her to close the blinds in the room where my computer was setup. In those days mice were opto-mechanical with the ball, and, under extreme bright light the sensors in the mouse were vulnerable to light coming through the plastic housing of the mouse. Connections had been checked too, plus I had managed to get her to reboot the machine with the reset button on the front. Yet all along it was operator error, I imagined everything that could be wrong up to 'it must be a stray neutrino' levels of implausible yet I overlooked the idea that my mum intuitively thought that a computer mouse was like a real mouse with the 'tail at the back'. We got there in the end after I had the eureka moment and worked out my mum was holding the mouse wrong. I could talk her through the rest when that was resolved and got the snippet of information I needed - a telephone number - which I needed for work. It was only when ecommerce and the Amazon Kindle came along that my mother was finally able to use a computer. All difficulties and fears mysteriously vanished when it came to buying stuff online, she became perfectly adept at using a computer then, much to my father's amusement. If only I had known of this tutorial back then.