Before you gripe and whine

Last updated September 25th, 2013 at 08:49 am

[The following is a transcript of the above video.]

If you are a business person who is prone to griping and whining about how difficult it is to master all the technologies and gadgets and social networks that you’ve come understand can help you succeed in business, I have two words for you:

PLEASE STOP.

Now, understanding that my ASKING you to stop probably isn’t enough to GET you to stop, I’m going to try SHAME.

I’d like to introduce you to my mother-in-law.

Mom is celebrating her 91st birthday TODAY.

She is as sharp as a tack, and her only physical ailments are the kinds of ailments one could reasonably expect a person who’s been living and breathing and walking and carrying and bending for 9 decades to have: her eyes don’t see as sharply as they used to; her joints don’t bend quite as easily as they used to.

As for her hearing, I think that’s a decision on her part to stop listening.

She moved near to my wife and me from the only town she had ever lived in all her life just five years ago. She found a lovely Assisted Living facility here, not 3 miles from where we live, and she found it all by herself, by virtue of a duly diligent Internet Web search.

Every morning with her coffee, she reads the online version of her hometown newspaper — on her desktop computer, not her iPad, because her desktop computer has a 24″ widescreen monitor and she’s very adept changing the zoom level of her browser.

She lives on Facebook. Facebook is open on her desktop computer and iPad all day long. She knows how to post and comment and share and like and hide people who talk too much. And she knows what those little icons are in the upper right-hand corner, and she knows to click them when they have numbers in red-colored boxes.

She sends and receives mail all day long, on both computer and iPad. Her inbox is virtually empty because she knows to delete things she doesn’t want to keep, and the ones she does want to keep she drags to folders we’ve created for her.

During her “Molly The Owl” fascination phase (look it up), and before she found out how expensive inkjet cartridges are and how quickly they empty, she was using the Windows snipping tool dozens of times a day to take and print screenshots of the owl so she could show her friends in the dining room.

She video-records just about every special event in the community center at her home, and she uploads them to her YouTube channel as soon as she returns to her apartment.

She’s been Skyping for about 6 years — long before all but one of her children started Skyping (my wife being the exception, of course). And she’s been “GoingToMeeting-ing” with me for as long, because it was during a GoToMeeting session — in which she was the presenter, 6 years ago — that I installed her Skype software for her.

Her Pandora is set to Christmas Carols from Thanksgiving till New Years and to Big Band and Swing all the rest of the time.

When her newest great-grandchild was born four months ago today, my mother in law Face-Timed with mother and infant before the umbilical cord was even cut.

And earlier this month, on Labor Day, we were sitting around the dinner table talking about the crisis in Syria, and mom interjected, “You know… I read what the Pope had to say about this on my Twitter feed this morning.”

In Summary

So, if you’re a business person who’s prone to griping and whining about how tough all this is, please stop. Nobody’s listening.

Thanks for listening.

And Happy Birthday, Mom!