Need Tech Support? Find a Kid

A friend wrote me a desperate email, asking if I can help her work out how to use the special features in her new Samsung mobile phone. You see, I’ve long been the go-to geek for my family and friends. But I couldn’t help this desperate woman. Sadly, I’ve never had much luck mastering mobile phones until I got an iPhone. I think what I love about my iPhone the most is finally I can find and use the nifty features packed into modern phones.

My 10-year-old niece has started posting really silly and entertaining videos on facebook. I figured you needed third-party software to do this stuff, so I asked her how she did it. “Photo Booth”, she replied, which she uses on her nanna’s MacBook . (Actually she said “Photon Booth”, which I think is also a cool name.) Ri-ight. She’s telling me that a stock-standard Mac has all the software she needs to do this. I didn’t know Photo Booth made videos that you could upload to facebook so easily. But a 10 year old figured it out. Figured out the whole thing.

The next time I get a new computer I’m going to find a kid to show me how to use it. I don’t mean, how to do the normal things like editing a file, playing some music, and coding. I mean, the cool gimmicky features that make computers fun. I bet she knows how to use your Samsung mobile phone, too.