Today I taught my parents… (Part 3)

Last time on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we saw Linda teach her mom how to order food online.

This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda shows her parents how to use a webcam.

I’m sure that, back in April 1960, my parents weren’t standing next to that cake thinking, “Gosh, we can’t wait to celebrate sixty years together in 2020 during a global pandemic by looking at family and friends through a big screen, many miles away from us.” I’m reasonably certain that wasn’t their thought at all that day.

If it were me, I would have been thinking, “Mmmm, CAKE!”

But let’s not use me as a yardstick … for anything. Instead of a Big Party, I got to help them celebrate the only way we could last month: through a webcam.

My parents both use desktop computers, not laptops, so of course they didn’t own a webcam. That would have been too easy. And, by the time I got the bright idea to order them a webcam online and have it delivered to their house, every webcam within a 5,000-mile radius had been snapped up, along with a million shares of Zoom stock.

I own a few ancient laptops with webcams, but I typically use a dedicated webcam and microphone on my desktop computer when I need to attend a virtual meeting. Back around 2010, I’d gotten a crappy blue plastic webcam for free with rewards points from entering a bajillion code combinations from the bottle caps of many Diet Cokes. MANY Diet Cokes. Let me tell you, it took a LOT of Diet Coke, imbibed by both me and my husband, to get that free crappy blue plastic webcam.

It has a built-in crappy microphone and a built-in crappy suction cup on the bottom. (I’d say the suction cup sucks, but that would be paying it a compliment. It does NOT suck. Hence the problem. The thing tends to skitter across your desk if the cord isn’t positioned just right.)

But, it served me well for nearly a decade, considering the price I’d paid. (It was worth at least twice what I paid for it!) And anyone who uses technology knows how long a decade is. Most electronic equipment needs carbon dating after about five years.

The Big Problem presented itself when the Big Party I had been planning for my parents to celebrate their 60th anniversary ground to a halt. I thought I’d been pretty good at predicting the various obstacles we might encounter trying to pull off a surprise party for my parents: airline flights and schedules for family to the east of us, work schedules for all the grown grandkids here, traffic issues getting those same grandkids to my house from 50 miles away, nap schedules for their great-grandson (and, let’s face it, for me too), food choices for so many of us on different diets…

But I had somehow neglected to add “global pandemic and worldwide shutdown” to my list of possible roadblocks. Now what? No in-person face-to-face party. After 60 years of surviving each other, my parents now had to survive COVID-19 and a complete lockdown, with nobody to entertain them but each other. If they hadn’t killed each other in the past 60 years, this just might do it.

But what to do about that Big Party? In typical noble, altruistic fashion, I gave my parents that free crappy blue plastic webcam. Because that’s how I roll. I’m nothing if not self-sacrificing.

But even that simple gesture turned into a Big Production. I wiped down the free crappy blue plastic webcam with sanitizing wipes, put everything in a small cardboard box (because I’ve got an entire collection of a dozen of every size box Amazon makes), and delivered the box to my parents’ garage (while waving at them through their kitchen window). I felt like an honorary member of the bomb squad. (Should I cut the blue wire or the red wire?)

They let the box sit in their garage for two days before touching it.

A few days later, we did a test run of the webcam and microphone, using Facebook’s video chat feature inside Messenger. I chose that over Zoom because my mom was already familiar with Facebook Messenger. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to walk her through setting up Zoom from scratch over the phone. This was the same woman who used to call me for impromptu tech support by announcing, “It won’t let me! The thingy is blinking!”

With Facebook Messenger, all I had to do was hit the little blue video camera icon in the upper right of a group message—and all she had to do was answer the incoming video call.

You know, once the camera was plugged in, and the microphone was plugged in.

What could go wrong? Well, what greeted me first were my mom’s neck and one of her hands, and a lot of loud crackling noise as she fiddled with the webcam and the microphone, trying to find good spots for them on her desk. And then both my parents tried to find spots for two chairs close enough to the camera for me to see and hear them. And for them to see the computer monitor that would soon be filled with loving faces wishing them a happy 60th.

The Big Day for the Big Party arrived. I’d divided the groups of people who wanted to cyber-attend into two time slots. For one thing, Facebook Messenger video chat accepts only eight cameras at a time. For another thing, I still had those pesky schedules to contend with.

I started a group message with the first time-slot folks, and then I “called” everyone. One by one, to my delight, folks popped up on my screen.

But where were my parents?

They were still in the two-person Messenger chat I’d set up with my mom. I typed in our two-person chat window: “Hey, I’m setting up our ‘party’ with a few folks…. We’re setting up now and I’ll add you once we’re ‘live.'”

Then I added, “I added you to our small group. You’ll get the video ring thing in a second.”

Suddenly I heard a loud phone-ringing noise and realized that, in another browser window, my mom was “calling” me in our two-person Messenger chat window.

Brrrrring… bbbrrrrrringgggg… Boy, that noise got annoying really fast.

I kept apologizing to the friends and family waiting for my parents in the group video chat… and kept hearing that bbbrrrrrrrinnngggg from the two-person chat window.

My parents tried to call me a total of five times before they figured out their error. I think my all-caps response of “GO TO THE GROUP MEETING NOT THIS ONE” probably helped nudge them in the right direction.

Of course, once they actually got to the group chat, they were greeted with friends, a nephew, a kid (okay, that was me), and some grandkids and their significant others. They were wearing their matching T-shirts, which said, “I Survived 60 Years!” They seemed delighted with the turnout, and we had a one-hour online party with them both.

And later that day, a second wave of kids, grandkids, friends, and a great-grandkid swept in for a second virtual party.

And, aside from the usual glitches with cameras, microphones, cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, background noise, and technophobia, it went surprisingly well.

It was the best we could do for them, given the restrictions. We’re planning a Real Party sometime in the fall. Of this year. We hope. Unless the murder hornets and a sharknado show up. Can’t rule out any possibility these days.

And, because my upgraded webcam finally arrived from Amazon a few weeks ago, I’m gonna let my parents keep that free crappy blue plastic webcam… because that’s what a noble, self-sacrificing daughter would do, right?

I still haven’t been able to give my parents a true happy-anniversary hug yet, more than a month later, but you can bet I’ll be the first one in their driveway when our state relaxes some restrictions.

You know, after I shower in hand sanitizer and sit in their garage for two days.