NIU

Bingo

Posted by Stacy on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:40 AM

My grandma was telling me how there used to be free bingo at her church when she was younger and how she hates that you have to pay an obscene amount of money now a days to get into a game. I told her that you can just play bingo online now and that you don't even have to go anywhere to do it!

At first she was resistant, but after a few days she finally let me show her how to play online bingo and she ended up loving it. Even though she still goes once and a while with her girlfriends to play at the church of at the YMCA, she prefers to play online bingo than to go out and get dressed up and pay a ton of money to play.

I was surprised though when one day she asked me to come over to help her teach her friends how to play internet bingo. They were all sitting around when I got there and so excited to learn. My grandma is good at emailing and goggling stuff on the internet, but besides that (and games now ha) she is pretty clueless and we always laugh at her, but compared to her friends, she is an online expert. They knew basically nothing (one lady didn't even know how to click on the icon on the desktop to get to the internet). So I sat down with them and explained how to get on and how to check their email (and set email up for a few of them) and how to look up things like the weather or yellow pages and Google and then I taught them how to play games online and access other things that they asked about.

I thought that it would be a miserable afternoon, but it ended up being kind of fun teaching them stuff (they thought I was some sort of queen and I really don't even consider myself a technology person) and showing them how to contact their friends and family through email. My grandma was telling me a few days ago that they now send out group emails to each other so they can figure out where to meet for coffee or yoga every week. It was so nice to be able to help them out like that, and they even made me cookies afterwards.