My father is 73 years old. He is a smart man and college educated. Now living in his retirement years he has involvement in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. This involves taking some courses. These courses are in PDF format.

And this is where the problem starts.

The way I set up Pop’s computer is the essence of simplicity. He has an older Dell Dimension 4400 with a 2.4GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive and the original Windows XP Home Edition (which I upgraded to SP3). It chugs along just fine with no issues whatsoever.

I purposely set up everything he does to be Yahoo based. He uses a few Yahoo Widgets for his weather and also uses Yahoo Mail. The mail is purposely set to “Classic” mode because it’s easier to read and faster than the new version.

Pop calls me and says he’s having difficulty printing an e-mail sent to him by the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

I asked him if he currently had the e-mail open. He didn’t know.

After about 10 questions I finally found out he was logged into his mail but did not have the e-mail open.

After about 15 minutes we found the e-mail.

Now we have to print it.

When he prints the e-mail via File/Print, the text is too small on the printed page.

Now I have to instruct him that no, you don’t print e-mail that way. You click the “Print” button at the far top right under the “Search” box. Because the text is so unbelievably small on-screen it took him a few minutes to locate it, but he did. He was then successfully able to print the e-mail in proper legible text when printed.

He then noted to me the e-mail stated there were several documents he had to print for course materials. All these documents were PDFs outside the e-mail on a Coast Guard web site.

We were able to get to the site and locate the PDFs.

Now we have to print these.

Of course, Adobe Reader has the print icon on the left. And there is no text under the icon stating what it is.

In the end I had to instruct Pop that:

1. Printing an e-mail is not done via File/Print but rather the “Print” button on the right and it is only available when an e-mail is open.
2. Clicking a link inside an e-mail takes you outside mail and to a web site.
3. When printing a PDF the icon to print it is on the far left and only applies when viewing a PDF document.

So we have 3 ways of printing stuff, 1 of which is wrong and the other two are only available under specific circumstances.

Computers suck.