I first became aware of her comfort with modern electronics last summer. My out-of-town friend Greg was visiting, and while he took a shower, I stood at the kitchen sink preparing some slop for the baby twin girls. My phone rang, and I took it from my pocket, surprised to see Greg’s name on the little screen.What a schmuck, I thought, calling from the bathroom to ask where we keep the towels. Then I thought, no, even Greg is not that thick, and I turned around. There across the room stood my pint-sized toddler holding his phone to her ear and looking at me.
People justly worry about young children and adolescents going online and finding pornography, or chatting and getting into emotional situations beyond their maturity. I think that is a challenge requiring more of talking than of technically outwitting. It’s important to teach children how to think straight and be careful with reality.
My research into World War II took me this week to a link to the first chapter of a 1999 book, “Inside the Oval Office,” by William Doyle, who based his book on secret tape recordings made by presidents from FDR to Bill Clinton. I started reading, and in the author’s biographical sketch of Franklin Roosevelt, he wrote: “After running for vice president on Democrat Al Smith’s failed 1920 ticket…”
That stopped me, for the 1920 Democratic candidate was James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio and publisher of the Dayton Daily News. It’s hard to take a historian seriously when he gets such a basic fact wrong. I wanted to read the rest of the chapter, and did, but with an eye to possible errors. And indeed I found another glaring mistake.
Doyle described a meeting in the White House on Sept. 27, 1940 and said that “in Berlin, Hitler was issuing plans for a cross-channel invasion of Britain.” By the end of that summer, the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain, had failed to destroy the Royal Air Force and in mid-September Hitler cancelled plans for the invasion, his Operation Sealion. The author got it wrong, but I also took exception to his language, for of course the plans for such an invasion need to be, and indeed were, made many months before any chance might occur for executing them. If things had gone his way by September, Hitler would have been issuing orders to launch the invasion, not issuing plans for it.
I don’t want to compare my own sweetheart of a daughter to Hitler or Stalin, but so far this year, she has changed the PIN code on my wife’s cell phone, shut down our Digitürk service and gotten into my laptop and changed the security settings.
My wife apologized, said Eylül kept opening my laptop whenever she had the chance. I patted the little girl on the head and asked her not to play with my computer, then opened it to check if everything was all right. The first thing I saw was a box warning: You are not authorized to access these files. I tapped the Enter key and the box disappeared, a close call.
I have never used a password lock for my computer or cell phone. Who needs another needless hassle in life? Now I think it might be a good idea, but I’m scared to try. Just yesterday I tried to access my foreign exchange accounts via the Internet, typed in the customer number, the password and a special one-time code from the fuzzy window with curvy letters, then got a message via my wife’s phone giving me the mobile activation code, which allowed me to enter my special interactive code.
At the end of all that, the system told me that no access could be granted because of a general technical failure and to try again later. Maybe when Eylül gets home from preschool.
