Not That Sane. V Lakshman. Every Wednesday.

Fresh Freshman (Sep. 9, '98)

When my wife's classes started a few weeks ago, I tagged along to one of her orientation classes. This was a laptop orientation and she shared it with a whole bunch of freshmean. By university policy, they were all supposed to bring laptops when they joined school. Ostensibly, that was to make them better prepared for an information age. More likely, it was because the university was too cheap to invest in computing resources.

Anyway, I tagged along with her and found myself sitting amid a bunch of fresh-faced kids. "Is this how a 19-year old looks?," I kept asking myself. It was unbelievable -- had I seen any of these kids on the street, I would have taken him for a junior high student.

The fellow sitting next to us was an intimidating, portly young fellow with a perpetual scowl. He seemed to resent being in the room and anxious to prove that he was not a computer novice. Soon after the instructor concluded a tedious explanation of setting up the laptop to be in the university network, the fellow shot up his hand. "I've already done all this," he pronounced, "when I set up the laptop to use the DNS at my dorm."

The instructor must have seen through the obvious swagger. "And?", he asked, as if expecting a further question. The fellow had to come up with a question immediately. He asked whether the number he'd set up for the DNS port was okay, not that he knew what DNS was, you see, but he figured that since Windows accepted the blank field, it might still be okay, and didn't the instructor think so? The instructor said he thought so and the orientation continued.

As I said, I would have taken them for junior high kids.


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