German Shepherd Puppies

My parents are getting old. My dad just turned 71 and my mom is 65. Very recently, and with mixed success they have begun to understand the internet and its many uses. They can use hotmail, and shop at their favorite stores and even play a few online games. Teaching my parents to use the computer, I feel like I imagine Anne Sullivan must have felt while trying to control and teach Helen Keller in her early years. My parents blindly typing away - well not really "typing," more like mashing the keys hysterically, as if the keys were coming at their faces menacingly, and needed to be knocked aside- lifting the mouse up from the desk and waving it toward the computer, and of course shouting at the computer to work better.

This "training" of course leads to come humorous questions:

• "Can I check hotmail on someone else's computer?"
• "Do we need to use a different hotmail name since we aren't at home?"
• "What does 'in caps' mean?"
• "Can you get your brother on this machine?"
• "How old is Hillary Duff?"
  

I'm not intending to be mean here. I myself am not particularly technological. I had no real understanding of the internet until the very late 1990's. When I first discovered email, I was amazed. It was fascinating. And then the immediate discovery of internet pornography changed my life and the skin on my penis forever.

A few months ago, they got the idea into their heads that it was time for them to get a dog. Momentarily forgetting the stresses and frustrations of housebreaking a puppy, they searched for German Shepherd breeders in New Jersey. My wife and I were called in to consult and one night we were using my brother's laptop and looking at dogs. My dad brought in his laptop and asked what we were looking at. We told him to use Google and search for "german shepherd puppies."

I saw him typing away and then look confused at his computer. This in itself is not unusual. He grimaced and I saw him hit Enter again, and shake his head. "I'm not getting anything," he said.
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"What did you search for?"
"German shepherd puppies, like you said."
It should be noted that my dad has what Bart Simpson would describe as "kind of a short fuse." He is not a patient man. He was growing frustrated.

I got up to see what the problem was, wondering how he could possibly be getting zero results from Google if he was in fact typing in the correct words. I sat next to him and looked at his screen. I froze. I wouldn't describe it as horror, but what I felt was very close. It was like what I felt during 'The Crying Game' when you see that guy's cock (and no, I don't mean arousal). I was in shock.

"So what's wrong with this damn thing?" My father asked. It was a question that had to be answered with caution.
"Can you see okay?" I asked. "I mean, are your glasses alright?"
"Of course they are." He responded quickly.

Looking at his screen I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. I had told him to search for "German Shepherd Puppies." What he had typed in was very much not "German Shepherd Puppies." Into the Google search box, my father had typed and then attempted to search for: "germanshephardhardpubbies"

No spaces. Just twenty-five consecutive letters. Letters, which when put together, spell absolutely nothing.

I've used Google hundreds of times if not more. Whenever I've seached for anything, anything at all, even if I mispell it, Google gives me something. Even if it's just a "did you mean -----." It always offers something to it's searching clientel. If you blindly mash the keypad, Google still gives you something back. This time - this one time - my father had stumped the mighty Google. It had nothing. Not a clue. No idea what this person was searching for. There wasn't even a link to an eBay auction for some related item. Apparently, nobody on eBay was selling any germanshephardhardpubbies that week. Not even in eBay stores.

I like to think that at the moment my dad clicked "search" that a siren went off at Google headquarters, and some supervisor had to rush to his desk to find out why a search on his website was unsuccessful. And I like to think that when he saw that someone had searched for germanshephardhardpubbies that he panicked. There's just no way they could prepare for such a search inquiry. Nothing they could do. At that moment, he would have realized that Google would never be able to handle every query imaginable. It would never be perfect, infallible. In the still of that moment, I like to think he put a small revlolver in his mouth and took his own life.

I asked my father if what he had typed looked right to him. If that was really what he had intended to write. He peered at his work. Leaned in for a closer look. Suddenly, he rolled his head back.
"Oh, of course," he said. "Those shouldn't be d's, they should be b's." He then deleted the b's he already incorrectly used to spell 'pubbies,' (and had just mistaken for d's), and typed the b's again.
"There," he said, and clicked 'search.'

When no results came back, he said what has become a common phrase for my parents regarding their computer - "I give up."

"Dad?" I was willing to let the spelling mistakes go. Many people have thought (and probably do think) that shepherd is spelled 'shephard' (we even have a friend who is blindly convinced that the word 'definitely' has an 'a' in it). Certainly, the presence of a second 'hard' in the spelling is troubling, as is the insistence on two b's in a word that contains no b's at all. Those are all issues that could easily be explained away by someone just being a bad speller. Or so I was willing to believe.

What cannot be explained away, especially for a man who is as avid a reader as I have seen my father be, is the fact that he didn't seperate the words with spaces. This is something you learn at the very beginning of school. From the very moment you start writing anything, you learn that words are seperated with spaces. Even my borderline illiterate friend (and fellow blogger) from high school, who cheated off of me in 3rd Grade because he couldn't spell 'elephant,' failed an AP Chemistry test because he forgot the 'L' in 'nickel' and even recieved a below average grade on a creative writing assignment for mispelling 'the' (no e) understands to space words apart from each other (even if most of the words being spaced are horribly mispelled).

"Why didn't you put spaces between the words?"
My dad responded the way I should have expected him to. Really, the only way he could. His response was perfect. It could not be refuted or argued. It was perfect in its simplicity.
"Because you didn't tell me to. You just said German Shepherd Puppies."

And like that, I was defeated.