My Computer Guy

I have a good friend who for the past 10 years has been my 'computer guy'. He gives me great advice when I'm buying new machines. He sets up my computer with all the 'good stuff'. He fixes all the things that go wrong. And when I call him in a panic because Word is locking me out of my 'final assignment' documents, he somehow manages to calm my nerves, fix the problem, and send me on my way, a little smarter than before. He has never let me down. And he has never made me feel like a complete and total moron, even when I know that somewhere inside he's just rolling his eyes in disbelief! When it comes to the things I don't know, but should....his patience is infinite!
Today I got a little taste of what he must feel like when dealing with computer geniuses like me!
It was a Speaking class. Beginner level. The topics for review were, 'using there is/there are to describe rooms' and 'prepositions of place' and 'names of furniture'. "Standard" activities apply. There's the 'describe a room', the 'find the differences between the two rooms', and the 'design your room, and dictate it to your partner who will draw it' activities. You can find them in ANY textbook.....page 16.
I decided to spice it up a little bit by taking activity #3 into the lab. There is a great little game-like program at http://www.allfungirlsgames.com/play-game/room-maker/ where you can click on cute little bits of furniture, and design your room any way you like. It's fun and EASY! I got students to design their own room, print it out, and then use their printouts to play a game where they describe the room to a partner who will try to recreate the room on the website, based on the description they hear...no cheating...no looking at partner's printout!
I expected it to take 30-40 minutes. It took 65.
The game was fun, and the students really seemed to enjoy making their rooms. Some of them even wanted to email themselves the rooms, so they could remember them later!
The technical difficulties left my head spinning!
These are supposed to be the kids of the "internet generation".... you know... the ones who grew up with binary code running through their veins, and who ate Web 2.0 for breakfast!!! THEY should be teaching ME how to build rooms, office towers, themeparks, and virtual cities!!! THEY should be teaching ME how to hack into IKEA and steal room designs right off the drawing boards!!!
They couldn't sign in. They couldn't figure out where to enter the address, putting it in Google, rather than the address bar. They couldn't see that they used dots instead of slashes, and that they had too many spaces between the words 'all fun  girls.  com../ play// game-s /./"...  and why wouldn't that work??? They couldn't make the computer print. They deleted it all by accident. They turned it off by mistake and couldn't get it to open again. They couldn't sign out.
I felt like my 'tech-friend' who can surely see how dumb I am, but who patiently persists, showing me my mistakes, and waiting for me to get it right.....again....and again.....and again.
I wonder if I'm going to hear complaints now...about how we spent too much time 'playing games' and not enough time 'studying'. I hope they don't lose sight of the fact that we DID practice "there is/there are", "prepositions of place", "names of furniture", "adjectives", along with plenty of speaking skills...."speaking", "listening", "asking questions", "asking for clarification". I hope the language learning has not gotten lost in the confusion.
Confusion we had aplenty....   Computer guy.... I could learn a thing or two from you.