ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

A couple of weekends ago my grandma called me up and invited me to a small party she was having at her house the weekend after Christmas. It was today. So I threw together a layered bean dip this morning and took it over there this afternoon. During dinner, the screen saver on my grandma’s computer came up.

“Dammit,” said my grandma. “In a minute it’s going to show all these naked pictures and the grandkids are here!”

This provoked a lot of laughs. My grandma explained that she has been having some serious problems with her computer over the last few months. At some point in the nebulous past, her screen saver began displaying strange, pornographic pictures. She didn’t know what to do about it, and since she doesn’t really care that much herself unless people are over, she just left it alone because she was afraid to make it worse. As she told us this story, we ate dinner and watched her screen saver, which was actually rather entertaining. In between the typical types of shit that old ladies like to exchange through e-mail, like pictures of baby pigs dressed in christening gowns, or puppies and baby seals snuggling together, were some hilariously weird nude pictures.

One of the series of photographs was of some kind of (gay pride?) parade. The most prominent subject was a completely nude tranny with beautiful curly hair, painted bright pink from head to toe and riding a bicycle. Our motley little dinner party, which consisted of me, my grandma, my 30 year old cousin and his pregnant wife, and my uncle’s 17 year stepdaughter, could not stop laughing about this.

“Even his pecker is painted!” laughed my cousin. Pecker! Ha, ha! The word pecker is so funny!

“That’s the saddest pecker I ever saw!” I said.

“If I were a pecker painted pink, I’d be sad too!” said my cousin’s wife. She was laughing so hard at the painted tranny on my grandma’s computer that she couldn’t eat.

After dinner I sat down and tackled my grandma’s complaints about her computer. The screen saver problem turned out to stem from the fact that her screen saver fed from the “My Documents” folder, which happens to be a repository for every single e-mail my grandma has ever received, which probably includes tons of filthy spam messages. I asked her if there were any that were particularly bad. She told me that she thinks the big boob pictures are not the end of the world, but asked me to take off the series of photographs of enormously fat blacktina women bending over showing off their naked parts, since she was embarrassed to have the younger grandchildren over if this would just pop up out of nowhere. I went through and looked for the worst offenders and deleted them. I figure doing this every time I go over will be easier than trying to teach her how to do it herself.

The second problem was that the sound was broken, hadn’t worked for weeks, and she was pretty sure she needed new speakers because she couldn’t think of anything else. I showed her how to look at the little speaker in the tray to see if her volume was muted (it was). The third problem was that she had purchased a fancy ergonomic keyboard a couple weeks ago but couldn’t get it to work. It turned out that her old keyboard had the old PS2 port and the new one was USB and Windows 98 wasn’t recognizing it. Yep, Windows 98! I plugged in the keyboard for her. She was very excited about this because now that she has sound and her new keyboard, she can watch the backlog of puppy and kitten videos sent by her friends, which she has been missing out on for the past few weeks.

The cool thing about grandmas is that you can do something for them that is totally not a big deal, and they will act like you have cured cancer, won the Olympics and saved the ozone layer. I overheard her bragging to her friend later about how her computer was broken, but I “fixed” it. In reality, I hardly did anything. But I love it that it meant something to her even though it was no big deal to me.

Later I came home and told my boyfriend this story. We spent like 10 minutes on Google Images searching for every variation on the concept of “painted tranny bicycle parade” we could think of, but we couldn’t find the pictures. Too bad. It really was the saddest pecker ever.