Esther Hearne, 101
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Palestine, Texas
Timothy Triplett, 52
President, Coherent Technologies Inc., Palestine, Texas
Timothy Triplett hadn’t seen his 2nd-grade teacher in 45 years. Then in December, he ran into Esther Hearne, who will turn 102 in March, while she was giving tours through a Palestine, Texas, house during the town’s annual festival of homes.
“It was like I was back in 2nd grade,” said Triplett, 52. “She remembered me.”
“He looked the same, just taller,” Hearne said.
She told him she had a computer (“that’s pretty good, me being 102!”) and he told her he had a computer company. Triplett is an electrical engineer and uses software to help clients automate their manufacturing processes.
“I had forgotten all I had learned [about computers],” she said. “Which wasn’t that much.”
So the teacher asked her former student for help with her computer.
“I told her I’d be glad to do it,” Triplett said.
Since that day, Triplett has worked with Hearne twice a week for about three hours at a time.
And it wasn’t long before they realized the old Compaq wasn’t going to cut it. So Triplett bought her a high-end Dell Dimension 4600C desktop with a 19-inch LCD flat-panel monitor (about $1,900 at www.dell.com).
Hearne complains that Triplett has not accepted a penny for his time or the computer. But he won’t hear of it:
“I told her she didn’t charge me for the 2nd grade, and I’m not going to charge her for this.”
The lessons began with the basics. Triplett showed Hearne the lay of the land on the keyboard and how to move the mouse around the screen.
To simplify the keyboard for Hearne, the engineer turned all the non-essential keys like Control and Alt into Shift keys.
“A lot of times, older people push a key at the bottom of the keyboard thinking they’re doing a Shift,” he said. “Instead, they do a Control or an Alt and strange things happen. And they think they broke the computer.”
The complex remapping process is detailed at Microsoft’s Web site (www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/input/w2kscan-map.mspx).
To help his teacher see the text, Triplett programmed the default font to display at 36 points, about three times the normal size.
“I don’t hear very well and I don’t see very well, so he made the letters big,” said Hearne. “First he made them huge, and then he kept making them smaller and stopped where I could still read them.”
Triplett also arranged for high-speed Internet access. Dial-up, he said, created a risk far greater than slow speeds.
“Not tying up the phone line in case of emergency was an important thing from my perspective,” he said. “This is not a place to cut corners.”
So why does the married entrepreneur spend about six hours each week teaching his 101-year-old 2nd-grade teacher how to use the computer?
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“I believe that I crossed paths with Mrs. Hearne for a reason. Technology is easy for me–but it’s not easy for everyone. I view it as my responsibility to take that gift and help people use technology to accomplish their goals.”
He sure has helped Mrs. Hearne.
“Oh, gosh!” she said happily. “They have made my life, Timothy and that computer. Meeting him and getting a [new PC] has just been the secret to keeping me busy lately.”
Which is a big deal coming from a woman who credits her longevity and, more important, her happiness to “just staying busy.”
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