The Meaning of the IT Course

elcerly techThis day gets a perfect five. That is…a perfect five out of ten. It’s perfectly balanced right down the middle. My entire world has been shattered by a revelation, but it opens up a whole new one, so…well, I’m still deciding how I feel about this.

Now, you know computers. Those blinking things that do all the whizzbang stuff, you may have heard of them. I recently heard that my grandson was doing an IT course somewhere in Melbourne, and naturally I didn’t know what that was or if I should be afraid for his future prospects. The first thing that came to mind was ‘Ink Tattooing’, and I nearly had a heart attack. But then, David is such a nice boy. Listens to nice, quiet guitar music, good grades. And he doesn’t have any tattoos, so it probably wasn’t that. I soon discovered that IT stands for ‘information technology’. That didn’t mean much, and it seemed a bit vague to be doing an IT course, given how much information there was in the world. How would such a course work? Do they teach you to remember facts? Ah, but no…my neighbour said that it was to do with computers, those blinky things I mentioned earlier. So David is learning to make them? No, he makes the things that go inside them. The blinky bits that makes them go all noisy and flashy.

This all flew over my head, so next time they came over for Sunday brunch, I asked David to explain it to me. What he said also flew over my head- there was something about software development, or some such thing- so he made it very easy. He picked up my alarm clock and said that computers were just like that, but more complex. I thought he was having a joke, especially when he said that my oven timer was also just a simple computer. Slowly, I realised. Computers are everywhere…and have been everywhere…for years! Since I was born! Golly, everything is a computer, come to think of it. My pacemaker, everything. Do people do software development for pacemakers? And now David wants to go along and do some extra game design course…and that has nothing to do with ludo, or even scrabble. It’s a wondrous world we live in indeed. Wondrous, and a little bit terrifying.