“Nah, give it to Britney,” suggested Brad.
“Fine,” said his mother, taking the CD back and walking toward the back of her house, to her bedroom. On the way, she knocked on the door of Brad’s twin sister Britney.
“What?” came the response.
Taking that as an invitation to open the door, Vanessa did so and saw her average-looking daughter sprawled out on her bed reading a fashion magazine.
“I bought this computer program today,” said Vanessa, holding up the CD. “Your brother didn’t want it.”
“What is it? Some stupid game?” Britney didn’t look up.
“It’s some kind of organizer.”
Now Britney raised her brown eyes to meet her mother’s. “Whatever. Just leave it by the computer.”
“Weren’t you just telling me the other day...”
Britney rolled her eyes. “Okay, Mom, okay.”
Vanessa left the disk on her daughter’s desk, then left the room, closing the door behind her.
Britney would never have admitted to her mother that she’d actually been interested in an organization program, but she did put the magazine down, sit at her desk, and load the program into her PC.
A window popped up and some cheesy music played while the program’s logo appeared on-screen. “Universal Program,” it said, with the tag line “Organize Your World, However You Want It!”
The logo disappeared, and a new window popped up:
Welcome to Universal Program! Please make a selection:
1) Individual Organizer
2) Group Organizer
3) Population Organizer
Britney had decided she’d start by organizing her schoolwork, but that option didn’t seem particularly obvious. Finally she decided that the program would want to “group” her assignments; she hit the number 2.
Please select one of the following pre-selected groups, “M” for more pre-selected groups, or “C” to create a custom group:
1) Smith Family (All)
2) Smith Family (Children Only)
3) Smith Family (Parents Only)
4) Smith Family (Males Only)
5) Smith Family (Females Only)
6) Dewey High School (All Students)
7) Dewey High School (All Seniors)
8) Dewey High School (All Male Students)
9) Dewey High School (All Female Students)
The list puzzled Britney briefly -- how did the computer program know her last name and the high school she attended? She finally decided it must have accessed her Facebook profile, or something like that.
She still wasn’t sure which option would help her organize her schoolwork, but she chose 9.
Now the window contained the instruction Enter name for initial template, or select Average or Random, along with a text box and buttons labeled “Average” and “Random.” That was puzzling again, but she shrugged and typed “Britney Smith” into the text box.
What then popped up was a very realistic-looking representation of Britney, a head-to-toe model standing on one side of the screen, dressed in the very T-shirt and jeans she was currently wearing. On the other side of the screen were boxes containing a variety of data: age, sex, height, and so on, and there were options to display more data.
They all looked accurate. Britney was impressed, if not a little scared, because she was pretty sure most of that information wasn’t on Facebook.
She noticed that each piece of data had an up/down arrow next to it, and it appeared that she could type over it. She still wasn’t sure how she could use this program to organize her schoolwork, but she decided to play around with the data. The change she made was...
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