There oughtta be flashing lights and bells that go off before you download a new version of Safari onto your mother’s MacBook. What’s the big deal, you ask?

Well. For weeks every time Mom’s gone to her Gmail inbox she’s seen a message at the top of the page that reads “You’re using an old tired browser with rime-coated whiskers and creaky joints and no teeth. Please go here and get a new improved one.”* I decided to fix that. So I went looking for the newest and shiniest version of Safari I could find, which was something like version 7.x.x. I downloaded it and tried to start it up. Poof! An error message appeared which said “You are a flawed person, running capitalist dog. You are trying to initiate a version of Safari for which you must have Operating System 10.9, not the measly 5.6.1 you’ve got. Go ye forth and correct your error!”*

Well crap. Since the browser won’t work with the OS I’ve got, I can’t just download OS X. Mom has never had a need for an Apple ID, so we had to create one in order to try to get OS X from the Apple Store. We created a profile and Apple sent a verification email to Mom’s inbox. But because the only browser is incompatible with the OS, when I tried to click the “verify email” button in the mail Apple sent, I got an error message saying “No application found with which to do that, dingbat!”*

I think I found a workaround using my desktop in the back room, but we won’t know till tomorrow. What a frustrating several hours!

*Message not strictly verbatim.