"Are you sure?"

Kid, now 6, loves to play Lego Batman 2 on my laptop. I even got him XBox controller to play it with. At first he needed help with some parts (some tricky jumps mostly) but it seems he has gained some skill there as he managed to completely finish the story with just small help here and there.

Then he found out that after finishing the game that you can play with any (unlocked) characters you want, anytime. Talk about excitement! I'm guessing the save he was using was nearing 70% completion or so.

Now, I deal with the problems of my clients often. Many people seem to learn technology with a method of "press this, then three times this, then this". They do not read what is on the screen, they just press the memorized-by-rote combination. And if anything they didn't expect shows up (like an error message), they way too often don't even bother reading it and instead start wildly pressing anything and everything to make the error go away.

After that they typically call me.

Take a deep breath. Count to ... well, three, as it is a phone call and I can't really delay much longer. And calmly explain them how to salvage whatever's salvageable at that point. Really, that's all I can do. And quite often, that's all that needs to be done. Next time they (hopefully) are wiser.

I'm pretty sure kid isn't like that. He seems to be - in general - remarkably resourceful when figuring out how to get whatever he wants. At the moment he doesn't read because he can't - yet at least. And I'm guessing that's why he chose "new game" and then his (70-ish percent complete) save slot.. and then even confirmed the erase of the old save...

...And proceeded to ask why there was the (unskippable) intro movie playing, again.

After I figured out and explained to him what had happened he took it relatively calmly. But he hasn't asked to play that game again afterwards either... But then again, I wouldn't be too happy to start everything over again either.

Lesson learned. Maybe. Hopefully.