What's an internet browser?

I wrote last week about the realization that the dictionary is nothing more than an endless loop of synonyms, and you had to have an implicit understanding of at least one of the words in the loop to be able to understand any of the words in that group (see post on “quitting”). If you don’t, you are, in a word, screwed.

Interestingly, this concept was validated this week when I was confronted with a need to define “internet browser” and had no ability to do anything other than throw synonym after synonym against a blank wall. Nothing stuck.

This all came about when I was describing to one gentleman that he had to go to his internet browser and type in a particular website address to access the site to enter his hours each week for a certain client. There was no app, I explained.

Contractor: What’s an internet browser?

Uuhhhh...the thing you use to access the internet?...Google Chrome. Firefox. Explorer (which I think was shut down?). Microsoft Edge (Explorer replacement?). Safari. AOL (which I am almost certain was shut down, and now I’m just dating myself by admitting that I used it at one point in my life...on dial-up, no less). Whatever the heck platform your computer, tablet, or phone has for the internet. Those are called browsers.

To make a short story long, I didn’t really know what to say to explain to this person what, exactly, an internet browser is. After a few moments of silence – during which a rapid series of cartoon thought bubbles filled with all of the characters you find when you press SHIFT + Number keys floated around my head – I finally asked what phone he used. Having worked out that we were dealing with an iPhone, I told him that he needed to go to Safari and copy/paste the contents of the text that I was about to send him into the search bar. This would enable him to get to the website where he would enter and submit his timecard for the previous week. I also pointed out that he needed to remember all of this because he would be entering his timecard the exact same way every week until he was converted to a permanent employee.

Or, rather, if he was converted to a permanent employee. Which, frankly, maybe wasn’t too much of a stretch. I have reason to believe he has rarely managed to complete a timesheet since, and companies do like people who donate hours.

Although that does tend to lead to lawsuits, so maybe we should pivot back to the “if” statement.

Before ending this initial conversation, though, and almost as an afterthought, I added the one last point that Safari was the internet browser developed by Apple. The silence that greeted this statement suggested that perhaps the information wasn’t welcome. Or maybe he had just hung up.