Hughie Ferguson, Kevin Ferguson, and the Australian Euchre Game
by Dave Ferguson
My parents came from Detroit to visit us in northern Virginia several times. It may have been their first visit to the house we had on Gainsborough Drive in Fairfax County. I don’t recall the year, but Kevin, my youngest, wasn’t very old — maybe 10.
Kevin was bright but sometimes shy, and my parents were mostly strangers to him. Since I knew Dad liked playing cards, I got the two of them together and suggested that Kevin show grandpa how to play solitaire on the computer. They headed off to the upstairs room where the computer was.
The next day, Kevin told me he’d gotten up in the middle of the night and found grandpa on the computer, still playing solitaire.
I felt like showing off Kevin a bit more, so I took mom and dad up to the computer room with him.
I said, “Kevin showed you how to play solitaire. But you probably want to play some other card games, too.”
Dad said he liked all kinds of games, like cribbage and euchre.
“Good,” I said. “Kevin, why don’t you see if any other computers know anything about euchre?”
Kevin used a search engine — I don’t think Google was available yet. I explained the result to my parents.
“Kevin just asked this computer to ask other computers if they know anything about euchre. It asked 12 million computers (or whatever the number was), and it said that these 120,000 do.”
They were impressed.
Kevin and I studied the list of results.
“Okay, it looks like this computer in Australia might have a euchre game. Let’s go see.”
Kevin went to that site, and sure enough, they had a euchre game.
“Now Kevin’s asking that computer in Australia to let us have a copy.”
A few minutes later, the file was downloaded.
“All right, Kevin,” I said. “Let’s start the file up.”
Kevin knew what he was doing. Less than 10 minutes after we began, he started up the euchre game. I turned to Dad.
“Now, I don’t know how to play euchre, and neither does Kevin. But if you tell him what’s supposed to happen, he’ll figure out how to make it happen on the computer.”
By the end of the visit, Kevin and Dad were getting along just fine, and Dad got in a lot of euchre.
Characters • Ferguson, David • Ferguson, Hughie • Ferguson, Kevin • Stories • told by David Ferguson | Dave Ferguson February 15, 2006
