'E-mail printer box'

My grandpa embraced 20th-century inventions like most people would embrace cacti, with the exception of those great big TV satellites in the backyard that brought him the all-Westerns channel until John Wayne and the rest moved their wagons to digital satellite.

No cell phone, no computer; and no real negative attitude toward it from my perspective. Just a general disinterest, I suppose.

But no more.

I thought it was a joke when I first read it: "Grandpa now has an e-mail printer box." I was thinking "you mean a computer?" No, my aunt meant an e-mail printer box.

Dave described it as 1950s meets 2007: It's a box that literally just prints letters the family e-mails him, like a fax machine would, I suppose. He can't send email back, and I'm pretty sure it's not a computer thing (I can't picture that grandpa with a mouse in his hand ...). Like a phone without a speaker. A TV without a remote. It's printer without a computer.

But I suppose it's a good thing. I e-mailed him already.

But this concept, this e-mail printer box.

Where did that come from? Who thought of that? Who sat there holding the phone under their chin and thought to themselves "You know, Aunt Edna's all right, and I feel like I should call her, but I don't want to sit here and talk about joint pain and her lousy son-in-law all night. EUREEKA. Let's build a box! A printer box! I can e-mail her! And she can't even e-mail back! It's the contact without the 'personal' part. SUCCESS."

Though I should point out for the record, my grandpa doesn't talk about joint pain or sons-in-law, that I know of. Just John Wayne.