My daughter e-mailed me on Thursday that my grandson, Mikey, had finally agreed to upgrade his Yahoo Messenger chat program and that I should log on and chat with him. So when I returned to the hotel room after work, I logged on and initiated a chat session with him.

Now, it’s important to know that Mikey’s Asperger’s seems to be responsible for contributing to his being very obsessive about computers. He always has computers and operating systems, especially Windows, on his mind and can talk to you non-stop for hours about which OS version is better and the various dialog boxes you can find by committing errors. He’s only 7, for goodness sake, and he knows more about the subject than a lot of adults and it was all self-taught. As with a lot of Asperger folks, social skills are something that always require a little extra attention since it’s an area of difficulty for them to integrate into their thinking and lives.

So I really shouldn’t have been surprised by the beginning of our chat session, which I screen-captured and altered for privacy concerns below, when I started to chat with him.

My little buddy keeps me smiling. I miss him, and his sister, all the time when I’m on the road.