Our son is home for the holidays after surviving his first semester of law school.  Fresh off exams, he is reading for enjoyment (in his case, large history books) and catching up with friends.  The other night he asked to use my computer to check Facebook.  Afraid my computer was allergic to Facebook (I am not on said site), I asked him why he couldn’t use his own computer.

He said that, just before finals, he loaded productivity software onto his computer and now was blocked from accessing Facebook.   My reaction:  why would you load potentially virus-laden, pirated spreadsheet, calendar, and word-processing software onto your computer and risk losing the ability to access the internet?  My view of productivity software is Microsoft Office or something similar, and I was prepared to assist in helping him remove whatever virus had infected his system.

Wrong!

Apparently in the modern student vernacular, productivity software is a program that blocks internet access to any potentially distracting sites during the period when that student should be studying for finals.  It was a simpler time when the only distraction one had was the TV in the student lounge that got all of 3 channels — nobody thought to unplug it.