The Simple Application Fallacy

There is no such thing as a simple application. I recently joined a community initiative to organize a flea market in our neighborhood. Our neighbor is a lovely lady in her third age who nocks at our door whenever she has a technical problem. In that lazy morning she came by, apparently in a hurry, asking me if I knew a practical way to extract information from email messages to populate a spreadsheet. She had to get ready for this because people would start registering in three days by email and that was the agreed procedure with the rest of the team. When she tried to demonstrate her intent in her laptop, it became immediately clear she was not going anywhere with her limited computer abilities.