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Oldest Son's high school issued laptops to all students this year.  Oldest ran into problems today trying to use it to do his homework.  The file permissions have gotten screwed up, and he doesn't have the correct permissions to save to the hard drive.  So he can't do his homework (on the laptop). 

I proposed several options.

One of the things I suggested was that he email his teachers and let them know he was having problems and might not get his homework done.  This was HUGELY upsetting to him.  He had a hard time articulating why he was so opposed to this idea.  The clearest statement he was able to make about it was that he doesn't like communicating with people who aren't here. 

I can only recall one time that I had a similar reaction.  I remember my viola professor asking me to mark the dynamics on a piece of music by writing the volume numbers I'd use on my stereo.  I REALLY didn't like that idea, for reasons that I still can't quite understand, let alone articulate.

We did eventually come up with a solution.  He plugged a flash drive into the computer and was able to save files onto it.