Showing my conjugator to my father

In the 80s, as I was still in the French Navy, in my spare time, I had written a program to conjugate all the French verbs, a conjugator.

The data came from a French dictionary and from a very popular book of conjugations of French verbs. I had entered all this data manually.

You could enter any verbal form and the program would display the full conjugation of all the verbs that include this verbal form.

My father had never liked computers. I think he was afraid of them, because he did not understand how they worked.

I told him that I had written this conjugator program and I wanted to show it to him. He was very reticent but finally I was able sit him in front of my computer.

After I explained how this conjugator worked, I asked him to give me any verbal form he wanted to demonstrate the capabilities of the program.

He chose "aille". He expected the program to display the verb "aller" (to go), where "aille" is in the present subjunctive.

So, I entered "aille" and the first verb displayed was "ailler", where "aille" is in the present indicative. "Ail" in French means garlic and the verb "ailler" means "to add garlic to", for example to a leg of lamb. My father did not know of this verb and considered that it was not a real French verb.

Even after I pressed "next" and the program displayed the conjugation of the verb "aller", he was still convinced that my program was useless. That reinforced his dislike of computers.