Can we ban them?
My elderly and widowed mother is a bloody nightmare with any computers. Trying to fix her problems remotely while being unable to see what is on screen or what she is gaily clicking without telling me is an absolute nightmare.
Her E-Mail has some sort of issue (no idea what) so tried to get her to log into gmail on the intranet. Easy? P1ss off.
After half an hour of shouting “don’t click that” and “what have you pressed now” including highlights of:
- ten minutes trying to get her to type “google” into the address bar in the right place
- a brief but entertaining trip to Bing AI
- Stopping her creating a Google classroom account
I finally got her to log in in the right place. I’ll swear I have several more grey hairs as a result.
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On a serious note though, often they have no choice.
It drives Ma Coffee mad when she calls someone - a utility, shop or government department - to transact a simple bit of business, and she's told "oh it's simple, you just need to go online to do that, no I'm sorry I can't do it for you over the phone."
It's never simple, especially if you're over 70. She ends up feeling useless and stupid and not getting done what should have taken two minutes over the phone.
With an ageing population and ever more importan e placed on inclusion, why make like unnecessarily hard for oldies? These processes are invented by 20-something digital natives with zero empathy. They might be simple to them, but not to a lot of the people who need to use them.
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