This thread is gold! My parents have been living in a technology vacuum since around 2003, showing no acknowledgement at all of the way the world has progressed other than very occasionally peppering conversation with some doom and gloom warning about the internet that they’ve picked up from the Daily Fail. The one that sticks in the mind was my cousin (around 19 at the time) being quite proud that he’d mastered a bmx stunt after following youtube tutorials. My dad burst into the conversation, quite upset, declaring that “The You Tubes” cause people to commit suicide and cousin must never ever watch The You Tubes again. Both of them regularly howl in frustration at their own pretty standard landline phone because they can never remember which buttons (green or red) answer and end the calls.
Anyway, despite all this, mum decided about two years ago that she was going to get one of those smartphone things (she’d previously had the same brick since 2002). I recommended the Doro but she took offence at the fact that it was marketed towards old people and instead somehow found and purchased a £10 smartphone from a random brand that nobody had ever heard of. She insisted it would do exactly the same as those fancy iphones but she was not going to pay a ridiculous sum of money for a phone. This thing was utterly unfathomable. DH and I regularly flit between Samsung and iphone models and consider ourselves quite techy but this phone defied logic in usability. Obviously, our inability to use or troubleshoot issues for DM just vindicated her belief that these things are far too complicated.
We did eventually persuade her to give up that phone and instead splash out on a basic Samsung model, explaining that although she’d have to spend over £100, the phone would be easier to use. She did actually get to grips with it quite well and hasn’t looked back since then but, like a pp said, she did have the unfortunate habit of somehow jabbing and swiping the screen at the same time which obviously ended up with the phone not doing what she wanted. One of her friends bought her a stylus to combat that and now she sits happily tapping away, albeit very slowly so we get the constant “mum is typing” notifications, followed by a one word message around fifteen minutes later. She also likes to have the keypad sound on which everyone else around her finds extremely annoying (“beep……. Beep…….beep….beep….oh no, I’ve misspelt that and have to delete….beep beep beep beep. Deep breath. Beep….. beep…. Beep….) and I have regularly video calls with the underside of her chin.
She joined facebook a while ago so that she could keep up to date with the family. She reposts Britain First memes on a daily basis, likes and comments on every photo posted by anyone she knows, joins in practically every conversation, even if it has nothing to do with her, posts messages in public that really should be private, responds to each and every post she says that says something like “I bet you can’t name a city beginning with the letter A”, reposts things like the dog with ham on his face, or pictures of children with disabilities saying they were told nobody would like their photo, tags herself in any group photos which include her but refuses to give herself a profile photo (so she’s still got the basic silhouette profile) because if facebook knows what she looks like, they will let someone steal her identity.
At least she tries though. Meanwhile my dad doesn’t even have a brick phone and is aghast that she would have brought such a thing into their house. He doesn’t like or trust computers at all and everything that ever goes wrong, from the TV breaking to either one of them coming down with the common cold is blamed on the fact that she uses “that thing” and it is creating invisible electric waves which are disrupting the house.