There comes a time in life when your role and your parents’ get reversed. Where your parents once stopped you from putting ants into your mouth as a child, you now stop them from downloading bugs into their devices. The switch-around couldn’t be more apparent than when you’re trying to impart the ways of Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp to them.
Take my folks, for instance. It’s been years since my brother and I hooked them up to cyberspace, and I’m still familiarising them with screen gestures such as tapping, swiping up and holding for two seconds… no, that’s a tap if you don’t keep your finger on the screen. No, you have to hold within that box, not anywhere else. It’ll work lah, just wait.
For someone who can’t totter faster than a toddler learning his initial steps, my 79-year-old father is especially impatient with technology. I pray every day to the technology gods for patience, largely for myself though. But I have been rather unlucky. The ticket for tech support almost always comes before an urgent work deadline with an awkwardly typed message such as: How to send photo ?
That is how my father spaces out the words in his text messages. This is a man who writes in cursive and attaches notes that start with “Dear Khim” when he forwards me mail. (Just to be clear, I am talking about mail in its physical form.)
But when it comes to text messages, all rules are out of the window.
"Hello? How do I call you ah?" (Photo: iStock/boonstudio)
Bless him for having an enquiring mind but how do you answer questions such as, why are there so many steps before I can send a message or email? And let's not revisit emojis and gifs for a while after several failed in-person tutorials with him. My consolation is, at least he now knows how to access the punctuation keys on his smartphone.
On the other hand, my mother at age 78 is a realist who knows she isn’t cut out to navigate the tricky waters of text messages. So, she calls me instead. Like the time when she rang me on her smartphone to ask: How to call you ah? I was confused. Four minutes into the conversation, I realised she meant using WiFi to call me.
Bi-weekly video calls with the folks and my overseas brother are an adventure, too. It’s like playing Skype gachapon because you never know what you'll get. Will they know how to answer the call this time? Do they remember how to switch on the camera and microphone? When they finally appear, there’s always a gap wider than the Strait of Johor between them, so I guess it doesn't matter if they can't work the camera.
IS IT LOUSY MEMORY, LAO HUA OR SOMETHING ELSE?
I get that it’s a whole new world for elderly parents who never had to download apps or scan QR codes to pay for a cup of coffee until now. Back then, their greatest concern at the payment counter was likely, does the cashier have enough change for a S$10 bill?
Video calls with senior parents are like playing Skype gachapon – you never know what you'll get. (Photo: iStock/FatCamera)
When it comes to memory work, it was about recalling the telephone number of an obscure relative, or the auspicious-sounding licence-plate number of the car that got rear-ended this morning for a 4D bet.
These days, it’s about passwords or rather, my parents’ inability to remember them. Long story short, I have discovered at least three new email and social media accounts created for them by relatives, friends and strangers at the community club. I was alarmed. On hindsight, if a desperate aunty or uncle asks me how to download CDC vouchers – and have no idea what a password is, let alone remember one – I would perform such an Internet intervention as an act of public service.
Before you chide me for leaving my parents to their own devices quite literally, I try my best to help via video calls, texted screen grabs and emails.
It’s also not unimaginable for me to walk in their shoes because I’m already wearing them. I chafe at having to create new passwords that require the right combination of letters, numbers, unique characters and a quarter of my liver.
I pause for a good minute when I try to recall my laptop password after just one weekend. I can’t read text messages without my lao hua (presbyopia) glasses, despite switching to the largest font size known to mankind.
Hands up, if you're familiar with providing technical support for senior users. (Photo: iStock/SDI Productions)
And I’m sure I’m pesky to the millennials on my team (How do I fit my videos under a minute? I did what you said but my footage is still so blurry! Hello? Are you still there?).
But I wonder if it’s just failing memory and eyesight that are stumbling blocks for seniors? On a subreddit thread, user Taanistat shared that their father “seems to think that if he wasn't born with the knowledge or ability to do something, then it isn't worth doing. That is unless it's something that he wants to do... like cruise Ebay for pocket knives and antique glassware that he collects.
"It's gone from funny, to amusing, to mildly irritating, to frustrating, to nearly rage inducing. It's just exasperating and exhausting”.
My emotional landscape mirrors Taanistat's each time I see my mother’s exercise book neatly filled with the 4D-number permutations she’d ever put money on – but nary a single password.
HESITATION AND MISINFORMATION
As keen as I am to expand my parents’ digital horizon (wood-working tutorials for my father and cooking videos for my mother), I have my trepidations.
Going by my mother’s online behaviour especially, it is only a matter of time before she gets scammed. (Touch wood.) She clicks on just about any link that social media floats up in her feed.
Mum is every marketer’s dream because she believes everything she reads, watches or is told – except what her children tell her about cyber security for seniors. My only consolation is that she has no interest in knowing how to use PayLah! or online banking services.
Do your senior parents trust aunty influencers more than you? (Photo: iStock/Butsaya)
Just how worrisome is my mum? At one point, she wanted to track down a certain joint-cracking Chinese sinseh influencer she’d seen on YouTube treating everything from frozen shoulder to indigestion.
Her most recent endeavour? My father is recovering from a fall and she, after watching another influencer proclaim eggs bad for wound healing, made sure the household was entirely egg-free. My repeated admonitions to seek a dietitian’s advice didn’t get through, of course, because I’m not an influencer like the ones she follows.
If my mother is the maniacal driver on the Internet superhighway, my father is the complete opposite. He stops, checks and rechecks at every intersection. He hesitates to click, tap or swipe on anything, and would only do so after affirming the consequences via countless screen grabs from my brother and me – then gets impatient when the link takes a nanosecond longer than he'd expected to load.
But for all their cyber idiosyncrasies, I suppose I should be thankful that my mother hasn’t racked up online debts or gotten POFMA-ed by the government for spreading false information. Or my father for completely giving up on the Internet and retreating into his uncle cave for good.
Another positive sign that I am starting to get through to them: Just recently, my father responded with a thumbs-up emoji to my text message. (Insert flamenco dancer emoji.)
I guess I don’t have to quit my day job and become an influencer after all.
Continue reading...
Take my folks, for instance. It’s been years since my brother and I hooked them up to cyberspace, and I’m still familiarising them with screen gestures such as tapping, swiping up and holding for two seconds… no, that’s a tap if you don’t keep your finger on the screen. No, you have to hold within that box, not anywhere else. It’ll work lah, just wait.
For someone who can’t totter faster than a toddler learning his initial steps, my 79-year-old father is especially impatient with technology. I pray every day to the technology gods for patience, largely for myself though. But I have been rather unlucky. The ticket for tech support almost always comes before an urgent work deadline with an awkwardly typed message such as: How to send photo ?
That is how my father spaces out the words in his text messages. This is a man who writes in cursive and attaches notes that start with “Dear Khim” when he forwards me mail. (Just to be clear, I am talking about mail in its physical form.)
But when it comes to text messages, all rules are out of the window.
"Hello? How do I call you ah?" (Photo: iStock/boonstudio)
Bless him for having an enquiring mind but how do you answer questions such as, why are there so many steps before I can send a message or email? And let's not revisit emojis and gifs for a while after several failed in-person tutorials with him. My consolation is, at least he now knows how to access the punctuation keys on his smartphone.
On the other hand, my mother at age 78 is a realist who knows she isn’t cut out to navigate the tricky waters of text messages. So, she calls me instead. Like the time when she rang me on her smartphone to ask: How to call you ah? I was confused. Four minutes into the conversation, I realised she meant using WiFi to call me.
Bi-weekly video calls with the folks and my overseas brother are an adventure, too. It’s like playing Skype gachapon because you never know what you'll get. Will they know how to answer the call this time? Do they remember how to switch on the camera and microphone? When they finally appear, there’s always a gap wider than the Strait of Johor between them, so I guess it doesn't matter if they can't work the camera.
IS IT LOUSY MEMORY, LAO HUA OR SOMETHING ELSE?
I get that it’s a whole new world for elderly parents who never had to download apps or scan QR codes to pay for a cup of coffee until now. Back then, their greatest concern at the payment counter was likely, does the cashier have enough change for a S$10 bill?
Video calls with senior parents are like playing Skype gachapon – you never know what you'll get. (Photo: iStock/FatCamera)
When it comes to memory work, it was about recalling the telephone number of an obscure relative, or the auspicious-sounding licence-plate number of the car that got rear-ended this morning for a 4D bet.
These days, it’s about passwords or rather, my parents’ inability to remember them. Long story short, I have discovered at least three new email and social media accounts created for them by relatives, friends and strangers at the community club. I was alarmed. On hindsight, if a desperate aunty or uncle asks me how to download CDC vouchers – and have no idea what a password is, let alone remember one – I would perform such an Internet intervention as an act of public service.
Before you chide me for leaving my parents to their own devices quite literally, I try my best to help via video calls, texted screen grabs and emails.
It’s also not unimaginable for me to walk in their shoes because I’m already wearing them. I chafe at having to create new passwords that require the right combination of letters, numbers, unique characters and a quarter of my liver.
I pause for a good minute when I try to recall my laptop password after just one weekend. I can’t read text messages without my lao hua (presbyopia) glasses, despite switching to the largest font size known to mankind.
Hands up, if you're familiar with providing technical support for senior users. (Photo: iStock/SDI Productions)
And I’m sure I’m pesky to the millennials on my team (How do I fit my videos under a minute? I did what you said but my footage is still so blurry! Hello? Are you still there?).
But I wonder if it’s just failing memory and eyesight that are stumbling blocks for seniors? On a subreddit thread, user Taanistat shared that their father “seems to think that if he wasn't born with the knowledge or ability to do something, then it isn't worth doing. That is unless it's something that he wants to do... like cruise Ebay for pocket knives and antique glassware that he collects.
"It's gone from funny, to amusing, to mildly irritating, to frustrating, to nearly rage inducing. It's just exasperating and exhausting”.
My emotional landscape mirrors Taanistat's each time I see my mother’s exercise book neatly filled with the 4D-number permutations she’d ever put money on – but nary a single password.
HESITATION AND MISINFORMATION
As keen as I am to expand my parents’ digital horizon (wood-working tutorials for my father and cooking videos for my mother), I have my trepidations.
Going by my mother’s online behaviour especially, it is only a matter of time before she gets scammed. (Touch wood.) She clicks on just about any link that social media floats up in her feed.
Mum is every marketer’s dream because she believes everything she reads, watches or is told – except what her children tell her about cyber security for seniors. My only consolation is that she has no interest in knowing how to use PayLah! or online banking services.
Do your senior parents trust aunty influencers more than you? (Photo: iStock/Butsaya)
Just how worrisome is my mum? At one point, she wanted to track down a certain joint-cracking Chinese sinseh influencer she’d seen on YouTube treating everything from frozen shoulder to indigestion.
Her most recent endeavour? My father is recovering from a fall and she, after watching another influencer proclaim eggs bad for wound healing, made sure the household was entirely egg-free. My repeated admonitions to seek a dietitian’s advice didn’t get through, of course, because I’m not an influencer like the ones she follows.
If my mother is the maniacal driver on the Internet superhighway, my father is the complete opposite. He stops, checks and rechecks at every intersection. He hesitates to click, tap or swipe on anything, and would only do so after affirming the consequences via countless screen grabs from my brother and me – then gets impatient when the link takes a nanosecond longer than he'd expected to load.
But for all their cyber idiosyncrasies, I suppose I should be thankful that my mother hasn’t racked up online debts or gotten POFMA-ed by the government for spreading false information. Or my father for completely giving up on the Internet and retreating into his uncle cave for good.
Another positive sign that I am starting to get through to them: Just recently, my father responded with a thumbs-up emoji to my text message. (Insert flamenco dancer emoji.)
I guess I don’t have to quit my day job and become an influencer after all.
Continue reading...