Trials and Tribulations of phones

Amidst the monotonous routine of life, encounters with oldies do add a bit of humour. Not because they have a great sense of humour or anything like that, what I'm referring to are the situations that arise due to their difficulty in operating these tech devices; computers and smartphones to be precise.

They say, "Charity begins at home". So I'll start with my own dad who has a different OS based phone. Let me disclose here that his OS is not-so-popular and not at all user-friendly. Poor he! He keeps on facing one problem or the other every week or so and he would have to ask me to fix them. Sometimes it's the app not being opened. So, I update them through their shitty app store. There are times when I'm unable to find one of the most popular apps on that store. I remember he had to shell out a few bucks also once at the dealer store to get the desired app running.

At other times and places, it is quite common to find elderly asking how to save a number, "Can you dial that number for me?" Importing exporting contacts on getting a new phone, "How did you zoom in to that video?"

One incident that can't escape my mention is there is this person who sends truckload of Good morning messages on Whatsapp on a daily basis, which is his way of showing love and care. I would like to tell here, before I narrate the whole thing, that I don't immediately watch the videos sent to me; they kind of go in my 'Watch Later' basket. So, as soon as I READ those messages (and not watch), that person upon seeing blue ticks deletes those messages (trying to clear some memory in 'his' phone). The catch here is that he doesn't tap 'Delete for me' or 'Clear Chat' but 'Delete for everyone'.

When I told him this is what happens he reminded me that I was the one who introduced him to this option of deleting. Raking my brain, I remembered telling him about it if he accidentally sends someone a wrong message.

Let me slide in a diverting bit of information: My 5-year-old nephew has started to spell words at his school, so he is now easily able to sail through a storm of videos by typing the name of his favourite cartoon shows on Youtube. Earlier he had to rely on the recommended videos only. I would clear watch history so that no relevant videos were suggested.

But remember those non-touch phones to unlock which we had to press a button immediately followed by * button. That was a sort of parental lock thing because these kids find that method difficult, courtesy their illiteracy to read the instructions displayed on-screen immediately after pressing the first button.

Do you think it's only the youngsters who can be found constantly fiddling with their devices? Even the oldies aren't spared of this addiction and I admit it's hard to resist this addiction.

A few days back, my mom, who otherwise is not much fond of using smartphones, spent more than an hour on the phone; courtesy her newly found fad for youtube. That night she was the last one in our house to lie down and it is a big deal because on normal days she is amongst the first people to lie down and repeatedly asking others before it's too late, making sure everyone is in bed well before the deadline.

I experienced some unsaid joy that day and I took full advantage of it, teasing her every minute or so. And when she came back to the real world she realised how she had completely lost the track of time.
I empathised. It's only after we're back out of Phone-zone that we realise how we wasted most of our time doing almost nothing productive.

Fun part: Initially, my mom used to think that Gallery and Whatsapp are one and the same thing. (Media sent through Whatsapp appears in the gallery. Get my point?)

Self-defence:- No, I'm not trying to underestimate the benefits of this technology. But I'm sure even you would relate how sometimes we pick up our phones to search for one thing and end up doing something else, only to be reminded of the original motive of picking up the phone when we get back to doing what we were doing earlier.

(I wonder why I was reminded of this <old post> that kind of fell in this category but got 'boring' as the feedback.)

Ending it off on a note that MS Excel is also one of those things which are not everyone's cup of tea. Excel sheets get hidden, autosaves confuse people as which was the recent file that they worked upon, drag and fill option gets disabled, print out in the desired format is hard to get etc.

I wonder if I extend this post anymore, it may not be able to hold your attention for this long and I may also run out of my cues.