Editor' Note: This posting was made before mom died. It kept being moved around, as who figured she would be grave temperature before it posted.
As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
I am not a very good teacher, as I have strict disciplines and expect things. I expect if I show you a few times how to do something, that you should at least retain part of the information and then not change what I was telling you to suit your own vocabulary and screw everything up.
I was helping my elderly Mom with her smart phone. A bit of a reversal here in explanation in I purchased her original Tracfone for her, as at 19 dollars, plus the 95 dollar a year access fee, it was cheaper than the 1200 fricking dollars my asstard sister signed Mom up for.
So that old phone has been "her" phone and has served her well, but I started noticing she had no battery, and in an emergency, God Forbid, she would need more than 10 minutes of talk time. So after discussing things with TL, we got a deal on a smart phone, akin to the one we have which replaced that horrid HTC phone out of Taiwan and absolutely no customer service. Damn Chinese islanders!!!
So I ordered it from the foreign slave help at Tracfone, and it was pretty easy to convert as God had me make a mistake on the serial number, so I went online, and the guy did all the work for me.
The work though is with Mom. This woman can run a remote without any problems, and a phone with a dial pad, but get her onto a smart phone or a laptop she just shuts down.
As I said I was patient in trying to teach her, but after telling her and telling her, I was yelling and yelling at her, but TL helped and got things going better.
I learned that it is all with vocabulary and visualization. Mom has a drive in her to try and press her finger through the screen or holding the off and on button until it starts arcing electricity. What I learned in teaching her though was she kept saying PRESS THE BUTTON. That took some vain repetition, but I finally got her to say HOLD THE BUTTON, and that started to register in her mind. After 24 hours she got the hold part down.
She had an absolute time of it with turning it off. I just kept telling her, you do the same thing to turn it off as you turn it on, and finally that registered, thankfully, and she was turning things off and on.
Swiping the phone though, was a NO GO. Swipe for her was Scroll, or more to the point her swipe was 45 degrees and she kept opening the keypad. So the Holy Ghost said to me, SAY SWEEP, and I said, "Which way do you sweep the floor........side to side", and then that registered and she got swiping the screen to unlock it down.
Our next progression was opening the phone, which is just that green phone button, and then trying to close it out using the back button. Pinky to the Pink Screen, meaning her pinky was there by the button to reverse to the pink main screen did not work, but when I explained to her, it was like me coming in from outside, going through a door, to the kitchen to the living room, and then backing out with each click it helped.
The Holy Ghost said, "Tell her it is just like opening a paper file, in you keep opening and closing files". That sunk in too.
I did not grow up with computers and about cried in trying to work with them, especially since my first mandatory association was creating a website, which is like starting out with brain surgery in the first day at med school, and my project had to be done, as everything was being shut down within a week. That was something in taking a Windows program creation and moving it to the old Geocities and watching pages explode. It was a learning experience though, and I got it done by God's Grace.
In those days, no one knew the internet or computers, and I always laughed in people were asking me how to fix problems, and I surprised one Microsoft tech in actually knowing a trick I read in a printer refresh that even Microsoft did not know existed in Windows 98.
My reason for posting these things is someday you might have to teach someone elderly the new technology. The solution is to put it into terms they can understand, along with physical things they can picture from their experience. That HOLD and PRESS was really hard, because Mom kept pressing, the phone would hibernate, and she would think it was off, and we would have to start the process again as the final jeopardy clock was ticking for hibernation again.
What I am amazed at is people who are raised with computers as children. I watch TL and TL lights up like a shooting star in TL gets new things, opens them up, does not read the directions and is all through the phone or laptop in the deep recesses pulling things out and bringing things up.
I am getting used to smart phones, but I still have an old LG keypad type that is not going anywhere, as I rarely carry it with me, and I prefer not to have people reaching out and touching me. I do not wear a watch either as I want to be free, and not bothered by people.
Mom will figure this out, as she did her old phone eventually. It just requires a base which she now has, and repetition and then adding some things, and it will all click in her brain as television was a great mystery back in the day, and she figured that out too.
I hope some of that helps as it was meant to........as Lord was I looking for a shock collar to get the message through. And not that is not Mom's phone, as I can not shit money. I have found the 100 dollar and cheaper phones are just fine. They simply boot up a little slower in the processor. I am patient with that.
Oh one more thing, take all that icon shit off your phone as it just confuses people. Telephone, Message, Voice Mail and Phone Pad, that is it. TL actually trashed everything including the internet, as I was shocked that while I was activating the phone that Google and Facebook did like a 400 megabyte update. That is a hell of a lot of spyware for an old woman.
agtG
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