A year ago, and through a good friend, I met an elderly couple, Toots and Dochs. Toots is about to turn 80 and Dochs is a couple of years younger. They are a wonderful couple who I really like a lot.
Their friends and family convinced them to buy a computer and learn about the internet, emailing and Skype.
So they bought themselves a Dell computer and decided to use a pre-paid wireless USB for their internet connection.
They bought all of this in October last year. Three months later I saw them at our Bowls Club and they asked me if I could visit them and teach them how to send emails and set up Skype for them.
I agreed to this, thinking that it would take me about an hour to show them the basics.
When I arrived at 3pm on a Friday afternoon in January, I discovered that nobody had yet set up an email account for them, nor had their internet connection device been installed.
In the three months since they had purchased everything, they had misplaced some of the information required to set it all up, so it took some time just to gather that information.
They had prior plans for 4.30 pm that same day, so I arranged to return the following day to finish the job.
I dragged Adoring Husband along the following day, because he is much faster at setting these things up than I.
A few phone calls and a few hours later, we had set up their email accounts and their internet access and downloaded Skype for them. They invited us to stay for dinner as a 'thank you' and we had a lovely evening getting to know each other.
We gave them a very basic lesson on creating and sending an email and departed, giving them our phone number and telling them to contact us to set up another day for us to visit and give some more lessons on emails and Skyping.
FOUR MONTHS LATER I ran into them again and they told me that they were having trouble sending an email and that it kept giving them an error message.
They had lost our phone number. So I promised to visit them the following morning (this morning) and check it out for them.
They had attempted to send this email two months ago!
It took ninety minutes over the phone, for the internet service provider to discover that the USB stick provided for the internet connection was faulty! Luckily, it's still under warrantee and they will get a replacement.
So next week, I will be paying them ANOTHER visit to get this sorted. ***sigh***
It's such a shame that they have encountered so many problems along the way. We tell them how simple it all is and how happy they will be to have easy access to their friends and family through emails and Skype ... but then it takes months of obstacles along the way.
I can understand why the older generation are afraid of this technology.
Toots found great pleasure in the fact that the new connection is being sent via snail mail ... "because it's a good old fashioned service that doesn't let you down!"
If it was painful for you to read this post ... imagine how painful this task has been for me!! Just wanted to share the load and I'd really appreciate some positive energy to be sent in my direction so that next week, it will all be finished without any more challenges to overcome!
Thank you for your time :o)
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