As shocking as they are, the following two anecdotes are true, I swear.
Last year when I was teaching seniors how to use computers around Logan City, an 80 year old lady told me that she had just bought a laptop. She was very proud that it would do the jobs that her vintage Windows 95 machine could not. I listened, and she kept explaining the lovely experience of buying the computer itself.
It went something like this:
The kind young man told me that he was very impressed I was getting in to computers when it was usually something young people did. I told him that I’m well used to taking risks and learning new things and he said I was a very unusual customer. I asked him what type of computer would best suit my needs… just e-mailing and maybe the odd game of solitaire, maybe sorting through some photos from family picnics etc… and he directed me to one of the newest laptops on offer. It was well over $2,000, but he said it wouldn’t let me down. I could do anything at all on it, he said. So I bought it! But then I didn’t know what to do with it… I couldn’t even turn it on. So for a ’seniors discount’ fee of $90, the sales people set the computer up for me. It was interesting to watch and was surprisingly quick… it looked as though the young man who set it up for me simply pressed one or two buttons and talked to his friends in the back room which I could see through a glass panel. Well I suppose the $90 was put to good use since I didn’t know how to turn it on!
This poor lady was ripped off in at least two ways:
- She could have picked up a computer to suit her needs for around $500
- The $90 “set-up fee” is highway robbery and appears to be a blatant play on the ignorance of senior citizens regarding IT generally
Another lady (ignore the theme of ‘ladies’ that appears to be emerging… I assure you the situation is almost identical for senior gents) told me of the following situation:
I couldn’t work out how to send an e-mail or turn the bloody thing off! So I asked my friends and they had no idea either… Windows Vista or some bloody thing was beyond them, they told me. So I looked in the yellow pages and found a company called ‘Nerds on Wheels’ or something, and they came to my house the same day. I had written a list of about 10 questions to ask and now that I look back on it, they were very much ‘introduction to computers’ style questions like “how do I turn this thing off?” and “do I left or right click?”… the guy was there for about 30 minutes and I was whacked with a bill for $100! I know he was just doing his job, but where’s the compassion? I’m a pensioner and I can barely afford my medicine let alone a consultant. I just wish there was a cheaper service available.
Well clearly there are cheaper services available, but they don’t receive anywhere near the funding necessary to reach people such as those above. Many pensioners aren’t actively engaged in social groups, so even hearing about these services is unusual in many cases.
Without an international response to this information-technology-ignorance amongst senior citizens, they are ripe for the picking by unscrupulous profit-seeking enterprise (not that there’s anything wrong with profit-seeking… it’s the lack of scruples I take issue with).
