First I want to preface this blog by saying that I love and respect my 77 year old mother. She is totally self sufficient and independent, active, looks great and is in wonderful shape.
Mom has great difficulty embracing technology. She will not get a computer and use the internet, which surprises me as much as she likes to catalogue shop. She uses a camera with film, she just got a DVD player because she could no longer rent VHS movies. She hates voice mail and is upset with her bank because they no longer return her original cancelled checks to her.
My mother is in Baltimore, I am in New Jersey, so we communicate by cell phone within the same network constantly. This took years on my part to get her to drop her old carrier and use the same one I have so we could talk to each other anytime, Mom thought this was cool, just like me being right around the corner in person. I was programmed into her cell phone #2.
This relationship and me being #2 on her phone lasted for almost two years until my contract ran out and I went under Maurice's family talk plan and changed my cell phone number.
Instant confusion on my mother's part:
"Did you change carriers?" " No" I replied, "same carrier".
"Do I have to pay for minutes now that you changed your number?" " No, Mom, same carrier, same free minutes."
"Well how am I going to get your new number into my cell phone?" "Just save it in there", I answered.
"I don't know how to do that" she said.
What ever she was doing, along the way we were communicating again, that is until the other day.
I called her on her cell and she shouted from the other end "I can't hear on this phone anymore, it's not working". I called her on the house phone and she told me my niece was playing a game on her cell and now she can't hear calls.
Something must have been adjusted and she tried but could not get the incoming volume up. Mom decided she was going to go to the phone store and get her phone fixed.
I need to mention, when she purchased her cell phone "the nice lady" in the store programmed it for her. Every time there was an issue with the phone she went to see "the lady at the phone store".
Yesterday I got a call from "mom cell" telling me that she went to the phone store and the nice young man in the store told her everything was fine with her cell phone "except for the piece of tape with my new cell number on it covering up the hearing portion of her phone". [my niece must have moved it there when playing games]
Mom was totally embarrassed and said to the young man and all the customers around "Oh no, don't tell my daughter, she will put me in one of those places."
While in the phone store she noticed a really "cute" little red phone and thought she would buy the phone on the condition "the nice young man" got a commission for selling the phone, since he was so helpful to her.
Today I called "mom cell" to see how everything was going. She loves her little red phone and the all "the nice man" had to do was take something out of her old cell and put it in her new cell [SIM card] all of her old numbers were still there, and he re-programmed me in the new cell and I am still #2.
Who is #1? That would be her "boy friend" Jack, who uses a pre-paid as you go cell phone.
Don't worry, I am not going to put Mom in "one of those places", she gets along just fine. It is difficult to keep up on the leaps and bounds of changing technology and as mom says "I like things just fine the way they use to be, much simplier then".
Photos courtesy of Microsoft Clip Art
COPYRIGHT, Christine O'Shea 2008, all rights reserved.
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