Left behind by technology (and my song about it)

Many seniors are feeling left out as the Information Age progresses.

It’s getting harder all the time to do business online. Websites and phone prompts are difficult to navigate and passwords more complicated than ever.

Younger people may be able to get by instinctively, but aging brains cannot. Seniors have been disenfranchised.

It isn’t enough to enter your user name and PIN anymore. Now you you have to enter a code texted to your phone as well in “double authentication.”

Of course, you must log in to buy tickets on many sites and prove that you aren’t a robot. Some seniors just show up at the door, hoping against a sell-out.

I may be 84 years old, but I’m not stupid. As a technology reporter for three national publications, I was an early adapter to desktop computing, the World Wide Web and Facebook. But I retired 17 years ago and my mind isn’t what it used to be.

Too many times I have booked the wrong date for  a hotel room. Now  I insist on calling the local hotel and making a reservation over the phone.

When I want a drug refill, I just tell the pharmacy clerk what I want a few days in advance. I have trouble reading the numbers on the pill bottle anymore or navigating the phone system.

This column was inspired by our experience with the Social Security website, when we needed a tax form. Not only was it hard to log in but it made Pickett take a selfie of herself and make a photograph of her driver’s license.

She finally gave up and we drove to the Social Security office, where someone printed the form out for her. We lost it again and she had to go back, but I won’t blame Social Security for that! Just last week, she opened an envelope where she had put one of the missing forms. “Here it is!” She said proudly.

So there’s the problem. What’s the solution?  I have several suggestions for tech companies that might help.

—Make more use of facial recognition, fingerprints and voice recognition.

—Let people speak to the website more easily to get what they want.

—Stop changing a website’s navigation so often with updates.

—Have uniform ways of doing repetitive tasks. Why can’t every ticket seller have the same format? And have you ever had to enter a new credit card to make automatic payments? Each company has a unique way of changing personal information. With passwords, of course.

—We can make more use of AI. Most older people hate AI, but when I have a problem like these, I go to ChatGPT and ask what to do. I wrote about this before: Once when I couldn’t get through to my cable company, ChatGPT advised me to just  tell the cable company’s AI voice  to “cancel” and you get right through. It worked. After all, AI characters know how their brothers and sisters think!

Appropriately, here are the words I wrote to a song I wrote several years ago.

You can hear it in this link.

Password Blues

I’ve got the password blues, I just can’t get  in.

My bank account is frozen and my wallet’s too thin,

What can I do? This just isn’t fair.

I wrote it down some place, but I don’t know where.

 

Refrain:

Password Blues, please let me in.

Password blues, I don’t know my PIN.

Password blues, I lost my long list.

According to the Internet, I just don’t exist.

 

“Forgot Your password?” Now here’s where to click.

This whole awful process just makes me so sick.

They texted my phone. But where’d I put  that?

I’ll have to call the bank and have a long chat.

 

They’ll give you a password but please don’t explode.

With capitals and numbers you just can’t decode.

It will pop up always in a a password app.

But when you need it, what happened to that?

 

Facial recognition, the new tech religion

Will solve this problem, require no decision.

But I’m wearing a mask or maybe a hat.

The website looks and asks: Who the heck is that?

 

To prove who you are and show you aren’t a trickster,

They’ll ask: How many cars are in this picture?

I just don’t know. My idea is better.

Give me your address, and I’ll mail you a letter!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posing as a financial whiz

My father said he didn’t know what I did for a living until I showed him a $10 bill.

“Look, that’s where I work,” I said, displaying the image of the Treasury Department.  “You can even see my window.”

He was shocked. He even showed $10 bills to his friends, proudly telling them the story.

But I wasn’t sure I wanted to work there in 1977. During a shake-up, I had been ousted from my job as a supervising editor at Associated Press and transferred to Capitol Hill.

 After that, I loved covering Congress! There was so much action! There were so many famous people: Sens. Edward Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater. Members fawned over wire service reporters, hoping their words would reach constituents. We got the best seats at congressional hearings.

The place was overflowing with young people, especially beautiful women whom congressmen seemed to hire en masse. You figured any woman who was even middle-aged was probably super competent or knew some dark secrets.

Then, an opening appeared for AP’s Treasury correspondent. I was sent there over my own objections. I didn’t want to leave. Unlike Congress, the Treasury was filled with old bureaucrats who were marking time until retirement. They looked down on wire services, hoping to influence fellow insiders through the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post.

But eventually, I liked it. For one thing, I believe I got more bylines than the White House staff because there were three of them and only one of me. I covered a huge swath of the government, almost everything with a dollar sign on it.

Other staffers considered me a guru on finance when I wasn’t. Sure, I analyzed the federal budget and even wrote specials on how to file your income tax returns. But I had a professional do my taxes.

If anyone questioned a story, I would say something like, “It all depends on the nondefense capital goods sector,” and that would shut them up. (It really means simply refrigerators and cars.)

I often thought about how much better this was than sitting in an office with a row of typewriters and a boss watching over me. There were only four of us in the Treasury press room:  AP, UPI, Reuters and Dow-Jones/Wall Street Journal. The one exception was the time a media company sent several pretty young women over to get a break on press announcements. Playing darts with these gals was something we wouldn’t have done at the main office!

But after awhile, it became a burden covering so much of the government and trying to make sense out of the meaningless economic indicators that came out monthly.

I quit and went to U.S. News & World Report, which was more analytical than AP. My new editor complained to me once, “This reads just like an AP story.” He meant it as an insult. I took it as a compliment.

 

 

Bringing back Sara

What has been my biggest life adventure? Well, it had nothing to do with journalism. It was a personal journey in the chaos of Central America in 1990.

When we decided to adopt a child in our 40s, two friends who were missionaries in Honduras put us in touch with a lawyer there.

Sure enough, she found a new-born baby, Sara Teresa,  in an orphanage in Tegucigalpa. Sara was already popular. The wife of the U.S. ambassador wanted her, too.

Probably unwisely, our lawyer sent Sara back to her birth mother for a few weeks to reserve her for us. Sara was malnourished there and lived among many chickens. Maybe  that’s why she loves animals so much today.

We flew to Tegucigalpa to see Sara, but first we wanted to stop at a Honduran resort on the Island of Roatan. We enjoyed this spot, frequented by rich people from all over the western Hemisphere, until disaster struck. Pickett fell off the edge of a pier (which had no railings) and broke her ankle.

There we were, the farthest we had ever been from what we considered civilization, and what could we do? As soon as we got back to Tegucigalpa, Pickett went to the hospital.

The doctor insisted surgery was necessary. But looking at the primitive equipment, Pickett wisely decided to wait until we returned to the U.S.

But first, with her leg in a cast, we were finally introduced to Sara, age 6 months, and enjoyed several days with her.

But for the adoption to become final, we had to wait another six months until we could return from Arlington.

In the meantime, we got a young woman to take care of her, and Sara was fed lots of  ice cream. This once-scrawny child now looked so fat in her pictures that the ice cream had to stop.  Meanwhile, Pickett got her leg fixed in a D.C. hospital.

As things dragged along, a friend actually lobbied the president of Honduras on our behalf as he gave the official a tour of Georgetown University.

But I think what really worked were the bribes we got the lawyer to pay the administrators.

Returning to Honduras around Sara’s first birthday, we took her home on Thanksgiving Day. The lawyer told us that the birth mother was secretly at the Tegucigalpa airport to watch as we departed, though I am not sure that really happened.

When we got home, Sara fell in love right away with our dog, beginning a love of dogs that led to her career as an animal groomer.

Post script: Sara expressed interest in trying to find her birth mother in later years, but the turmoil in Honduras at that time made it unsafe. However, she did meet some distant relatives in this country through DNA testing.

 

 

 

Are you old? Here’s how to find out

Ignore the calendar. Follow this guide to figure out whether you really are elderly:

—At the self-service checkout, clerks always come to help you because they know you won’t be able to figure it out.

—You don’t cut your toenails anymore. You either can’t reach them or (worse) you can‘t see them.

—You can’t watch long movies in the evening because you fall asleep after one hour.

—You wrote a list of things to remember, but you can’t remember where you put it.

—You think “Dewey beats Truman” was a funny headline in 1948, but no one knows what you are talking about.

—You lost 8 pounds when you were sick, but your gut hasn’t gotten any smaller.

—You can actually remember when there was no television.

—Friends younger than you have great grandchildren.

—You order the senior special at a restaurant and your son or daughter orders one too.

—You remember the music of Neil Sedaka, who died last week. During the pandemic he put on a Facebook show every day. (You know I recorded his “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and sent it to him and he wrote back that he liked it!) https://youtu.be/nfAj3KfMDcs?si=PD1mxsTdDUQY4Rgu

—You say: “You don’t remember Doris Day? Everyone remembers Doris Day!”

—You type on a phone one finger at a time, never with both thumbs.

—You can’t think of a word you want to say, but it pops up in your head days later.

—You like matinees, but you always fall asleep in the second act.

—Social gatherings are difficult because you can’t remember people’s names or even their faces.

—You keep calling people in their 50s “kids.”

—You are offended by “modern music,” but on the radio it is called “oldies.” They don’t play the music you grew up with anywhere.

—You remember when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn and there were no Major League Baseball teams west of St. Louis.

—You wake up with a hangover, but you had nothing to drink last night.

 

 

 

I still can’t open that package!

Random thoughts as spring approaches:

I I wrote recently about how hard it is to open packages. I had to buy scissors to open something I bought once when I was traveling.  The scissors were so securely wrapped, I couldn’t open them either!

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I am upset that the Washington Post is eliminating its sports page as it loses readers to Internet media. This newspaper has a sports page. Why can’t they? Then I thought: change is hard, especially for old people. Blacksmiths didn’t like automobiles. Our parents didn’t want to abandon typewriters  for computers. Got to adapt.

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I loved the “American Revolution” series on PBS by Ken Burns. But in 12 hours of TV, why wasn’t there any mention of the Crossing of the Dan, when British couldn’t cross the Dan River, giving patriots time to regroup? Probably because nobody died.

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Why do we always have to clean the house before the cleaning lady comes?
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Why have  the  insignias for NFL teams replaced the team names and cities on most telecasts? I have not memorized those images.

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Why is it that when you put two wires for your electronics in a box, they get hopelessly tangled up in no time at all?

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I can’t believe that I walked out on my favorite jazz musician twice! Once Miles Davis’ mic was too loud and I left the show in Los Angeles. In Washington, I didn’t like it when he turned his back to the audience. But such a talent!

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My pet peeve: News articles that water down shocking events. Why is a serious crime called an inncident?  Invasions and raids are called “operations.” To me, an operation is what happens in a hospital. Guess they are afraid of offending someone.

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There is talk again about pprice controls because of the high cost of groceries. I covered the Council on Wage and Price Stability when controls were tried in 1979. They sound good, but believe me, they lead to shortages and don’t work!

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“Frog and Toad” by Halifax County Little Theatre is a wonderful show to be enjoyed by adults and kids alike. And where else but in Southside can you leave your hat under your seat and have the director chase after you outside to give it back to you? The show continues at The Prizery this coming Friday,  Saturday and Sunday.

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We routinely tell each other of our “best and worst” of the day at dinner when our grandchildren are here. My grandson Bryce came up with a great idea for breakfast: Predict what your best and worst of the day will be. That allows you to envision what you hope happens. Well, for the year, my best will be good health for everyone, peace in Ukraine, Venezuela, Israel/Gaza and Iran, and understanding and toleration of each other’s viewpoints in this country. Worst? Oh, none!