Push the Button. Easy. Right? Not!

“Now if you need anything just “PUSH THIS BUTTON”!
Easy, right? NOT!

How many times have you told someone of a certain age to simply “PUSH THIS BUTTON”?

The inevitable answer is “What button? Where? Which one?”

Then comes the blank stare, the puzzled look, the enactment of a puppy who nicks the head when you make a strange whistling noise…

That is the real world of elderly care. The dreaded “Button Labyrinth” that is the hallmark of modern technology and the maze that people who grew up with dials and switches are damned to stumble through with their out of touch fingers.

Forget scroll-able menus and highlighted texts, select, click, upload, download, minimize, cut, copy, paste, font size, and the dreaded links, all of these terms are meaningless to people who haven’t made the jump into the 21st Century.

Honestly, they shouldn’t have to, but technology and the potential of machines demands such multi-leveled menu options so that they are accessible from one “Thingamabob: Remote: Whatchamacallit: Power of the World: Clicker, or simply doohickey.”

Being in the highest care section of the hospital for heart treatments, my father has but ONE button to remember…the BIG FAT RED BUTTON in the middle of the remote connected to the bed. But the multi buttoned “thang” is also the TV remote, channel changer, volume control, mute button and intercom to the nurse’s station.

All the while he is surrounded by a bunch of monitors for IVs, tubes and wires all over the place, and what not surrounding him. He is going to be fine, but he thinks that he is going to die alone in that room, when the fact is that everyone has been staying up late, working longer hours, losing sleep, worrying themselves, making extra trips, and basically making sure that he lives forever. To get his needs met, all he has to do is “Push the Button”, the one and only button he needs to know to push. Yet, every time you show him the button you get a “Well, thanks for finally showing me.” quip.

That is the most difficult thing about caring for those you love who have short term memory problems as well as confusion. Every time you push a button, you have to find another button to push, and then another screen pops up and yet another 200 buttons to choose from. Menus, icons, and links leading you on a treasure hunt to get what you actually want to access. If you didn’t grow up in this world it is very confusing.

I made the mistake of giving my father an iPhone. To me, it is the most ingenious device mankind has ever created. I do everything on it. I can command about 90% of my life’s management on that silly thing. It is simple, as long as you can remember to “Push the Home Button.”, which of course is the ONLY button on the surface of an iPhone. But, it doesn’t have a label next to it saying “Home Button” on it, and it is colored the same as the phone, so you can barely see that it is there. After you push the button and the screen opens you have to put in a pass code or put your thumb on the “Home Button” to get into the operation of the phone, where you are presented with countless app icons.

Once you open an app, you have to “log in” to those apps, and once you are inside the app, you have to then figure out how to do what you want to do with it. Which is for most people of his generation, like my father, means just quit.

I have recorded “how to” videos about everything so he can watch them over and over again to remind him how to do things. I have typed out “how to” instructions on everything with detailed pictures labeled with definitions and sequences so he can just follow steps.

Inevitably, he can’t get to step 2 on things. If what he wants to do isn’t a toggle switch labeled for that purpose the size of a wall light switch, he basically is lost and frustratingly claims…”It doesn’t work!”

The issue isn’t intelligence, desire, or capability, he and most people of his generation lack, it is simple a matter of not being able to make that leap of technology to be able to do it.

After all, Dad is no dummy, or some bum who never accomplished anything. He was an all around athlete who excelled in sports in his time, he became an Air Force jet fighter pilot, a football coach, a college professor with an earned PhD. He is someone who tried his best to follow all of the rules, to be a good person, and go to church on Sundays. But all of these things were done in the world of analogue technology. He never made the jump to digital tech systems. Now, it is all virtual, digital technology.

He likes to write, and can type rather well. But, we no longer own a typewriter. We have a word processor on a computer linked to a printer. You can print all sorts of things with a word processor and a printer, but there are seemingly hundreds of things you have to choose from to do it, save it, print it or send it.

It is all too much for him. I can type and print a document in a short period of time. It takes him hours to do what I can do in minutes or even seconds. With a typewriter, you get a piece of paper, roll it into the machine, start typing and what you see is what you get, and you are done! No setup to accomplish, no configurations to be managed, no formats to be selected, no updating of programs to do, and not menus of choices about what you can do with the program and printer to figure out.

Paper in, type, paper out. That is it. Open the bill, write a check, put in an envelope, mail it, done. Get in the car, put the key in the slot, turn the key, it runs. Walk up to the TV, turn the on/off button on, turn the dial for the channel, boom, you are done.

Today, we are given massive choices on an almost constant scale to do basically anything you want. But, for people like my Dad they may as well not exist because he simply can’t do it, nor should he be expected to. But, today, everything is made “the new way” which has completely eliminated the “old way”, leaving an entire generation confused and frustrated.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I think that for the most part, it is simply removing those technologies from their grasp, and leading them down the calming path of real things. Pencils, paper, check books, letters, magazines, newspapers, newspapers, typewriters, files, radios and tvs with physical switches would make life for people like my father much easier, and for me much less time consuming.

I think I’m going to go out and find my father a typewriter. You can’t read his handwriting, no one ever could.

So the saga continues.