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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

This is basically my life as a high school programmer except I never thought it was interesting enough to write a Medium post about. Newsflash: old people want to use technology but can't. You can help them learn how. It's not difficult.

If I sound snarky it's because this reads like a college essay which while not problematic of itself makes it extremely distracting to read as someone who is not an admissions officer.

Nonetheless it's still cool and vitally important. I just wish it had a less clinical feel to the writing.

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>>You can help them learn how. It's not difficult.

You have to be really really careful. Most of us learned about technology when we were young, before we had credit cards and retirement plans. Handing an old person the internet, opening them to the world of scam artists that implies, is very dangerous.

When working with seniors one must also be ready for stereotypes to be true. Not all old people have bad memory, but many do. It can be very frustrating to work with someone every day only to have that work disappear overnight. Often lack of memory manifests as aggression and paranoia. It is not unusual to work with someone every day for weeks, only for them to suddenly accuse you of stealing. You have to be ready for these setbacks.

That is exactly the kind of advice I would have liked to read in the article.

I actually did both. That is to say, I taught seniors [0] both how to use computers and about the scams they would find online, with specific examples and even some taken from the spam of my own email account. I gave full descriptions of different variations on the scams and how they play out for the people who actually buy into them. It's not too hard for them to get the basics down with a little practice and they remember the scams better if they're presented in story form.

[0] Technically, the classes were open to anyone in the community, but nobody under ~50 was interested in those topics at those times, so almost everyone in every class appeared to be retired.

I've been doing this weekly for a long time. You think I don't know that? My own grandparents have come very close to falling for credit card scams numerous times and they would have had it not been for my instruction.

I don't just hand them the internet, I teach them everything I learned. And it's never a one time deal either. I've hit the setbacks you describe several times already too, and I still come back to help them. Often it's not about learning permanently but about helping them accomplish specific tasks. A lot of old people don't want to use the internet constantly like we do, they just want to FaceTime their grandkids once a week or look at sports scores and such.

I appreciate your concern that I know these things, but again, this is my life. I've been working on it several times a week for the past four years.

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