Some months ago, my Dad bought himself a Hudl. He hated it. He just didn’t get its uses. Anyway, he took it on holiday in July and my Mum picked it up and started to use it. While we were away, I showed her how to use facebook and messenger and she’s got lots of pleasure from setting up her friends and communicating with them. I think she found it somehow feels impolite in the modern world to communicate openly with her grandsons so she sort of lurks in their space without commenting. She’s worried that their friends will think they are uncool if Nanny is found chatting to them online.
When they came to see us for my graduation, I decided she needed to be dragged into doing her food shopping online. She resisted fiercely at first, claiming that she liked to choose her own fresh foods and didn’t trust anyone else to do it…oh and why did she need to food shop online when she’s retired and has plenty of time to shop? I had to work really hard to persuade her of the benefits to her of choosing online.
Anyway, while she was here I set her up with an account, sorted out logins, passwords, loyalty cards and payment methods for her and we did a test shop that was delivered when they got home from here. She was delighted with the results. She loved the service – the shopping brought right into the house, the politeness of the delivery driver and the quality of the fresh food (phew).
I explained that the system is a little bit tricky so she needed to make sure she placed another order before she’d forgotten how. I got a call a couple of weeks later to say she’d got into the system and ordered her food but she was a bit confused over the checkout procedure so I reminded her of what she needed to do to get her order placed. Again she loved it. Today she’s placed her third order and I think it’s true to say she’s faced a few challenges so I have had two phone conversations with her to help her through the process – the first to get her checked out the first time, then another chat when she realised she’d over-ordered something so she went back into her order to revise it.
She gets very frustrated when she can’t remember what she needs to do and is extremely apologetic for “disturbing” me. What she doesn’t seem to realise is that I’m immensely proud of her for embracing the technology and persevering when she meets a challenge. It doesn’t worry me that I need to help her through the process, in fact, I’d much rather that than see her give up. Every time she does it it’ll get easier and let’s face it, carting home bags and bags of food shopping from the supermarket is only going to get more difficult as time goes by.
Ultimately she gets such a huge sense of satisfaction out of getting the order placed and then not having to carry the food in from the car. I knew that she would love it if she could get through the pain barrier of learning how and am thrilled that she’s now talking about other uses of the technology – food deliveries when they get home from holiday or a weekend break etc etc. I am so very proud of her. She rocks.
