There comes a time in life when your role and your parents’ get reversed. Where your parents once stopped you from putting ants into your mouth as a child, you now stop them from downloading bugs into their devices. The switch-around couldn’t be more apparent than when you’re trying to impart the ways of Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp to them.
Take my folks, for instance. It’s been years since my brother and I hooked them up to cyberspace, and I’m still familiarising them with screen gestures such as tapping, swiping up and holding for two seconds… no, that’s a tap if you don’t keep your finger on the screen. No, you have to hold within that box, not anywhere else. It’ll work lah, just wait.
For someone who can’t totter faster than a toddler learning his initial steps, my 79-year-old father is especially impatient with technology. I pray every day to the technology gods for patience, largely for myself though. But I have been rather unlucky. The ticket for tech support almost always comes before an urgent work deadline with an awkwardly typed message such as: How to send photo ?
That is how my father spaces out the words in his text messages. This is a man who writes in cursive and attaches notes that start with “Dear Khim” when he forwards me mail. (Just to be clear, I am talking about mail in its physical form.)
But when it comes to text messages, all rules are out of the window.
