Posts from — June 2008

Had there been a Mobile Phone Usage License issued by TRAI, I am more or less sure that my mom would need to take it at least 4 times and only after a recommendation from Mobile Tech School of India would she get a license. Though I am exaggerating the situation a (lot)(bit), my mom is simply cross with a cell phone.

In spite of being an average user of the gadget for about 5 years,she uses the phone mostly to receive calls.She is back to square one,when Nokia comes up with a better model(read dad gets her another cell).That means more time for her to find the menu, then the address book and type in letters and find someone!And if the menu arrangement has changed a bit or someone has changed the view from List to Grid,more the trouble!!!

In most cases, when my mom feels like using the phone, she picks it up only to realize that she should find her spectacles first, else dialing(whatever!) would be on the tougher side.But before she goes searching for her spectacles, she does some random pressing of the key pad that would have sent a couple of blanks text messages to the first number.(and that happens to be grand mom’s land line number! Sigh!)

The service provider would soon award mom for religiously reading all the spam/promo messages that are sent.She does not miss even a single message, ranging from ring tone downloads to Re.0001 per call offer!!!.

Every time I go home, I check sent items on her phone only to find Sent box full of blank messages. I do not see my mom taking the pains of sending me a message in Manglish;I am sure, she would instead call me. So, for an user like her, I guess the cell phone should have just the call option. She is faster retrieving numbers from her memory/address book that from the phone’s address book.

Even after 15 mail ids across Yahoo!,Hotmail and Gmail, my mom still stays away from the net. Each time she would either forget the user name or password; even both in some cases.She blames me for not helping her become an internet savvy mom.

A typical situation would be my brother booting the comp.,logging into mom’s gtalk and ask her to start chatting with me. For how long would she chat? May be 10 minutes. And this would happen once in a year or so.This is what I tell her every time she asks me to teach her to use the net.

Mom,the land line is what is best for you.

Images:Getty