Cell phone for elders

My parents have been using a cell phone for the past few years. While it has mostly been hand-me-downs when I change to a newer model, there has at least been no change in the last year or more. But probably due to their old age and an inherent fear about handling something “costly” so late in their life, they continue to make some “rookie” mistakes while using the phone.

For instance, they don’t use the phone that regularly and one fine day, when they try to make a call – which typically is a call to me – they find that the battery has drained off totally. Now comes the interesting part. They then put it on charge, have the basic presence of mind to check that the “charging” message appears and then let things be. After a couple of hours, they unplug the charger from the phone and leave things as is. So, when I try to call them, I get the phone switched off message. Or if they decide to call me, they find the phone to be blank and assume that the phone didn’t charge properly and they complain to me.

This is just one example. There are scores of other such mistakes
they make routinely, but none can beat what happened on Tuesday. I am trying my best to capture the incident here, but this is something that is better experienced when I narrate it verbally in person.

On Tuesday – the 22^nd of February – my parents left to Trichy to attend the religious conversion of my cousin's son (Upanayanam in other words). Due to some scheduling conflicts, I couldn’t drop them off at the railway station and I stayed back at home. Once the train started, my mother called me on my land-line to inform me about it.

The conversation ended after we said our byes to each other, but the phone call didn’t. She forgot to cut the call from her end and since, she had dialed a land-line, the unhooking of the phone from my side, didn’t cut the call. She was oblivious to the whole thing and had tucked away her phone inside her handbag.

Thankfully, I remembered that my father too had taken his cell phone. So I called him, hoping to pass on the message to my mother about cutting the call. He picked up the phone on my second attempt to reach him. I told him to tell my mother to cut off the call from her mobile. He said he would and I said bye to him. Luckily I waited to see if he cut this call and found that he put me on hold!!!!

Well well well. So, I now checked the land-line to ensure that my mother had cut that call. Then I called her from that line and asked her to tell my father to cut his call and not put it on hold. And thus ended a rather frustrating and entertaining 5 minutes of a morning.

Clearly, the need of the hour is for a simple cell phone which has big text on the buttons that say things like “start”, “end” and of course big keys and a bigger display. In other words, a cordless phone!