For those of us who still think the typewriter is cutting-edge technology, that telephones sit on hall tables with dials on the front, and the Home Service is the ultimate in evening entertainment, the vast burgeoning of technological devices with which we are now faced has come as quite a shock. Try as we might to live up to our children’s and, indeed, our grandchildren’s demands that we get caught up with the modern world, many find the whole thing not only a challenge, but also quite worrying.
As part of my ‘keeping myself out of mischief’ campaign, I do two drop-in sessions per week at Ringwood Library just helping anyone who presents themselves with problems with mobile phones, tablets (not medications…just larger sized phones), laptops, the internet… Whatever the problem, I will try to help both patiently and non-judgementally.
So, I thought I’d write a short monthly ‘tech tips’ column tackling some of the more common problems about which people come to consult me.
On this occasion, the introduction has taken up a bit of space, so this time my tip is short and pithy, and owes much to both Corporal Jones and Douglas Adams. It is, of course, DON’T PANIC. Many tech disasters only seem that way. Often the solutions are simple… once you have learnt what to do.
A quick illustrative anecdote: a gentleman contacted me. His phone wasn’t receiving emails or messages. He kept trying to reset his accounts, but none of the necessary security codes would come through to his phone, so he was stuck.
What he didn’t know is that his phone has an ‘aeroplane’ mode which cuts off all communication with the outside world. Somehow, that had been switched on, probably by a finger slip. Time taken for me to solve the actual problem was less than ten seconds. Undoing the chaos he’d caused took rather longer.
I relate that story, not to be judgemental, but simply to illustrate that keeping calm is always good advice.