My first ride of the day was an elderly woman in her 60s or 70s. She sent me a text via the app describing her appearance and exactly where she would be. Sure enough, she matched her appearance as described in her text and was at the exact location she said. My kind of passenger.
She got in the car and was very pleasant, thanking me for picking her up and giving her a ride. As we drove off, she talked about the marvels of technology and how happy she was to be able to get a ride so quickly. She so loved rideshare, much more than taxis.
She started to say how she was not crazy about cell phones though. And I thought, “Ah, yes, an older person who does not like technology.”
She added that it was mainly because she did not want to talk on the telephone, but she loved them for the purpose of texting. She was baffled about people who used them as phones, especially people who were walking on the street with their pets and their kids. She never answered the phone and if people wanted to get in contact with her they should text her!
She reminisced about the days when you didn’t have a phone outside the house and if people called you, they had to leave a message and you wouldn’t know who called until you got home. There were positives and negatives in this, but she said she never liked answering the phone back then.
She thought that the cell phone was convenient for people who might have missed appointments or needed rides or so forth. If people had kids that needed to be picked up and they were at work… that kind of thing.
As I stopped to let some kids cross, she did say that one big problem was how no one looked up from their phones. Not even to cross a street. And these kids proved her point as none of them looked up or even seemed aware that I might have run them over.
She then went on to talk about the positives and negatives of social media. She had a Facebook account only accessed it every couple of months to see how people were doing. She found it very toxic to get on it every day. She would never join Twitter or X. From the stories she heard, it was not a happy place.
But she went on to tell me how much she truly loved her smart phone. With it, she could find where her favorite stores were and when they were open. She could open an app and find out what the weather was going to be like and dress accordingly because the weather people on TV were always wrong. Her phone had apps on it that could figure out tips she needed to leave at restaurants, that could allow her to order food that would be delivered to her doorstep, and even find sports scores, as she was a huge baseball fan. She did add on to this final comment that she was not happy to see the scores during the World Series, as her Diamondbacks really screwed the pooch.
I am going to sound like an agist in saying this, but I was truly amazed at how this older woman embraced technology to do everything she needed it to do and handled it all with aplomb.
I’m sure she knew how to handle a smart phone much better than me.
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