We’re still settling into a new routine with Babcia. K has gotten her old phone charged and running, but the closest Babcia has come to an iPhone is the old tablet we bought her years ago.
Nana struggled with smartphones as well. Papa made the switch fairly easily, and then when we brought him an iPhone to replace his Android phone, he made the shift without much complication. Nana just experienced frustration: a few tries, and she was done.
“I can’t even answer Papa’s phone!” she once declared. She just handed it to him. She wasn’t having it.
I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a sort of willful helplessness: she’d never had any problem learning new things in the past. When Papa brought home a new computer in the early eighties, she learned how to use it. Each time he upgraded after that, she learned how to use it. New software, new user interfaces (i.e., the mouse). But for whatever reason, she just never had the motivation to learn how to use a smartphone.
