Now that Christmas is past, I can’t help but marvel about how nice technology is for trying to replace those family customs we used to enjoy in person.
Christmas Day, I asked my mother and sister to join me for a video call. I proposed using Facetime since we all have apple phones or tablets. If that didn’t work, I suggested Zoom as the back up. For my real job, I’m on video calls all day long, so I didn’t anticipate much of problem. How wrong I was.
The call was supposed to take place at 7pm giving me an hour to talk to my family and then a half hour to get ready to go for christmas appetizers at my step-daughter’s boyfriend’s family house. Facetime only worked for one of them, so after about fifteen minutes I suggested trying zoom. I hadn’t even installed it, so I had to quickly download it, ad then attempted to contact both parties again. Epic fail.
So about 25 minutes in of trying to get us all on one call, I sent a message saying I gave up. My sister decided to use her work computer and invite all of us to a teams meeting. Which worked perfectly for me, because I use Teams both personally and professionally. For my mother, she had to download the app, set up a login and then get on the call and then couldn’t figure out how to turn on the video camera or her speaker so she could hear us.
40 minutes total into this project we finally had success. A quickly chat with my family to pass on the holiday wishes and catch up.
After going through all this, I can’t imagine what parents are doing for their children to have access to their school curriculum. I’ve read stories about kids who have to go sit in parking lots of fast food restaurants so they have access to their school programs. I believe technology will be the thing that keeps lower income people down and the divide of access will keep getting worse. How do you do interviews for jobs if you don’t have internet or a smartphone or laptop?
There is also a new trend emerging with employers who are asking their workers to provide their own cell phone and laptop to be able to perform their work. Imagine being asked to provide this when you can’t afford it to start a job.
This year I’ve sunk too much money into my fledgling publishing business to do this, but I’ve decided once I have some spare cash, I’m going to buy one of those tracfone deals that provides phone and data for one year (limited use – but if you use free wifi whenever possible it stretches its use).
You can pick one up for about $60 from HSN (this is not meant to be a plug for HSN – it just happens to be the only place I’ve seen these deals for less than $100). I plan on buying one or two to pass on to kids in my community that are struggling with access. I imagine foster children or children in households that are struggling to pay bills would also benefit. I know these particular phones are a decent deal and a decent phone because I purchased one for $50 to be my own business phone to keep costs down.
If you can spare the money consider doing something similar like buying a low cost tablet or cell phone to help someone in need. Or by providing access on your wifi for those that can use it. Access equals the ability to thrive.
