Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Remember, Mom is about 83, and she's not good with techniligy.

Had to go to Mom's house Monday night, after getting back from San Saba. She'd surprised me earlier that morning, as I drove to work, calling me on her cell phone. She NEVER uses it. Got it the same time I got my razor, but barely knows how to turn it on, mostly because she never DOES use it, so you can see why it surprised me.

Anyway, turns out she'd dropped her cordless land line, and it wasn't working any more. People were calling here and she couldn't answer the phone. See, she doesn't know how to operate that one ether. There's a button she could push to answer calls from the base unit, but she doesn't know which one it is. Mom's got as thing with technology.

So, bottom line, I needed to go to Temple and sort things out. I told her I'd get up early on Tuesday and come over, but then I got to thinking about it. Since I'm in my summer schedule, who wants to get up early? So I called Denise, who was still at work at 8PM when I was leaving San Saba, and told her what was going on. I asked her if she wanted to make a trip to Temple. She did, so I told her I'd swing by the house along the way.

Turned out it took me about 30 seconds to fix the phone. Took the back off the battery compartment on the hand unit and pressed on the battery connection. Lights came on and everything worked. It' had simply become dislodged when she'd dropped it on the carpeted floor. Done deal. Then I cleared all the messages from her base unit, letting her listen to them all.

Most of the messages were from our cousin Sue, down in Houston. Sue calls mom every day, just about. Kind of a pain in the ass, but she's just about all the family mom has now. She'd been calling mom all day, worrying why she couldn't get hold of her. Mom had called me later in the afternoon, while I was in the library in San Saba. She told me Sue was drivin' her crazy, and did I have her number?

Turned out that all the numbers we had for Sue were old, disconnected numbers, so we couldn't call her to tell her mom was fine. This fear, that Sue would drive up to check on mom, is what drove me to decide to go ahead and go to mom's that night.

Anyway, after the drama with her land line was cleared up, Sue called again, and mom could tell her about all the mess that had gone on. We got her correct number in the process, and I made sure to put it on my phone. I checked mom's cell and we found Sue's correct cell number in there, in Received Calls. It just wasn't marked. The number that was marked as Sue's was wrong. I fixed all that, and then I sat mom down and showed her how to bring up recent callers on her cell and redial the numbers.

Anyway, after all that, mom apologized for not having anything to feed us. I told her it was no big deal, and then she offered us all a beer. We ended up sitting there, laughing, drinking a beer with mom, while she told us how much fun it had been to use her cell phone. After a while, I looked over at Denise and we mutually decided it was time to go home.

We ended up gettin' home at about 11:30 that night. made for a LONG day. But it was fun, and it's always good to see my momma.

Anyway, gotta go to work. Gotta take the scenic rout today. They're workin' on the bridge over the Colorado, just as you get into San Saba county. So I have to take the longer, twisty rout past Colorado Bend State Park. Cheers!

3 comments:

NotClauswitz said...

My mom has a land-phone with giant numbers on it that sounds like a submarine's dive alarm. I about jump out of the chair whenever it goes off. No cell phone but she's got a computer and she's writing a book - the Swedish-side family genealogy...

FHB said...

Yea, my mom's got one of those too. Loud as hell, with flashing lights. I think what I really need to do is go to an antique store and get one of those old rotary style phones from the 70s and put it in her kitchen. Those friggin' things NEVER went out.

Jerry in Texas said...

FHB,
You should really have an old-school corded phone somewhere in the house. If the power goes out, it will be the only phone that still works.