My skill in responding to clients meaningfully without being patronizing got a severe test this week. A senior couple had replaced an aging computer with a new one. The transfer went without hitches. The only warning I gave them was to check out their fax machine to make sure it still worked. They have an HP all-in-one fax, copier, scanner, and printer.

The old computer had obviously evolved over time from a dial-up connection to broadband. It had two telephone lines plugged into a PCI card, but their Internet access was through an ethernet connection. I told them that those two lines probably looped through the computer and back to the fax through some route behind their bookshelves. They nodded.

A few days passed, and I received an urgent call. They loved the computer and the software I put on it for them, but they needed to receive a fax and it wasn’t working. I asked if they were sure that they had a telephone connection to the machine, and they assured me that the printer worked and they could copy things. I asked them to get a spare telephone, unplug the cable to the fax, plug the telephone in and let me know if they got a dial tone. Minutes passed. “No, it’s dead.”

So I suggested that of the two lines that were on the floor behind their computer, one went to the wall and the outside world, but the other went to the fax machine and nowhere else. They simply had to remove the short one and replace it with the other. “Okay, we got it.”

The next call was from the husband who was dialing for his wife because she was on the floor looking behind the computer. That call went on for some time. We decided that it would be better if I stopped by to help them.

Reproducing the conversation that followed would be tedious and not very productive. The thing I learned was that they were totally confused about the functions of various elements of their system. They had once upon a time received faxes through their computer. The computer was connected to the phone line. The computer sent data to the printer, which is also a fax machine, so the computer must be part of the fax process. Those observations set their mental process of how the world should be. They had spent a lot of time trying to see where to plug the phone lines into the new computer. Of course, it had no such facility.

So we got that straightened out and immediately fell into another morass. This one had to do with the interaction between the fax machine and their answering machine. Strictly speaking, this was not my problem, but they are friends. They use a shared voice/fax line and seldom get faxes, so that makes sense to share a line, but given their previous problem simply hooking things up, how could I explain the best way to keep the fax and answering machine happy? The obvious answer is to use a manual start for faxing, but that is facilitated by having a phone in the immediate vicinity of the fax machine. They prefer to keep their answering machine in the kitchen and the fax in their office. So I suggested they go to a thrift store and buy an old standard telephone to plug into the ext. jack on the fax. They looked dubious. They hesitated. Then the husband asked the question that stopped me: “How will the new phone know what number we have?” He was obviously concerned about being forced to learn how to program the new telephone.

When you get a question like that from people who pay you good money to tutor them in computers, you risk ruining the relationship with a flip answer. In fact, you probably risk the relationship with any answer. Remember these are seniors who have used phones all their lives. If a teen who was surgically attached to a cell phone asked that question, it would make sense. The teen might never have used a phone that did not have a chip in it. But these were mature users.

The best I could come up with on short notice was “The wire you plug into knows the number. It gets it from the wall socket.” That satisfied them. They thought it was a clever system because they could plug in a new phone and not program it. Maybe someday we will revisit the issue, but in the meantime I am trying to help them learn how to make collages and cards.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]senior learning, senior computing, sherman deforest, computer repair, fax, network[/tags]