A man with a squirrel on his head

The increasing ubiquity of IT means that, like, I suspect, many of our generation, we spend a fair amount of time attempting to provide long-distance tech support by phone for older relatives baffled by the workings of an iPad or the intricacies of the internet, often because they find themselves with no alternative but to go online for some essential transaction.

By and large, they’re all pretty competent with general browsing, emails and so on, but every now and then something goes awry: the title comes from a particularly surreal recent conversation where three attempts to send a link to an embedded instruction video from a company’s website - a link we had both previously tested ourselves - elicited a baffled “But it’s a film of the weather forecast, dear” and then “All I’ve got is some people on a beach”, finally followed by “Now it’s a man with a squirrel on his head”.

Part of the problem is that the idea of proceeding by trial and error - the essence of learning to handle an iPad, phone or PC - is an alien one to a generation brought up to be careful and to avoid mistakes wherever possible; ‘click it and see what happens’ is not their natural reaction to a problem. It’s even worse for those who had experience of early computers at work many decades ago; they still suffer from the fear of failure learned in the days when a single error in input or timing could crash the whole system.

In a sane and humane world, they would be free to ignore the existence of the internet apart from its usefulness for entertainment or family and social communications. However, the increasing difficulty in carrying out day-to-day interactions with public services and businesses by any other means forces them into using it; companies and government offices alike are striving, to use the revealingly demeaning official term, to ‘drive customers online”.

It’s something I wrote about in 2017 and, since then, the pace has, if anything, accelerated, especially since Covid closed workplaces and obliged customers and clients to deal remotely with isolated workers, many of whom are still working from home nearly three years on. The telephone helplines nominally still exist but these days, if they are answered at all, there’s a strong chance of being cut off or left on hold while someone lets the dog out and no possibility of the call being passed to a supervisor or someone with better information.

It’s all well and good to put everything online and reduce telephone communication to a bare minimum to keep costs down but, in a world of online scams and cyber-crime, to rely on it to the exclusion of everything else is not only cruelly staking the least tech-savvy customers out like captive goats for scamming predators (as well as disenfranchising many with physical or visual impairments which prevent them from using the technology); it is also exposing all of us to risk, defended only by the weakest links in the security chain.

And that, of course, is before the inexplicable glitch, the solar flare or the cyber-attack which brings the whole thing crashing down; one day, firms - and government and health agencies - may have cause to regret putting all their eggs in the online basket. In the meantime, while it’s all still working, spare a thought for everyone unwillingly compelled to negotiate the mysteries of the internet and ending up with a man with a squirrel on his head.