“We have to take the rules we’ve been working within the past, then start over”

@stardotpro

Over the past six months, I lost touch with three senior citizens. One had passed away, and as the weeks passed I became increasingly concerned about the other two. One lives in the Midlands, which made investigation of his sudden silence difficult. The other was in the ’burbs of west London. There, all I had to do was nudge a friend who had been taught by our missing man while in junior school. He went straight round to his ex-teacher’s house and banged on the door.

Eventually, contact was made in both cases, and the silence turned out to be permutations of the same issue. In one case a migration from a cable TV connection provider to a general internet company managed to cut off his landline phone. The other case was one of those grit-your-teeth jobs: my friend couldn’t pass the identity checks from Facebook after he was hacked and his password changed by the bad guys. No amount of phoning helplines, billing departments and so on would fix either situation. In these cases with the over-80s, the idea of a three-way call or a Zoom meeting with someone like me as Mr Angry the Tech Translator is unlikely, especially given that neither had an internet service, that