My father is getting old. He runs his own business, and has done so for over fifty years now, but he has started to find it difficult to keep up with the constant changes in the world of technology, and it’s getting him down. He has mastered the art of storing information on spreadsheets, to a certain extent, but he still insists on keeping a duplicate copy on paper “just in case the computer crashes”. He doesn’t seem to understand that he is doubling his workload in the process.

The other day, his fax machine broke, and after sending it to get fixed, he was notified that they no longer service fax machines of that age any more, and that he should upgrade to a newer model. I thought that this would be a great time to introduce him to the concept of faxing via internet, but he just can’t seem to get his head around it. There is nothing physical for him to pull the paper out of, and although it’s based on the exact same technology, he has too much trouble trusting that it works as advertised.