Our fathers like icons.
I had a quest.
My Old Man asked me to find a decent mobile phone for him. He wasn’t after anything fancy — “Just to have the large letters on a display”, he requested.
My Dad doesn’t care about the model and make. His only concern is avoiding troubles he used to have when sending text messages. He is having trouble reading text on the small screen.
To make things harder, my Dad is a tiler. Tilers have enormous fists and fingers. Probably, the largest of all builders. When your hands are like paws, you’re having trouble using a small keyboard.
So I bought him a Nokia. I found a model that has both — large display with large letters and fairly large buttons.
I have two phone numbers.
The phone I use to talk to my parents is a personal one and we have cheap calls, since we’re on the same carrier. When he calls me on my business phone, they charge him much more than they should. But Dad keeps calling me on that phone. I wondered why.
When I gifted the new phone to my father, I added my business phone number, just in case.
This new phone has large letters on the large display and large buttons. The phone also has large icons which you can assign to any contact in the address book. When I added a new phone number, I automatically assigned an icon to it. Since then, my father calls me to that number.
I will have to remove the icons.
Illustration by Marko Kršul