For some reason my algorithm (elsewhere) is showing me content about how Boomers (or just older people) act in a customer service situations.
There seems to be a lot of jokes being made about how older people cannot seem to figure out how to use point-of-sale card readers, particularly the tap function. But really just generally using card readers at all.
I know I have talked about my mom and her inability to use her cell phone/to text at all, and/or her very minimal ability to use a computer.
And there is this thing she does when interacting with that type of basic tech - cell phones, computers, and yes also card readers - that I have never really been able to articulate properly.
It is like she is unable to properly interact with the machine/user interface on a physical level. But it isn’t a physical issue. Like she still has enough hand/finger dexterity to, you know, push the buttons or tap the screen or whatever.
The analogy I have used before is driving a car - when you first learn how to drive a car, a lot of the learning involves kind of just getting a “feel” for driving a vehicle. How much to turn the wheel, how hard to hit the brakes in various circumstances etc.
Like you are learning the rules of the road and also how to do certain specific things, like parallel parking and stuff like that. But you are also kind of training your body/mind to be able to almost instinctively know how far to turn the wheel to make the corner, when exactly you need to slow down (or speed up) or start pressing the brake. In some ways, the car becomes an extension of you.
This is why there is always a moment of cognitive adjustment when/if you have to drive an unfamiliar car. Your mind/body has to sort of recalibrate to the slight differences in how the new car drives. It isn’t as instinctive as it is for you in your own car, at least at first.
Note: This also happens with other types of vehicles - like bikes or skateboards or boats etc.
That “feel” thing is something your brain/body also uses when interacting with tech that has a physical interface.
Like, whenever I have gotten a new phone, it takes my brain - and by extension my hand/fingers - a little bit of time to get used to it. Just like if I drive a different car.
Now, a lot of older people’s brains can adjust to driving an unfamiliar car. It might take them a bit longer than a younger person to “recalibrate,” but because they have presumably been driving for decades, their brain is like “we have used a machine very similar this one many times before, so I will just use the same Drive a Car operating template I have always used.”
But because things like smart phones and touch screens and card readers really only came into wider use around, say, 20 years ago (maybe a bit before that, but not by much), people in that age range (let’s say 65+ now) were already into their mid-40’s and above.
So, with exceptions being the 45+ year old (at the time) folks who had to use computers more heavily at their jobs when all of this tech really started taking over, most people who were that age didn’t seem to have the ability to adapt. They couldn’t seem to get the “feel” for it.
I think partly because that type of action - the action of tapping a digital icon on a screen, as a big example - was/is so different from how you interact with anything truly analog or mechanical.
Like, when I was a kid and a teen and even into my mid-20’s, most of the machines and objects I interacted with were real-world, physical things. I grew up in a completely analog world.
I would turn things and press physical buttons and lift things and push things etc etc. I would use my arms and legs and hands and fingers to manipulate objects that existed in the world.
But I never lightly and quickly “tapped” anything that wasn’t actually physical/real, in order to perform an action. (Although cards and card readers are physical - but I will get to the subtle difference there in a minute.)
I didn’t operate in that kind of here-but-not-here digital space until I was in my mid-20’s. Unless you count early video games, but even then they had physical things you used to operate them - joysticks and physical buttons etc. It also wasn’t too big of a leap for me to go from pressing the levers on the side of a pinball machine to make the pinball go, to using a joystick to make my little digital character run away from the ghosts in Pac Man.
But I was still just young enough for my brain to adapt and learn it.
Not only did 45+ year old people in that era generally not play those early video games, again (unless their work required it), they didn’t really even use computers. Not in a recreational sense (I know there are exceptions, but I am talking about the average person).
So the world just kept moving along this tech trajectory - and they mostly didn’t use it, until and unless they absolutely had to. So their brains/bodies never got a “feel” for it.
And now that the world pretty much runs on that type of tech, it has really left them behind in the dust. Learning the “feel” for how to use this stuff is really hard for a 65-70+ year old brain. Some are better at it than others, but you can still tell it isn’t natural or instinctive to them. Most look and seem oddly awkward using it.
The card reader issues are especially interesting to me. Again, the readers are physical objects and so are the cards (unless you have your card in digital form on your phone, but you rarely see people over 65 using their phone to pay).
But you are still not using the card and the reader in the way that we used to operate things 25+ years ago. Inserting the card in the machine and pressing the buttons is mostly okay for them, because it is similar enough to how you used to use other machines in the past. Still a bit outside their childhood/teen/earlier adult experience though!
But the tapping thing - like where to tap, how long you hold the card there etc - it is just not a thing their brains can adapt to. It is physical action yes, but it isn’t quite “mechanical” enough. It doesn’t involve pushing or pulling or pressing on a distinct and obvious lever or button.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the tap-to-pay machines operate slightly differently. I fuck it up regularly. But I at least still have a basic idea or “feel” of how you tap. I might not get it in the correct spot all of the time, but when I ask things like “Do I tap on the back?” and they tell me where, I can then do it right.
Anyway, I am babbling here! But I do think it is interesting, from a kind of neurological/brain POV, that the certain actions we perform with our hands/eyes/fingers to interact with certain kinds of tech, come naturally to people under a certain age - but really seem to be super challenging for people older than that to perform.
Even though it feels so easy and natural to younger people to do, it really is almost impossible for a lot of people over a certain age to do those same things.
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