Pay and dismay

Information technology is great if you are reasonably young, have good eyesight and have all your wits about you. But if one is getting on a bit in years, if one has to frequently swap glasses depending on the task in hand, and if one’s memory is no longer the infallible steel trap it once was, one can be forgiven for sometimes thinking that the powers that be are using IT to make life unreasonably complex and challenging for people like yourself.

Let’s imagine a cold, wet and windy morning in late autumn and that you are a person in your late sixties, lurching around a bit while you wait your turn for a hip replacement. You drive to the supermarket to do your weekly shopping and then the torment begins. You limp the thirty yards or so over to the pay-and-display ticket machine. You are organised and have a fifty-pence and a twenty-pence coin ready in your hand.

After a few moments you find the coin slot (not entirely straightforward as it has been unobtrusively placed lower down, beneath the card and phone pay options). So far, no big problem, but then a new display appears on the inbuilt screen. Ah yes, it wants you to enter your car registration number, and you’re ready for this too – you have it written down on a piece of paper. Your numb fingers fumble it out of your wallet/purse (it’s windy, wet and cold remember) but before you can get your reading glasses out, the wind snatches the soggy scrap out of your hand.

Oh well. There are a couple of people waiting behind you now so you press the coin return and limp the thirty or so yards back to your car, take a long look at the number plate and fix the sequence in your short-term memory bank. Then it’s a thirty-yard limp back to the machine to join the back of the queue. You stand there being rained on in the wind, muttering your car registration to yourself and, after a minute or two, go through the process again.

But of course they’ve laid another trap for you; the letters and numbers on the shiny steel keypad have been largely worn away by thousands of finger touches, and are further obscured by the rain. With your cold-numbed fingers (luckily you are still wearing your reading glasses) you enter what you hope is your car registration and then limp triumphantly the thirty or so yards back to your car, carefully protecting your ticket from the wind and the rain.

Making sure you’ve got a pound coin to release a shopping trolley, it’s now time to relax a bit, prowling the aisles for life’s necessities with a few added treats. It’s fun; you see someone you know and chat for a few minutes. The stress engendered by your ordeal in the car park has fallen away but now, with your laden trolley, you head reluctantly towards the self-scanners . . .

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