Well I never

My mother was a great internet user in her 80s, investigating family history and keeping in touch with relatives in Canada and New Zealand. On the other hand she never got the hang of using a mobile phone but I suspect she just didn't want to be too available!

kitty it was via Shrewsbury I believe.

Yes quite flickeyb I have an uncle by marriage who was involved in computer department, in BP, 50 years ago. Late 70s now and tracks his shares etc. online

Many of us were using computers before the parents of many of these wet behind the ears interviewers were born. DH, an engineer, was working with computers in the early 1960s and continued ever since. My first contact was in the mid 1960s and has continues since. Dh bought the original ZX80 and we have had a home computer ever since and use it a lot. At the moment DH and I are facing each other at a table in the study both beavering away on our laptops. If I wasn't currently on Gransnet I really ought to be writing the minutes of a meeting I attended last week, then I must sell something on ebay, before checking train times for a meeting next week.

Where do they find these interviewers??!!

Why does society (I'm being a bit sweeping there I know!) think that, as soon as you hit 60 you become a brain-dead imcompetent?

We bought my 85 year old mother a mobile phone because she was so deaf that using a phone to speak was a nightmare. I taught her how to text and that's how friends and family communicated with her. After she died aged 89, the comment that was made by her wonderful carers in the residential home in which she spent her final few weeks was, "We really miss hearing the beeps of a text message coming on to Peggy's phone!"

She also used to go to the local library to use the computer to email her sister in the US. She was in her late 80s.

Her sister in the US was still driving from Florida to Rhode Island and back, on her own, once every year when she was in her 80s. My geography's not good, but even I know that's a very long journey! She was also very computer literate and regularly emailed right into her 90s.

It's astonishing that there seems to be this prevailing attitude that the over 50s are to be marvelled at if they can still operate a kettle or change a lightbulb!

I believe that when McCarthy and Stone, the builders of retirement homes did a survey of technology use by its residents. This was the result
www.mccarthyandstone.co.uk/media-centre/national-press/forget-oaps-were-iaps-internet-age-pensioners-reveals-survey/.

Perhaps the interviewer should get out a bit more

Jess could you ask the lady you were speaking to which way she came as we are doing that trip on Saturday?

It is not newsworthy to say how techy we all are. I think Mini may well be right

Some people have no idea about us 'oldies' do they. I'm 76 and have been
online for 16 years. My sons gave me a computer as a retirement present as they didn't want me to go rusty.

Do you think they're hoping that they'll be inundated with emails etc from GNs and others of mature years so that they will have another programme without actually having to do any research? Not that I'm cynical, you understand

My uncle is 92 & regularly uses Skype.

Well said Oldgreymare

Well if the interviewer was Susannah, she should know better as her Mum certainly knows how to use the internet!!!!!

My late uncle bought a computer in his 80s and very quickly taught himself all the ins and outs of internet and email as well as desktop publishing. He wrote letters in Swedish (he was Scottish, but liked languages) and managed to find all the Swedish characters somewhere on the keyboard. These idiotic reporters ought to go along to a U3A meeting! I suspect they would get very short shrift.

'Furious' from Fife.. How dare they?

LOL
I was talking yesterday to a visitor to this area. She was 86 and had driven herself from Loughborough to N Wales (with an overnight break) to have a holiday on her own. She had not only booked online she had been on the internet, studied the maps of her planned off-motorway route and memorised them.

I saw that, too. What nonsense!

That is insulting, what do they think we have been doing with our lives? Most of us have grown up (well in my case from my 20's) with computers although they take up quite a lot less room nowadays and don't (fortunately) require a dust free environment......Angry from Somerset

Send them an email Brenda. I do sometimes but will put my age on next time!