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My Father and the Tablet

We bought my father a tablet for his seventy-fourth birthday, which he had not asked for and did not want, and which he referred to for the first eight months as “the device”, in the tone most people reserve for legal documents.

He was not stupid about it. He had been an electrician for forty-one years and could rewire a house from memory. What he had was a very specific and entirely rational fear, which was that he would press something and break something and not know which thing he had pressed.

It took four visits before he would log in without me in the room.

The settings were where everything actually lived, and nobody had ever told him that. I made the text larger, which took eleven seconds and changed the entire experience, and I turned off almost every notification on the machine, because a device that buzzes at a nervous person all day teaches them that it is dangerous.

I had to sign up for two accounts on his behalf and I made a written list of the passwords, on paper, in a drawer, which every security professional in the world would object to and which was unquestionably the right decision for a man of seventy-four in a house on his own.

The first six months were mostly things going wrong. The photo app would crash whenever he opened it from the home screen, for a reason I never established. Twice the whole thing decided to freeze mid-sentence and he rang me convinced he had destroyed it. It wanted to update itself constantly, always at the exact moment he wanted to do something else, and he could not tell the difference between a genuine update and something trying to trick him. Neither, if I am honest, can I.

Then it turned, and it turned completely.

By the second year he was on that thing for hours. He would stream old football matches, entire matches from 1979, and he watched a documentary series about canals that he still refers to. He would scroll through photographs of his grandchildren in Australia at half past six in the morning, which he told me about slightly guiltily, as though it were a waste of the machine.

He became, without any irony at all, mildly addicted to reading the news, and his screen time at seventy-six was higher than mine.

The bad afternoon came in the November of the third year.

He got a telephone call – not an email, a call – from somebody claiming to be from his bank, who knew his name and the first line of his address and the name of the branch. It was an extremely competent scam. They told him his account had been hacked and that he needed to move his money to a safe account immediately, and they stayed on the line with him for twenty-five minutes while he did it, which is the part that makes me angriest, because staying on the line is the whole technique.

He got as far as the confirmation screen and then he stopped, and he said he would call them back, and they became slightly impatient, and that was what saved him. Not knowledge. Tone of voice.

He rang me instead. He had lost nothing. He was so ashamed that he could not say it in one go and I had to piece it together over about ten minutes, and he was seventy-six years old and apologising to me.

I want to be clear that he had done nothing wrong. He had not clicked on spam, he had not given away his data carelessly, his privacy settings were – because I had done them – better than most people’s. He was targeted by professionals who do this all day.

We changed everything that week and I taught him the only rule that actually works, which is that no real bank will ever ask you to move money while they wait.

He is eighty-one now. He still has the same tablet, which I back up twice a year and which is four operating systems out of date and works perfectly well. He switches it off at nine every night and puts it in the drawer, which I once thought was fear and now think is discipline I do not have.

I checked my own screen time after that November. It was five hours and ten minutes a day, which is not a distraction from my life so much as a substantial part of it, and I have never once managed to put my phone in a drawer at nine o’clock.