See interview with volunteer service provider – scroll down

Do you find computers frustrating?

I am a member of nextdoor.co.uk, a social media that encourages people to contact others in their own area for support and information.  Today’s entry is stimulated by Stewart, a fellow member from Coleford, that’s a small village local from Midsomer about ‘digital exclusion’.

Illustrative only

He wrote ..many people are excluded from what we now regard as ordinary activity, particularly older people. The pace of digital change has been rapid. I’ve heard people say, “I can’t be bothered, I’ll do without”.

Now it’s caught up with them, they can’t order online, make appointments, book holidays, find all sorts of things like bus timetables, TV schedules, communicate with friends and the list goes on.

Perhaps the most scary thing is many don’t realise what they are missing.

I was told there is a regular meeting on Thursday mornings at the Cheese and Grain, Frome, so as we don’t need much of an excuse to go to Frome then off we go. I’m told I have to ask for Will Palmer who is ‘on duty’ along with two others. I ended up by Stewart coming up to Francoise and myself in the Cheese and Grain Coffee bar and off we went with our discussion.

He and I are of the same generation so we remembered the old basic computers such as the Sinclair ZX80. I recalled the IBM 82 which was the size of a filing cabinet and would auto-type information in the memory of the machine;  1 inch wide magnetic tapes were used.

My own attitude to tech

Before talking to anyone I want to review my own attitude, having been a technophobe and then (mostly) succeeding to overcome it.

Overcoming wasn’t much of a problem because I’ve always loved gadgets and the ‘latest and the greatest’ but my ‘fault’ –  if you could call it that – is that I don’t ask something for fear of being thought of as stupid, or ‘am I the only person who doesn’t understand’.

However, in spite of progress I still feel I’m only using a fraction of the capability of my computer. I have knowledge of the necessary paths but that’s about it.

I also admit to going on overload when I have to read a long list of instructions.

BUT I have to say that instructions given by a techie are often far from helpful because they tend to leave one key stage out and a miss is good as a mile as they say. I am left feeling stupid.

Also when I ask the internet what to , I get a series of bullet point instructions but I find that the existence of the commands in the site or facility is not as they say, because the updating and configuring is so frequent an occurrence that even Google cannot keep pace with it.

Having said all that, the most useful sources of information are ‘talk me through’ videos which can be found on YouTube and it’s quite amazing the sorts of things you can get advice on from people who are really sympathetic and patient.

As for remote service centres I struggle with Indian or Pakistani accents, people who speak too fast, and bad lines.

Interview with Service provider

Today  27 February 2025 Stewart and I had a chat via ZOOM and he filled me in with the background of his voluntary work helping people to lose their fear of technology

Brian: Can you tell me about spark-it
Stewart: Yes, I don’t know a lot but it’s part of Spark which is a Somerset County Council initiative that creates all sorts of things to help the community. It depends a lot on volunteers but there are some paid people at the top who administrates Spark. Spark IT is one of the arms of Spark and it’s to do with these digital cafes and it’s all about overcoming digital exclusion.

There are evidently 180,000 people in Somerset who are in danger are being completely isolated by the lack of access to it – which seems like a lot of people but I meet them all the time particularly on a Wednesday morning in Wincanton.

I would not be surprised if the numbers were higher than that because I meet so many people and the people I meet are those who are prepared to just go along with it a bit and find out.

There are some people who are completely negative and I encounter them. One example: I spoke to a husband of woman coming with her iPad and had a problem with it and after I’d fixed it I spoke to the husband and I said ‘you’re not into this technology at all? He said ‘no, no, I’m going to ignore it’

There are a lot of people much younger than him who are also saying that they are similarly going to ignore it.  If things go at the rate they are going then in five years time they’re going to be excluded from so many aspects of society.

Amazon doesn’t mean anything to them. They can’t shop for groceries like my wife does where she ticks a few boxes and then sends it off and a man comes to the door with trays full of stuff. They can’t shop around virtually,  they physically have to go somewhere. There are some companies that only trade online, so they’re completely excluded from those.

One of the real worries is the NHS app because that makes life so much easier. Doctors and medical centers are depending on it so much these days. It actually makes it very difficult to interface with them any other way except  by walking in and speaking at the reception.

And if you live in an outlying village it is a job because many of the people in need require that sort of service. Consider people who don’t drive and have to catch a bus  – if it is anything like Coleford here I think there’s only a couple of buses a day.

Travel is a big investment of time just to book an appointment or get a repeat prescription but of course the NHS app. deals with that very well.

Brian:If I can have a bit of a shopping list from you, what sort of problems are you finding? What problems do people present with more often than than others?
Stewart: people come in with a smartphone and say ‘I understand I can pick up my emails on my phone.  How do I do that? another example is where they’ve already got a phone and some relative has sent them a picture of their grandchildren and they say  ‘I don’t know how to open it’.

So these are very simple things. We do very advanced stuff as well but mostly the demand is for simple things. Sometimes they come in with the phone they’ve got but which unfortunately is not a smartphone just an ordinary phone and they say ‘I see that some people can log in to Amazon or make a doctors appointment or see what the weather is’.

or some people you have  to tell them they need a Smartphone with a SIM. ‘If you go to Tesco’s it’s only about £10 a month’  but for some people that is a lot of money. There are cheaper ways.

You could buy a second hand smartphone and just pay for a SIM card and you can probably get it down below £10 a month but you’ve got a little bit of an upfront cost in buying the phone and old second hand smartphone say 50 pounds or so.

Another charity is where if you really are in need you can get a mobile phone for free – its called ‘donate it’. I’m a trustee of the charity that’s based in Wincanton as it happens and it’s got about 50 pick up points all over Somerset and quite a few in Dorset.

What it does is it takes old phones, laptops and tablets that people have sitting in their drawers, the old model that they used to use and they don’t know how to dispose them and they’re scared of just putting them into a dustbin because of course there may be data on it.

It takes those devices and sorts them out. Some are not worth refurbishing so the precious metals get removed from them which more or less pays for their safe disposal so that they don’t end up in landfill.

But some of them – a very small percentage – can be reused and they can be refurbished and then we give them to the needy: homeless people, refugees,  and those who have some sort of an addiction problem.

You can’t lead much of a life without a phone. People say to me: What if you give somebody who’s got an addiction problem a smart phone. Surely they will just trade it in and buy whatever substance they’re addicted to. Yes you’re absolutely right.

What we do is we have some that have got broken screens. We don’t fix those,  we give them to people who’ve got an addiction problem so they are not tradable but they can still use them and still apply for jobs, make appointments with the doctor, report back to their whoever they have to report to, look for vacancies in hostels.

So if you haven’t got a phone you can’t do any of those things. The client group tends to be younger people and they are really becoming digitally excluded. Lack of a phone excludes them from modern society. A phone that works but has got a broken screen is perfect for the sort of person that might want to trade it for substances as it is unsaleable.

Brian – what is the average age and description of the client group?
Stewart: If you talk about typical it’s mostly ladies of  70 years of age and beyond.  What happens is the husband may have done the banking, dealt with the bills and maybe eBay, Amazon and things like that because they had the technology when they were working people.

When the husband dies the widow is absolutely stuck. So we see them in this condition. On the other hand we see elderly guys who were fairly senior people in society;  solicitors and people who had PA’s when they were in their work. They left all that sort of thing to their PA then when they retire they find they are completely cut off.  so that’s the other side of the coin but it’s mostly elderly women.

Brian: Let’s come on now to how we make helping such a client group attractive to volunteers. Can you think of the last few volunteers you’ve got and how you got them.
Stewart: I’ve got a volunteer example very recently who turned up. She was female and it was difficult to tell her age but I would say probably 50 or 60s.

She wanted to volunteer and while she was there I said ‘there’s a woman who needs a bit of a hand opening an attachment or something and she just dived straight in and I could tell she was really good.

I’ll tell you how we found her – I’m based in a Community Centre in Wincanton, and that Community Centre has about 150 volunteers per week doing various things such as taking people people on walks, running the talking cafe,  helping with the gardening and so it goes on. The numbers of volunteers are exceptional.

There’s a person who manages these volunteers so  I said to him that we need another volunteer for the Digital Cafe and it was he who found her.  She said she could not do anything Before Christmas because she was going to have a heart operation. So I said ‘I hope that goes well’ Then I didn’t see her after Christmas

I waited a couple weeks and I  then sent an email.  I said ‘are we going to see you?’ She said ‘unfortunately my heart operation didn’t go very well.  I’m still recuperating and now my mother has fallen very ill’. So that’s a volunteer we had and then we don’t have in a matter of three months.

Another volunteer who is there about 40% of the time lives locally. She and her husband have several properties which they rent out so apart from the occasion panic she must be at a bit of a loose end, She must be in a late 40s and she wanted to do something for the community so she wandered in one day and said ‘do you need a volunteer’? I said ‘yes we do’.

Can you cope with somebody who can’t open up an attachment to their email. or wants to start using their contacts on their phone or something like that?   She said ‘oh yes, I can do that’. I said ‘come along’ and she got stuck in she’s been doing it for well over a year.

We’ve got a schedule with her me and another volunteer so that we’ve got a little spreadsheet that’s online so everybody can access it and update it.

Another volunteer, another regular for about 40% of the time. she was  a loose end  and is around 75.  Her husband has been meaning to retire for  years and is a very eminent person in  pharmaceutical industry.

He is often invited to speak in different places all over the world and so his proviso when receiving invitations is ‘yes I’ll come and speak but you’ll have to book two seats on the plane because I’m bringing my wife and I want a bigger room in the hotel’.

So they’re always traveling and they’re actually in the Antipodes as we speak so I only see that  woman for bouts of five weeks and then she’s off somewhere else. She is very useful and very good.

Brian: what strikes me is that in Wincanton you have a community for people to walk into to volunteer. I know this will sound blinding obvious but unless there’s some place to walk in to you can’t walk in can you.  So that’s the problem possibly with Frome. I know there’s a table with a sign on, but is not quite the same thing as a dedicated community center. I reckon the Frome Times could be alerted.

Stewart: Frome is slightly different. It started out before spark IT set up this perhaps in before Spark it was set up with digital cafes so I think what happened was when spark IT started they saw that there was one in Frome.

Maybe that’s what initiated Spark and they pulled the Frome one into their network. But the Frome one is unique the one  in as much as there are two people there who are otherwise employed by the big doctors conglomerate that they have in Frome.

The surgery is obviously a big enough to employ two people who are mostly helping out with signing people up onto the NHS app because that is quite a tricky thing to get set up because the  levels of security have to be so high.

Brian:  I do nothing but look at websites all day  and even with my knowledge I find it difficult to understand some procedures largely because the people who wrote the software did not beta test it before publishing it. And they think that it must be absolutely obvious but it’s not obvious what to do. Everything should be beta tested with a cleaner or  a shop assistant.<

Stewart: yes you are right. Those testers could include an old lady who’s never used a smartphone before. Back to the NHS App. You’ve got a security problem. You’ve got people’s medical records that somebody else could access if it is not very tight so you have to jump  through all sorts of hoops to make sure that you are the person you say you are.

I don’t know if you remember but you had to have some sort of photographic ID and you had to photograph it and send it and then you had to also photograph yourself using your phone at that time and then it compared the two pictures.  They will then see if they matched and  they have access to your driving  license to check. So they correlate that and generate a code which it sends to your email address. If you put a false email address in,  that will not work.

It’s going to be an email address which has been authenticated,  then you receive the code and put the code into the app and it opens up the whole thing so you can see there’s lots of steps which people can mis-step and if they just make little mistake while they’re going through that process then it gets terribly complicated.  They may have to start again.