How to Keep in Touch with Internet-Challenged Seniors

It’s hard to remember the days of waiting 3-4 days for a letter or response to a missive you’d sent someone. (And some people are too young to even have a memory of those times.) But there is a sizeable section of our population that lives that way—the 75 years and older group. A good part of this population still reads the newspaper (the kind that gets your fingers dirty by the time you’re finished), still subscribes to glossy magazines and still looks forward to the daily visit from the mail carrier to herald another possible connection with the outside world and (hope beyond hope!) loved ones.

If you’re lucky enough to have an elderly relative—a parent or grandparent—who is still looking forward to letters from you (let’s say) but you haven’t written a letter (read: snail mail) in about a decade, then you have a very sad and unfortunately all too common situation of disconnect.

“If I could, I would fire off an e-mail to Gamma Jane at any time of the day,” you whimper. “Heck, I could fire off six. If it’s a slow day at work.” But writing a letter that then needs to be printed out, folded into an envelope, affixed with a stamp (is there a post office even near you, do you know?) and then taking off time from work to track down a mailbox—well, it’s a miracle poor Gamma Jane hears from you ever.

Voila, Presto! (Or, I suppose that should be, Abracadabra, Presto, to use a phrase more culturally in tune with this ancient demographic audience.) But anyway, Presto!

Presto is a combination printing mailbox and mail delivery service that lets you use the convenience of email to communicate with loved ones who don't use a computer or the Internet.

What Presto does for the loving but too-busy-to-write relative of an internet-challenged oldster (ICO) is allow you—and all your lazy good for nothing siblings—to communicate with your loved one using the tool you use everyday—e-mail. No, the ICO doesn’t have to own a computer or a keyboard or a router. He or she doesn’t have to have Internet service. Presto is a printer that goes in the ICO’s house (my mother keeps hers in the dining room so she never misses an e-mail from me or my brothers.)

You schedule “deliveries” either three or six times a day—your choice, and when you write your loved one a letter, it is delivered at the next delivery time in the schedule. Not only can you write your Gamma Jane as easily and conveniently (for you) as you would to any friend or e-mail contact, but you can also send her photos and articles you find on the Internet that, being internet-challenged, she wouldn’t normally have access to.

Can anyone say “win-win”?

You rake in the credit for being in touch a lot more than you have in the past. And the ICO enjoys contact from the outside world much more than they could expect to from once-a-day postal mail service. And since you don’t write snail mail any more anyway—make that once a month!