HUNTINGTON, NY — Local woman Christine Upton listened patiently this morning to a voicemail from her boomer father, who spent the first thirty seconds carefully listing information her phone had already provided.
"Hi sweetheart, this is your Dad calling," began Mr. John Upton. "It's Saturday, about 4:00 p.m. I'm calling from the house phone, since my cell phone is dead and I can't find the charger."
Despite repeated attempts to explain what new phones can do, Mr. Upton has remained steadfastly set in his ways. "Every voicemail from Dad, it's date, time, person calling, and usually the weather," said Ms. Upton. "And any time he calls someone besides me, I still hear him diligently leave his call-back number at the end. I've also tried to break him of signing text messages 'Love, Dad' - but that's a lost cause."
As Mr. Upton refuses to get an iPhone, his daughter's use of "like" and "laugh" reactions have produced endless confusion. "He now thinks when you laugh at something, the proper way to express that via text is to actually type out 'Dad laughed at such-and-such'," said Ms. Upton. "Still, simply getting him to text at all was a big step. It took years to convince him that China wasn't reading every message."
At publishing time, Mr. Upton was carefully writing down the name of the AT&T employee who had helped him update his phone, so he could be sure to request them if he ever called for help.
Citing concerns about stiff competition from Amazon and an impossible-to-please Gen Z, Santa has announced he's hanging up the hat for good.
