One Reason Old People Don't Update Their Stuff

Walk into an old person’s home and chances that it feels old: old furniture, old decor, old everything.  I used to think that it was because once you get old you don’t care about keeping up with things, or maybe you don’t have money to keep updating stuff, or maybe you don't want to spend money again on something you already updated when you were younger.

Now I realize there is another reason old people don’t update their stuff: they don’t realize how fast time is passing.  I ran into this exact experience with my home WIFI network of all things.

I spent a lot of time putting in a mesh WIFI network into my home in 2018.  I got it working, then pretty much forgot about it.  When I turned on my home devices, they got internet.  If I got a new  gadget, I hooked it up to the network and it worked.

Now 2018 doesn’t seem too long ago (to me), but it is SIX years ago, over 2,000 days.  When I was a kid six years took forever, and I got not one, but two college degrees in six years, which also seemed to last forever when I was a young adult.

And in tech, six years is definitely a huge amount of time, and during that time WIFI got updated, faster, could go further, and so on.   Time had passed me by, and I didn’t even know it since to me in my 50s, six years now seems like six months.

I would have still been oblivious about my ancient WIFI system but I ran across an online bandwidth tester, tried it out and saw it was much lower than the big number that my cable company justifies for their ever increasing monthly rate.  So I spent a whopping $200 at Amazon for a new system and took all of ten minutes to upgrade my home network.  My home network is now five times faster than it was, with a noticeable improvement in buffering and latency.

Now this was cheap and easy to do, so it was not about money or technical ability.  It just never occurred to me how much time had passed since I installed it.  If you had asked me when I put in my WIFI system I would have said it felt like a year or two ago.

So I was getting old inside my house and not even knowing it, which I now realize happens to a lot of old people.  They are just fine with what is going on inside their house, they just don’t realize how fast time is passing outside of it.

 

You Can’t Bequeath Kindle Books

 After my dad passed away I had to go through the mess that was his office.  Buried in one of his desk drawers was my mother’s iPad.  She passed away in early 2022, so her vintage 2018 iPad sat buried in a drawer for two and a half years.

Thinking I might be able to Ebay it for $50 I re-powered the battery and booted it up and spent all of one minute cracking the pass code using her birthday.  Once I was in I found my dad did delete her email before throwing it into a drawer, but he didn’t delete her Kindle ap.

Kindle was still was linked her unused Amazon account (separate from my Dad’s) and has over 100 books, a treasure trove of reading that she would have paid over $1K from the time she started migrating from paper to electronic around 2012.  The problem is how to get $1K of content off the old $50 iPad over to MY iPad?

Turns out that when you buy an ebook, you don’t own it.  You only are getting a license to use it untilyou die.  That’s right, ebooks and similar content cannot be passed down or transferred, so I can’t tell Amazon I am the rightful heir and to send that $1K of ebooks my way post haste.  In fact, if you tell Amazon someone is dead and prove it they will clamp down their account right quick.

The obvious way around this would be to pretend she is still alive, log into her Amazon account, and put me on “family sharing”, which is how you normally share ebooks in a household.  I luckily found her old Amazon password on a piece of paper in another drawer, which sat idle for the past two and a half years.  The bad news is after 2.5 years without activity Amazon wants two-factor proof for me to log in, and both the email and phone that are on her account were shut down long ago. 

I could try to social engineer Amazon Support into updating her account with a new email and phone (and over the phone is the only way to do this), or I could just use her old iPad as a reader until I get through her content.

Before deciding what to do I went through the content and deleted anything I already read, which removed over two dozen books (mostly books we recommended to one another, so makes sense).  Looking at what was left, turns out her tastes were a bit different from mine.  The remaining library is a good 2/3 police procedurals, which I might grab for a plane flight, but otherwise find boring (same story over and over).  The remaining 1/3 has a few novels which look interesting, but in the end it is definitely not the full $1K in content I was originally expecting.

At the end of the day I will skip trying to cheat my way past Amazon and just keep the iPad as a reader until I get through the books I want to read, then finally get rid of it.  By the time I sell the old iPad its value will be less than the $50 it is worth today, but I will make up for that by reading a few books off it.