Biggest Challenge Yet

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Created on Wednesday, 12 October 2011

This morning a BBC crew came to my house at the crack of dawn to film me #GiveAnHour of my time to help my father use the internet. He has been on email before but doesn’t use the web and I cant really do my day job with sincerity and know he isn’t online!

The first challenge was getting my dad up, fed and dressed particularly as he had been out for a late night and big dinner! It was also hard to get him to stop focusing on the cameras and to focus on the Apple Mac – but as the hour went on, he did get the message, even if it was a slightly artificial environment.

One of Race Online 2012's key missions is to inspire people who may have never been online to give it a go.  We think that very often people get put off with the language used for all computer related stuff – actually much better to start with things they are interested in.

It took a while to get my Dad engaged and not frightened or sceptical. First of all we searched for alpine plants as he used to work in a garden in Munich and loves them – we found some good pics but they weren’t enough to hold his attention long – then I moved on to one of his favourite subjects – himself :) as he is a writer and a journalist there is a huge amount of his work online and so I showed him all the different bits and pieces.

This approach fascinated him but he was still cynical and not sure if he felt his privacy was being infringed…. By now we had been chatting for about 20 mins and I could tell he was paying attention but we hadn’t found the killer use… yet… Then I started asking him for things on his shopping list and he talked about how he was looking for a certain paint for the outside of his house.  We were off.  

As I showed him not just one but three different sites that stocked it, all at a cheap price and all able to deliver locally he could suddenly see the power of the search engine and he was really amazed at the ease of online shopping.

I hadn’t expected that would be the need that got him all fired up and it took us a bit of time to find the right inspiration but we had fun, a good chat and by the end of our mini tutorial I think he was convinced there were things of value to explore.

I figure he is a tough audience and a proper refusenik so he’s also a good indication of the challenges when helping people.

One Dad down, only 8.7M more people to encourage online….