Resource Hoarder

Older Every Day

Resource Hoarder

I’ve recently become a part of Venmo. I think.

Since I was a teenager, I have had a checkbook. That now has nearly become an extinct form.

I pay for my daily mocha with my phone. I can’t remember how or when I learned to do that. I still carry a credit card, because I really don’t think the phone is going to work this time.

But Venmo.

The man who is hugely helpful to us in the increasing number of tasks I used to take care of myself, took my phone one day and entered himself on Venmo for me, so I could pay him.

Seemed as close to seamless as any technology does to me.

So, I dared to try it with the woman who cleans for us. The first time I tried to pay her, I asked her to pay me by mistake. She corrected me and, with her help, I managed to reverse it.

Then I had another shot with a man who helped us look at a gardening job we were sorting out. He has what to me is a complicated Turkish name. I tried to pay close attention to the spelling.

Immediately I got notice from Venmo that the payment had gone through.

My euphoria was interrupted by a message through the Venmo apt that came back instantly.

“Who is this? Why are you sending me this?”

I had that old person’s extra heartbeat that signals another drubbing by some contemporary digital task gone wrong.

I fumbled around with the so-called “help” feature that asked me questions, totally beyond my understanding.

Finally, I texted (I consider texting miraculous) my 16-year-old grandson, who is in bed recovering from surgery for a torn ACL.

“Kai, if you haven’t recently taken a pain med, can I come over and get help with a digital disaster?”

“Come ahead, Papa.”

He took my phone in his right hand, and his phone in his left hand, and began a process that is at least as mysterious as the virgin birth.

“This was sent to the wrong person, by mistake,” he texted, to someone, “would you please return it?”

The someone texted back that she wouldn’t return it, but he could go to Venmo help and she would cooperate.

It seems this process lends itself to scams, in which a person claims, falsely, to have sent the money and asks for it to be returned.

Kai then turned to some site on the internet that gave him the exact wording needed to successfully complete that task.

With the phone in his left hand, he read the exact wording into my phone in his right hand. I didn’t ask how he switched from text to voice.

After another 15 minutes of complex back and forth, Kai excused me, saying he believed it was done and I should watch my bank account to see that the $50 was returned.

I gave him the cache of chocolate chip cookies Lacey and sent me with, as bribe. Fell all over myself thanking him. Which embarrassed him.

I have since looked at my bank account a few times in search of what he told me to look for. I have found neither the $50 being paid out, nor returned.

I haven’t admitted to him, that the experience of being in his thrall, and watching him navigate so expertly what I experience only as a headache, was itself enough. I don’t intend to keep looking for what happened to those $50.

The time spent with him, watching him do what I will never be able to do, seemingly effortlessly, was worth at least $50.

I read somewhere old people are hoarding the resources that belong to younger people.

I’m ready to turn over some of those resources to Kai and his cohort. Who actually know what to do with them.