Pensioners like Mum & Dad are left stressed & depressed by digital work culture

I’m surfing the internet for official support designed to help older people navigate digital admin’ and I’ve stumbled on programmes from Age UK and ‘AbilityNet’ a little too late.

Summer 2025 – 2026 has yielded a radical sea-change for myself and my parents…as they moved back to ‘jolly’ England from a pretty corner of Northwest France, at the precarious ages of seventy-three and seventy-four, and have bought a new house and repatriated their car and pensions.

I use ‘precarious’ because I can see the small mental leaps challenging them on a day-to-day basis that weren’t there when A Place in the Sun conveyed them to Chateauneuf eight years ago. Bless them – having spent a dramatic six months moving around Air B&Bs to find a suitable new home, physical sensitives to things like ‘the cold’ (one didn’t have central heating) and a mattress with aggressive springs (my mother’s back reacted) have also reared their heads in this hairy year of digital admin’ hell-fire.

I admit that as the only child, I have only played witness or helping tech-brain, in these administrative Hunger Games, intermittently and from a distance. We haven’t lived in the same area for at least a decade – they gravitate to rural idylls without train-stations, and I’m a Dyspraxic, non-driver who makes a living from the media/communications industries. It would be nice to think that the gorgeous Tudor and Georgian town of Uppingham where I grew-up has its own legacy printing industry or that my former Xmas retreat, Heulgoat, has a cottage PR industry served by 1,400 Bretons. But of course, they don’t. It is their separation from modern industry, and preservation of slow aesthetics that makes them safe, attractive, almost spiritual.

So, I haven’t been as useful as I might have been had I settled up the road. I’m still looking for that elusive home of my own with glowing natural beauty and a direct line into a cultural centre. Though I did, sitting around their kitchen table in Heulgoat, overlooking the eerie lake, witness the beginning of what was to be a long season of administrative frustration and depression for my parents.

That particular task in August 25’ was the ‘repatriation of household goods.’ I remember this slog featuring the hybrid, hard-copy and digital process of uploading lists upon lists of belongings into an online form. Before I inserted myself into the fractious conversation, there had been a first attempt. Predictably, the first attempt was rejected due to formatting issues of the handwritten lists – kitchen items, bathroom items, bedroom items etc.

We collectively got there in the end, following some tears from Mum, who took to pacing around the Sous Sol and garden like a ghost, and a circular, hyperbolic narration of the situation from my dad that stretched time by an extra couple of hours. (He’s a former Speech and Drama teacher.) The tears and the outraged narrative weren’t triggered by system ‘rejection’ alone. They were triggered by the compounding of many micro-tasks that caused overwhelm and a sense of failure – ‘How do we get photos from our phones onto the computer?’ ‘Why can’t we find all the documents in our Chromebook downloads?’ ‘How do we attach the photos to an email?’ ‘What do you mean, our internet’s too slow?’ ‘Why can’t we save what we’ve done?’ ‘So, we have to start all over again?’ Etc.

This phrase ‘so we have to start all over again’ became an unwanted mantra for two people who started their working lives in a bank and factory that both dealt in A4 paper, trays and beige folders. In fact, when my father levelled a union complaint at an employer late in his career, he fondly labelled his institutional folder of evidence his ‘Shit Folder’ in bold felt-tip, before carrying it into an HR meeting. I digress because they’re unusually hilarious and have a track-record of acting with conviction.

So, to be wrong-footed by multiple portals into a world they do not understand is hard territory. The eye of the digital admin’ storm really began on this side of the Channel, with UK solicitors. Solicitor Number One required a nuanced system of ID checks that included the ‘online portal QR code, to phone, back to computer’ Foxtrot. You know what I mean. Aside from my parents’ struggle in gauging the quirks of a phone camera picking-up a QR code, or what this multiplatform matrix meant, the main bone of frustration was…they do not own up-to-date phones.

Why would they? They’re not watching TikToks while sat outside the Tabac with their mates, they’re regaling former travel mishaps and complaining about the French postal system. As a post-war baby with a talent for ‘making do’ and mending, my mother has zero interest in buying anything she doesn’t need, rendering all ecommerce completely useless. They take photos with a digital camera that feels like a camera, that they know how to marry with a laptop. Finally, the idea of posting aspirational images of where they are and what they’re doing is so counter-intuitive to them – as it’s dependent on giving a monkeys about what others think. They simply don’t. It’s aspirational, and a tendency I try and lean-in to.

Calling up the solicitors’ office and begging them to send two sets of ID checks to my father’s ‘phone’ was a wrangling that involved deep resistance from the legal firm’s agent. After protesting that the phone was too old …over the phone, my panicking Mum sent a picture of her phone to the representative as proof of incompatability. With perfect irony, this episode concluded by the solicitors contacting them a month later to say they do not do business with my parent’s chosen building society and could not proceed…thus the process regenerated.

Fast forward to Mr and Mrs Flower occupying the ‘bad-mattress Air B&B’ in Thornton Cleveleys and Solicitor Number Two was also circumspect about my mother’s phone being incompatible with their ID system. Another call, another heavily forced compromise, which – given that they both still hold fast to nanny state principles of politeness and public service caused a degree of emotional discomfort. I think the unconscious question of why they were required to ‘fight’ for basic needs simmered quite near the surface throughout…

Throughout these repetitive but increasingly familiar cycles, Mum and Dad attempted to source tech solutions from local libraries in the midlands and on the Fylde coast. What should have been oases of practical support were more often than not, under-serviced services, one with a perpetually broken scanner, another with aged computers that couldn’t ‘compute’ the actions needed by the mortgage lender. One library in on the Wyre coast only allowed use of the scanner for staff! (This doesn’t surprise me, I am the only coastal dweller to open a laptop in public spaces…no one has a corporate job.)

The final tier to this cake of administrative foulness was my rents’ experience of repatriating their tiny, red, fifteen-year-old car. I emphasise, this is not a limited-edition Lamborghini or anything adjacent. In fact, it broke down three times on the way from Grantham to Lancashire.

I have no hesitation in saying that anyone who has dealt with the DVLA lately must have been on the receiving end of some seriously archaic, Harry Potterish systems that defy all logic. I don’t simply mean the systems that waste time and money in the way a private enterprise couldn’t. I also mean – systems that waste energy, good will and any residue of good reputation that was built during the era of pre-digital socialism.

The roots of the problem were around the multitude of paper-forms, supplementing a digital process, that were required as one mail package to the DVLA. To unpack this boring but necessary detail – the application for registration package was sent back on three occasions over a period of four months due to either one proof being absent (because they had received it in the first attempt and kept it) and one proof being a photocopy – because they had also received said proof in a previous attempt. Meanwhile, my poor Mum and Dad, wanted to get out of Fleetwood and explore the rest of their homeland. Infuriatingly, the letters explaining what was missing were as oblique as the system itself – offering a few lines of cryptic jargon that I, as a professional communicator, would not have allowed to leave the office. Added to this, the same bloke, Nick/Dave or something, seemed to have ownership of this end-to-end process as a sort of dedicated customer ‘relationship’ manager.

And on querying whether there were any notes on the account as to what had been sent when, the agent said – ‘we don’t keep any record of what documents we’ve received; we just treat each submission as complete or incomplete.’ As you’ve probably clocked, there is nothing ultra digital about this last experience of system failure, which was as lethargic and ‘computer says no’ as my parents’ interactions with the pension service.

The pension service debacle was refreshing in that it centred on phone calls. Dad and Mum in turn were asked to answer four security questions before being moved onto the business of receiving pension statements. On the first attempt, my mother made the cardinal error of prompting my father’s answer to one of the questions. This was inauspiciously overheard by the agent who voided the process and asked them to phone back and…start again.

Sure, being Air B&B nomads, having to sign-up to doctors, libraries and mechanics in each geography were mitigating factors in the stress, low mood and distrust Mum and Dad felt through each cycle of this relocation spin-dryer. However, the point is – none of these processes had been thought-out with them in mind. Meaning – senior citizens who only touch a computer to throw a film or video onto the television or to email an old friend.

For all the research and development into user experience of products, platforms and games we, as a society, invest in, where are the trials and alternative user-journeys for our biggest growing population – the elderly?

Like most people, I would rather my parents enjoyed all the colours in the Autumn of their lives rather than crying over screens. That’s the recovery from burn-out journey that middle-managers of my generation face. But currently, the wheels of transaction and governance seem to be focused on the middle of the middle – IT literate, working age adults who probably use LinkedIn. Scanning through the messaging of support programmes offered by Age UK and AbilityNet, there is a curious absence of sentiment about help with service providers, government agencies, private firms. Are we to assume that these entities have their own answers and activities to address the sensitive, protected characteristic of age?

I suggest that they do not.

 

 

TF