My grandmother in law has started to do an odd thing as she gets older. Her short term memory is non existent at certain times, and she has taken to calling my mother in law at all times of the night. This is standard practice with elderly people, I saw it with my own family.
However lately she has been coming through via the operator, 3, 4,5 times a night. The phone bill came through and it is over 200 quid for this quarter, over 75% of her calls have come through from 118-500, which is the BT directory enquiries number.
We think we know how she gets through, it's a BT phone and it has 118-500 as speed dial for button 6.
We removed this from speed dial and still she came through via the operator last night. We also blanked out all the numbers except for 1, 2, 3 (the speed dial options for 3 close relatives).
She can't remember what happened 5 minutes ago, so it's very unlikely that she remembers 118-500, it's not written on any piece of paper, the phonebook has been moved, how is she managing to dial it? She claims she isn't and that the nice lady on the end of the phone always puts her through, she says the lady is there whenever she picks the phone up.
It's got me baffled, I had though of getting BT to block 118-500 or maybe looking for a phone that allows only certain numbers to be called.
It brings back memories of my own grandmother, she was partially sighted in her old age, about 90% blind, we used to customise all her gadgets with little bits of cardboard over buttons, tippex on certain buttons, black markers on others, anything to try to make the interface with the gadget more useful.
It's only when you start thinking like that that you realise how badly designed a lot of our everyday items are for people with impairments.
This is an interesting book on the subject: Design of Everyday Things