As I reach those echelons of advanced age, where, just a few short centuries ago I would have been regarded as a wise man, I sometimes feel the impact of age discrimination already. For example when they randomly change well-functioning processes just to confuse people. Or when they fire people to make things “digital”, which just means that you can’t understand nothing no more, when in the good old times you simply walked down to the Post Office to ask. Or when they take away software that we had just gotten used to. Like Microsoft is now threatening to do to Skype.
The end of Skype will mean two things:
People like me, who are slow to adapt to ever-changing technological gadgets, are being shut out from electronic communication. Henceforth, no more fancy video chats for me. (Anyhow, I always found it strange that people from the southern hemisphere weren’t shown upside down.) Luckily, I still have a proper phone (the number is in the phone book) and an address, where you can send letters, postcards and books.
Second, I have been using Skype to communicate with my international clients for decades. This shows that even one’s own business, if it’s based on some computer tool, can be reduced to rubble at the whim of a madman.
Either way, I shall have more time to read books, to stroll across flower-strewn hills, and to be happily unavailable to the big wide world.
The Happy Hermit 
Bonus points for those old enough to catch the movie reference of “at the whim of a madman”. đź“˝
Many thanks for your wise post!
Google Voice is my only phone, including on the cellular phone using a portable internet access point that I take with me. Voice is free, in some countries.
I have no idea what a “portable internet” is, but I am sure I would always leave it at home or forget it on the bus.
Also, I really prefer not to have any interweb outside, because I like to focus on the world and its people. That’s why I stick with one of them old Nokia phones. (And I even leave that at home when I go for walks.)
You can use Zoom on your computer, and a Zoom meeting with a client would be free for 40 minutes. Just an idea, though I’m loathe to disturb your splendid isolation. Best part of retirement is getting so much time with my books.
I had to learn Zoom for university, and I sometimes use it to talk to clients.
But an initial consultation with me takes a multifold of 40 minutes. Especially in family law, where I really need to get to know the clients. (The longest initial consultation I ever had was 6 hours. With me, people do get their money’s worth.)
Zoom is no replacement for Skype, though.
You can’t find friends on there, you can’t have a list of friends, you can’t play chess, and you can’t call normal phone numbers.
And each time you want to talk, you need to set up a meeting and send an e-mail and jump through plenty of hoops, and register and enter numbers and digits and passwords, instead of simply calling.
Also, how would you even find people on Zoom? You can’t.
Skype was very useful for that. If you remembered somebody whom you had once met on the ferry to Dover, but you only had their first name and the town where they were from, you could search for “Archibald Nantucket”, and swoosh, there he was. With a photo to make sure it was the right one.
Or if you got some shambolic disease in Bangladesh, you entered “doctor Bangladesh” or “pharmacy Bangladesh”, and swoosh there were plenty of helpful people, whom you could talk to.
Andreas, when I went to law school in America in the mid to late 1980s, we had books, paper, pencils and pens, and that was it.
Then some rich kids started bringing to class their new laptop computers. Nobody had portable phones. There wasn’t any such thing. I remember being a young lawyer in a government office with a pager clipped to my belt and a newly issued portable phone the size of a woman’s foot that I got a call on once during lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant and when I took the call, I could hear some people around my table whispering, “Who does he think he is? Show off!”
In time we got desk top computers at work, and then our family got one at home. At work, we also got laptops and eventually cell phones, as did our family members all got cell phones of our own. Eventually the ironically named “smart phones” that connected us all to the internet and had cameras and recorders and practically all the gadgetry of a good Swiss Army Knife isolated even members of the closest of family and friends away from one another and into our own little virtual realities.
I never did use Skype, and now reading your account of how useful it was, I wonder why I never used it. It’s on my desktop home computer somewhere, I’m sure. If I stopped and found it and also found a six year old to show me how to use it, I could call you up now and we could no doubt finish this reminiscence face to face, which might not be the best idea since I’m sitting here in my boxer shorts and t-shirt, unshaven, and with my hair uncombed, but we could probably do it just for the hell of it, huh?
Today in my practice of law after the low tech start that I described in my opening sentence, I use ZOOM and TEAMS and don’t understand why there are two of the same type of thing, but some of my clients and the courts where I appear use TEAMS and some of them use ZOOM, and I have even conducted evidentiary hearings and trials on both of these from hundreds of miles away in the comfortable confines of my office at work.
I’m sixty-eight years old. I was dragged not kicking and screaming but whimpering and whining into this Third Millenium. I hate computers and they hate me back. I hope that the “Terminator” movies are true, and a John Connor comes along to save us all from these infernal beasts. The biggest, seemingly insurmountable problem in my practice right now and the source of statewide litigation in which my office is now embroiled is all because some well-meaning fool changed our statewide office software from something that had been working just fine for over two decades to a “new and improved” software that has really screwed things up like only a “new and improved” computer software can do!
Would you mind, Andreas, if I virtually lay down beside you on that grassy, flowered slope and read an old-fashioned book and maybe smoke an old-fashioned joint . . . which is now legal in our state . . . or maybe just close my eyes and “dream of large women!”
Oh yes, please join me enjoying a computer-free day! But you need to come to Europe to lay down in some meadow, because I ain’t laying down in Arizona, where venomous snakes abound. (I am so afraid of snakes, one day I will move to Ireland or one of the other snake-free countries left in the world.)
The fact that there is always somebody who wants to tinker with and “improve” a system that is working absolutely fine also astonishes me. I am sure none of the users sent letters to the company, asking them to please change the program. And not only do they roll out something new which nobody asked for, but they also do it without proper testing, and without ever asking their customers. It’s like if you went to a family restaurant, and in the middle of the meal, they change it into a biker bar. Or some better example that I can’t come up with right now.
Like you, I think, I not only dislike all of this technology stuff personally, but I also detest it for what it does to society. I spend a lot of times on trains, and it’s sad to observe how many people don’t look outside to enjoy the scenery (and there is beautiful scenery) even once. Or couples who don’t talk, instead consuming videos or whatever.
Another pet peeve of mine are people who tell me that computers/AI/whatever will take over law very soon. I used to argue with them, but then I got tired of it. Now I just say: “Well, then don’t bother me and go to court with your ChatGPT friend. Enjoy prison!” Funnily enough, they never want to try it.
Thanks for this, Andreas. I agree wholeheartedly and am very annoyed about the change – to the extent that I am looking into dropping my 365 subscription if they go through with it. I use Skype mainly to speak to friends and businesses overseas on their landline phones. This is free, up to a generous quota of minutes every month. The problem is that many of the people I call can only be contacted by landline. Computer or smartphone based solutions at the other end just won’t work. I consulted the oracle (ChapGPT), but she didn’t come up with a viable alternative.
Keep well, Chris
♣
Hello Chris,
similarly here. I don’t have a 365 subscription, so I need to pay for Skype-to-phone calls, but it was still much cheaper than calling an Australian phone number from my German landline phone. And especially when I was traveling/living in countries where I didn’t have any phone, it was the only way to make calls.
Dear Andreas,
I switched from Skype to Yolla for international phone calls. It is much better and very straight forward.
Thank you very much!
I’ll have to use one of those services.
life Zooms by too fast
I’m in exactly the same dilemma and share your views entirely, Andreas. I checked Yolla, but that’s for “smart”phones, which I don’t have. Hopefully someone will make an alternative program (for computer) if it doesn’t exist already.
Oh. If Yolla doesn’t work on computers (I haven’t checked it out yet), then I will need to keep looking, too. :/
It seems increasingly likely that my interaction with the rest of the world will get reduced with each step of technological “progress”.
And I don’t really mind, as all this connectivity is just making me feel stressed.
I think you can find me on Teams if you search for andreas.moser@asamnet.de, but I am still not sure if it works.
Hi Andreas,
Skype is ending in a few days. I just received a recommendation for a program called “Discord,” which can be downloaded on a computer and which can evidently replace the functionalities of Skype. I am going to try it, despite the rather off-putting name.
And there is another one called “Jitsi” that is open-source and has a better feel to it, without all the business noise and mention of “gaming.”
Thank you for the recommendations!
I will try to do without anything for as long as possible (which basically means as long as I am within the European Union, where my mobile phone works without roaming charges).
But whenever I shall venture to foreign shores or remote islands again, I will look at the alternatives you listed. (If they will still be around by then.)