ThinkFlood Blog

I have always found it hard to buy presents for my parents. After all, they are a couple of decades ahead of me, and they have pretty much everything they want, right?

In fact, my parents even have a hard time buying presents for each other. My mother struggled for years to find a unique and interesting Christmas present for my father. The problem was, whenever he saw something that he wanted, he went ahead and bought it for himself. Growing up, it seemed that the only one who ever got anything from Santa was Dad.

I remember one year when my mother thought she had found him the perfect gift. This was about the time that some of the Midwestern meat packing houses began offering premium steaks through mail order. My father loves a good steak, so my mother ordered him a case of prime New York strips. Amazingly, a case arrived the next day. “What service!” she thought. Then she looked at the packing list and realized that my father had ordered the same thing for himself about a week earlier.

Anyway, for a long time I found it tough to play in this game. Then a couple of years ago I realized that there is something that I have that they want and cannot get for themselves: pictures of their grandchildren. I decided I would do more than send them a few prints every now and then. Instead, I went out and splurged on a few digital picture frames. I bought the biggest ones I could afford, and sent them to my parents and grandparents, along with SD memory cards full of pictures from the past year. I told them that going forward I would send them additional memory cards to plug in. If they wanted, they could also use the files off the cards to order prints.

Last year was my first chance to send them fresh memory cards. Since the cards are only about the size of postage stamps, I decided I would tape each one to the inside of a greeting card and include a note of explanation. Wanting to send something more, I also designed a wall calendar using family pictures and had copies professionally printed for each of them.

I was not worried that my parents would have a problem with the memory card, but my grandparents are well into their eighties, and I wanted to make sure that they knew what to do. So, when I called my grandmother in Florida to wish her a Merry Christmas, I asked if she had figured out how to view the pictures.

“Oh yes, the pictures are lovely, thank you.”

“Great – I’m glad you figured out how to put the memory card in the picture frame,” I sighed, relieved.

“What’s a memory card?” she asked.

After a little more discussion, I realized that she was referring to the pictures in the printed calendar. She had thrown out the memory card – in spite of the note, she had not realized what it was, and did not know how to use it. I learned how hard it is to explain these things over the phone.

In fact, the whole idea has not turned out to be what I first anticipated. In spite of my budget-busting Christmas a couple of years ago, the 7″ screens on those digital picture frames just don’t do the photos justice. And preparing the SD memory cards has turned out to be quite time consuming — at least a couple of hours of going through all of last year’s photos to pick out the good ones, and then as much as 10 minutes or more to copy them to each 1 GB card — even over USB 2.0. Of course there was the experience with my grandmother in Florida. And then I learned from my grandfather in Virginia that he has not even bothered to open the box, because his eyesight is so poor that a 7″ picture does not mean anything to him.

There’s got to be a better way, right? Alas, after much study I found that there isn’t – at least not yet. But it is coming. Like a rolling stone. Like a flood…