Finding New Meaning in Life Through PowerPoint

Anand Giridharadas:

Lourdes del Castillo de Rumié, 77 years old and practically vibrating (because there is so much left to do!), thinks she may have found the secret to joyous old age: PowerPoint.

Yes, that PowerPoint: legendary time drain of consultants, bureaucrats and generals -- the software that never fails to make simple things more complicated. But Mrs. del Castillo de Rumié has found that what makes it tedious for the young makes it marvelous for the ripened. After all, when you are old, though you lack for years ahead, you have all the hours in the world.

Mrs. del Castillo de Rumié wants to tell any older person she can to take the path she did a year and a half -- and 175 or so PowerPoint presentations -- ago, after many fulfilling decades baking wedding cakes and teaching informal art history classes to adults from her home in this lush Caribbean city. "You're going to find so much happiness before you die," she said.

She traces her late blossoming as a PowerPoint evangelist to bank visits in which the teller would ask for her email address. It was humiliating to confess she didn't have one.

That bitter feeling is where the encounter with technology so often ends for the well-aged. It might have for Mrs. del Castillo de Rumié, too, had it not been for a friend whom she considered truly old.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 8, 2014 12:40 AM
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