SLUG: B10_attention_over_50
SET: B
CONCEPT: Attention Americans over 45
HEADLINE: Watch the setup video
WORDS: 747

Attention Americans over fifty.

A quiet program has been open for a while now.

It is for people at home with a phone and wifi already in the house.

No one is calling you.

No one is knocking on the door.

It is not on the news because it does not need to be.

The people who found it early are the ones already running it from the side table by the recliner.

A lady at the post office told me about a woman in her town who set it up on a Sunday and now checks it with her coffee on Fridays.

A hygienist I know said her mother in law has been running it since February.

A woman at church said her sister down in Alabama uses hers to help with her granddaughter's asthma medicine every month.

There is a widow in Georgia I heard about who stopped picking up shifts at the diner because she did not have to anymore.

There is a couple in Missouri who use theirs to cover the electric bill and put a little away for their grandson's first car.

The stories keep landing in the same shape.

A small phone thing.

Runs off the wifi already in the house.

About twenty minutes to set up on a Sunday.

Then you leave it alone and it does what it does.

None of them are on the news.

None of them are on the radio.

They are just quietly running from the side tables of people who found out first.

I heard the same story from a woman at Walmart in March.

She is the reason I am typing this at all.

I am 56.

This is my third month.

Last Friday the number on my screen said $2,483 for the week.

I want to back up.

I was in the checkout line in March with a cart of the basics and doing the math in my head as the girl rang me up.

I put back the ground beef.

I put back the laundry pods.

I put back the little bag of oranges my granddaughter had asked for.

I left with milk, bread, peanut butter, and a bottle of the store brand tylenol for my knees.

I made it to the parking lot before I sat down on the curb next to my cart.

I could not get back up.

The woman loading her trunk two spaces over saw me and she did not pretend she didn't.

She walked over and sat down on the curb with me in her scrubs.

She did not say a word for a good minute.

Then she said honey you are not the first woman I have sat next to on this curb.

She pulled her phone out.

She showed me a short setup video she had been running for about four months.

She said honey it runs off the wifi in the house, it fits in your palm, and the whole setup is about twenty minutes one morning.

She wrote it down on the back of her Walmart receipt with a pen from her purse.

I set it up the next Sunday after church.

I barely touched it for the first couple weeks.

Life got in the way.

Then the first Friday number came in.

$186.

I stared at it for a long time.

The next Friday it was $612.

And this last one was the $2,483.

I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee and cried the good kind of crying.

I called my daughter.

I told her the oranges are back on the list and to bring the kids over Saturday.

I ordered my grandson the shoes he has been asking about since Easter.

I paid the ortho three months ahead so I never have to sit in that office with a knot in my stomach.

The little phone thing is still sitting on the side table where I put it in March.

It runs off the wifi that was already in the house.

I am telling you the same way she told me on that curb, because she said the only rule was to pass it on when you can.

If you are over fifty and you are tired of doing the math in the checkout line, tap the button under this post and watch the setup video.

The same one she showed me on the back of a receipt.

Pass it on to someone who needs it too.
