Online Shopping and Other Absolute Necessities

Nowadays, all parcels arriving from outside the EU must be declared, and VAT as well as postal services fee has to be paid on them. This has fortunately almost put an end to my family’s shopping from E-bay. E-bay is a paradise for pretty stuff such as phone covers, bags, and jewellery. The prices are very cheap compared to local shops or Finnish online stores. My daughters would order small parcels from China and ask me to pay for them with my PayPal account. Hardly environmentally friendly to have a small item shipped from another continent and who knows how safe the materials are. The items took their time arriving  – sometimes we had forgotten all about ordering that dragon shaped ring or party decorations. But if an item took too long to arrive we got refund for the money. You declare the parcels on Finnish Custom’s website and get a link for paying the handling fee for postal services. No need to leave your house and yet complicated enough that we have practically stopped this particular hobby. 

The digital travel agencies such as Booking.com or Airbnb however are the only way we book hotel or other accommodation  abroad nowadays. You can quickly check out far more options than you would ever be offered at any travel agency. They sites are mostly reliable and you can reserve rooms without paying for them too far in advance. Customer reviews are also helpful. I suspect my credit card information was once stolen from one travel shop and someone used it for their own shopping. After deactivating the card and filing an investigation request with the police the sum was not charged from my account.

Online shopping, gaming, chatting, streaming are convenient options for people with some money, reasonable computer skills, eye sight and dexterity. Not obligatory and you can live without them. But life can get complicated if you cannot access kela.fi, kanta.fi, your bank’s website or if you don’t have an e-mail account. If you don’t know how to navigate digital services you end up spending a lot of time trekking to the bank or specialized shop (perhaps 100 km away from the town where you live in), or Kela, health services, or tax office. The public services websites such as kela.fi must be built accessible also for people with impaired vision and are available in English as well. But if your Finnish, Swedish or English is not very good you can easily give a wrong answer which may result in a delay if not cancelling of your benefits. Kanta.fi is very practical for those who can use it. My 85 year old aunt was frustrated as she doesn’t use online banking and had to queue on the phone for booking her Covid-19 vaccination appointment and requesting the vaccination certificate. Phone is still a reasonably convenient option for digital services. If however the other option is to visit in person, you may end of up spending a lot of time and money for accessing the public service. You may not be aware of all available services (jobs, schools, events) or you get tired of trying to get access to them. There are so many elderly people, immigrants, people with disabilities, even young diginatives who need help with various authorities’ digital services that some kind of support should be easily available.

Perhaps surprisingly, the first time I accessed Kanta was to print out my Covid-19 vaccination certificate. I went back for this assignment. Obviously it is practical to find all your health care data in one place. Pension information was also interesting, although it seems far away at the moment. Another public service I have needed recently was vero.fi where I added the expence for the work space to my precorrected tax return. I have not used Kela website for ages for my own needs, but I use it almost daily at work to find information on various social benefits.

At work www.te-palvelut.fi has been is the digital service I have used daily. I don’t necessarily need it myself as employment and economic office (TE-toimisto) employee but my clients are all immigrants so they need help in using the website, especially when accessing their own information. Clients are expected to use the site to write their own job search plan and also mark the agreed activities as accomplished by the due date. Otherwise the system informs Kela or the client’s unemployment benefit fund that they should stop paying unemployment benefit. Clients who don’t have online bank account access codes or are unable to use the site in Finnish obviously will have problems with this. As job vacancies and training programmes are also mostly advertised in Finnish they may be problems also with understanding those. Therefore, visiting the employment office in person is often the safest option so as to avoid unnecessary breaks or problems with the benefits. In the beginning of May 2022 this site was replaced by another site called Työmarkkinatori. The new site will allow users to publish their own job seeker profile and receive information on vacancies in their own field. However useful the site, majority of vacancies are filled in another way. Direct contacts to recruiters and networking (digital or personal) is very important.

I left comments on Saskia Verbeck’s, Anniina Ryynänen’s and Jesse Nissinen’s  interesting Digi Citizen articles. I did the Digital Competence Test. It’s a bit difficult to evaluate your own competencies without an objective framework or description of skills you should have. I notice that my own digital learning is based too much on trial and error. I find webinars and remote lessons on how to use digital services so boring I usually rather just start using the service, perhaps with the help of a written manual where I can check just the part I need at the moment. In this section, I have learned particularly lot from reading other blogs.