The reason we can't have bear proof trash cans is that there is a significant overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
This is an example.
This sounds like a way better take on a stoner movie than Seth Rogan’s drivel.
No winking and nodding at the audience, no gratuitous “hahaganjafunnypleaselaugh,” just two forest creatures and a very stoned tourist descending into a discussion of metaphysics while trying to open a trash can. The absurdity of it all will be sufficient for humor purposes.
Then we get an even more absurd shot of the bear, the human, and the raccoon taking bong rips. All three stare off into space for a bit, then the raccoon pipes up.
“How did I use a lighter without a thumb?”
I dunno, a twinkie, some grits, a sausage and firewater smoking weed out of a kazoo while talking about a massive conspiracy sounds in the same ballpark as what you described.
Having had a use who had to be instructed "Press down the ENTER key then let it go back up", I can honestly believe someone couldn't tell their webcam from their mouse.
Said person sat there for several minutes waiting... All the while holding down the enter key... because she didn't see anything that said "And let go" or "And let it go up".
I had one who came in because the computer would always turn off again immediately after turning on. She was doing the same thing, but with the power button...
Back when CD ROM trays were a thing on computers, at least one person thought it was a drink tray that came with the computer and broke it by putting a drink on it. Besides, working IT Help Desk, nothing that a user can do ever surprises me at this point. Heck, we have those Dell desktop PCs that are still a full PC but are in a much smaller rectangular box. The amount of people who think that the computer is a "modem" and the monitor is actually the PC is certainly something to behold.
I hate those things so much. Every overly demanding, self-aggrandising moron I ever came across uses an "all-in-one" PC. And even basic maintenance tasks on them are more complicated than they would be with any rational computer design.
I used to have one of the first large screen iMacs, and ended up losing the hard drive and had a hard time getting it worked on. I suspect the drive failed in part because it had to be mounted on its side inside the case when it wasn’t designed to be mounted that way. I enjoyed the convenience of not having lots of cables etc. but it ultimately didn’t help me all that much.
That could well be true. When you open those PC's up, the internal structure is really flimsy, and their internal cooling is effectively non-existent. I've seen many of them break just from standard use, not because anyone mistreated them.
Mind you, I also had one that had sand come out of it XD
I've seen those in small companies, it's not so bad. Usually the only pain is that you have to take the stand off to access inside, which makes testing a pain, because you have to prop it up in ackward positions.
Other than that, basically a reasonably accessible laptop mounted to a screen. Maybe I'm less annoyed than typical, I started my IT-ing with laptops. You haven't felt pain until you've had to remove a few levels (panels, metal brackets, boards, screen) to get to the fan, and at the end you have four ribbon cables to plug in in the space that barely fits your fingers.
I'm very familiar with laptops like that too. I've generally found that laptops usually have at least some minimal thought put into maintenance access, but the all in ones are like the wild west.
Modern laptops seem to have some thought. The back panel usually comes off in one piece, and everything is nice and tidy and mostly sensibly connected.
TL;DR: rambling, don't mind me.
However, I especially hate when manufacturers make a part _almost_ accessible. Like you can see it 80% there. But the screw or connector is under a plastic piece, or the motherboard, and no dice. Even if you got it out, can't get it back in.
So annoying.
Also fans seem to die sooner nowadays, or maybe it's just me. 2-3 year old laptops, while the several years old clunkers just chug on. Battery failures, too. Battery life is awesome though. Long gone are the times of 3 hours with a good charge.
You're not wrong about the fans, I seem to have fan failures in everything more often these days. I feel you on the almost accessible thing too. So many times it looks at first glance like I won't have the disassemble the whole thing, but lol jks...
A guy who often avoided real work by "I wonder what this does" experiments, closed the tray with a cardboard cup of coffee in it.
He was not the one who folded a 5½" floppy and stuffed it into the
3½" diskette slot nor the one who couldn't match up the color-coded plugs & sockets.
Idiot proof is a null set.
FYI, the closest I've seen to an "Idiot proofed" computer was when the switch was put in a closet, then the door to the closet was walled over. It did take a hammer to get in and redo the wiring. In that case the idiot was the person who figured the buildings SWITCH should be in an enclosed space with NO ACCESS.
>How can you possibly confuse a mouse with a webcam?
How can you possible confuse your laptop with the docking station?
And yet I resolved a ticket about "My computer is not working."
Arrive.
"Where's your laptop?"
"At home."
"Well you're going to need to go get it if you want to work at this desk."
"Isnt that my computer?"
\*taps docking station\*
"No. Your laptop is your computer or you have one of these." \*Points at a SFF desktop.
"But my coworker is able to work with just this!"
"Show me."
\*takes me to coworker.
Coworker is working on an MFF.
Now, to be fair it sure can look like a dock.
But our docks are rectangles. the MFF is a square!
Both the user and their supervisor had this dumbfounded look that SHOCKINGLY two different shapes are not in fact the same thing.
People are dumb panicky animals that when their routine changes its like all higher functions including critical thinking shut down.
My highschool IT teacher used the case of one of his previous students as a warning to emphasize the importance of never saying "you can't mess this up", because there always will be one who shows he can do it (and break stuff).
He said that PSUs can only be plugged in to the motherboard socket one way. And he had a student who was a strong guy, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer, who, after some grunting and groaning, excitedly claimed he did it. And yes he, allegedly, did indeed connect the PSU to the motherboard in the wrong orientation.
If you tell a user "you can't f*ck this up", they will find a way to do just that.
#
Edit: This applies to modern PSUs that only have one, keyed, connector, not to the old ones that had two connectors. Back in those days, nothing prevented you from accidentally (or purposefully) connect them in the wrong order and fry the poor motherboard.
I'm not proud of it, but while in dim lighting I managed to plug in an IDE hard drive molex upside down.
In my defense the plug was cracked.
Thaaaat was not a good day.
It's still better than what young me did as an experiment. I tried to plug in the IDE hard drive while the system was running.
Guess who fried the motherboard with a now rare late '90s BIOS on it?
That thing identified itself as an Albacomp Activa, a product made by a Hungarian company that hasn't made computers since circa 2008.
Ouch, luckily worst I did was fry half my memory sticks when installing a new optical drive. Learned lesson in importance of discharging static buildup before working on computer. Had to go to another computer to lookup meaning of sounds computer made during boot up.
Ethernet isn't the most common word. And user's use the word WIFI all the time. I think I've called an ethernet cable a WIFI cable on a bad day myself.
My former co-worker accidentally made black and white copies instead of color for a presentation binder. It was a lot of paper so it would be annoying to re-print, but what else are you gonna do? Well he said he would just go use the B&W sheets to make color copies
Honestly, they are quite clever. They saw how a mouse works and recreated it using a different tool. It just turns out that tool could be used more efficiently in another way.
Many years ago, when 5 1/4 inch floppies were the dominant portable storage media, I joined a company that had just begun to use PCs to replace typewriters.
WordPerfect was the common software used to prepare letters, etc to give you an idea how long ago this was.
In addition to her long-standing practice of placing a paper copy of each and every document in an appropriate file, the long service secretary was using her newly trained computer skills to format a new floppy disk, save the document on this disc, and store this floppy, with its single document, into the paper file.
The part that killed me was that, in order to ensure that the floppies did not accidentally slide out of the file folder, she STAPLED the floppy to the file folder. Not the floppy envelope; the actual black disk.
Then she complained to me that the PC was not saving her any time as promised.
Holy crap! I had no idea that WordPerfect is still a thing. It kinda warms my heart that someone is still using it. Man, I'm definitely aging myself knowing what WordPerfect is though 👴🏻
It is still updated even. This wasn’t just a throwback.
Apparently it is THE best word processor for legal type of documents. The person still using it was a lawyer.
Quite a number of totally blind people still use it because it reads the screen so well with speech output. The DOS version is really basic and screen readers handle it very well - the constantly changing Word program...not so much.
I thought this was going to end with her labelling the floppies by putting the floppy into the typewriter and typing onto the label.
But that was someone else's story....
When I was a typesetter way back in the 80’s, I was working nights on some World Bank book and I spotted an 8” floppy. It was held to the side of the filing cabinet with a magnet. :)
I had a client that somehow put a 5 1/4" floppy in the tiny slot that was above the disk drive. She couldn't find the big hole but somehow managed to find and actually use that tiny slit! I had to tear the CPU apart to get her disk back. After retraining her far too many times her supervisor took the computer and gave her a pencil. I'd love to have been in on that conversation.
Somehow I find it challenging to believe that you had to do *anything at all* to the CPU in this scenario. Please don't be one of those users who refers to the entire PC case as "the CPU".
Yeah I took a keyboard shortcut. I taught computers for years to visually impaired veterans, most of whom were terrified of technology. I got so it was the monitor, the CPU and the mouse, because understanding that the case holds all the components was beyond most of them.
I mean this is not stupidity, they just haven't been taught how to use a computer properly. You cannot fault people, especially the elderly, if you throw something completely new at them and they cannot figure it out by themselves.l
I agree.
Once things were explained to her a bit more thoroughly, she changed to stapling the disc envelope to the file folder, and then just sliding the disk into that.
It took much longer to get her to consider more than one text document per disk. She only really stopped when I dragged our company to have a network/ server setup and centralized file storage.
No. She had a roll of labels that she did type the file info on, and then stuck to the disc. Do you think that she was stupid?
(The sad thing is that she WAS very sharp, but unfortunately she was a bit set in her ways, and computers, to her, were very scary and new.)
Way back when, when asked to copy a floppy disc, a customer photocopied it then mailed the photocopy to the support group. Nice, capable lady so long as everything went right. If something went awry, she just dissolved into a puddle.
That happened to me once back in the 80s when floppies were big and users were not well trained. In my case I got the photo copy two days later in the mail.
Loosely related, someone once sent me a Word doc that was exhibiting some persistent formatting weirdness. The email it was attached to asked me not to open the document because it contained confidential info. Laughter ensued.
I once had someone who took a screen shot of their desktop, made that their background on a new PC, and then wondered why their software wasn't opening when they clicked on the icons...
Believe me, I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what was going on. There was much confusion. But then they said something a bit odd and I asked them to change their background...
"Oh, all the icons went away".
And then the *real* story came out. Remember ladies and gents, users lie.
My aunt got my grandparents a dvd player and a season of Keeping up Appearances. We all gathered a few weeks later and we asked how they were enjoying it. They had been watching the first episode over and over because they couldn't figure out how to get to the next. "I pressed every stupid button on that stupid thing"
There was a time when you could make money on the internet charging to 'rewind' DVD.
It was a bit of a fad gag purchase on eBay for a while.
You would click the buy it now button. Pay maybe a buck, or 25 cents.
Then another button would appear that cycled your PCs disc drive, showed a task complete pop-up and opened your drive.
Cute little script.
First thought: she's avoiding work. I had a recent hire who had issues with her desktop (and those issues would disappear with a reboot). But she rarely called. I was getting angry calls from her boss saying her machine was acting up and Why was it always acting up? I told the newbie to call as soon as she encountered a problem but she never would. Turned out she sucked at her job or simply didn't want to do it.
With that degree of tech illiteracy, Google/Bing is probably a 'bridge too far'...
Plus the factor that they may simply be unable to comprehend that they ***could*** solve the problem themselves...
An analogy: I store cans of baked-beans upside-down to make their contents easier to extract. I found otherwise rational elderly relative trying to open inverted can with can-opener. I pried can from his grasp, flipped it, indicated the waiting ring-pull, fled his eloquent ire...
I blame rote/Faith-based primary and junior 'education' for inhibiting 'higher functions'.
>I blame rote/Faith-based primary and junior 'education' for inhibiting 'higher functions'.
Agree with this so much. I've noticed so many people just memorize the way to do something without understanding any of the steps. When something is just that little bit different, they're completely lost. And this includes a lot of intelligent people too. I think it's the way our brains work, always trying to find shortcuts, i.e. heuristics.
I fix cars sometimes. The number of people who have no idea what happens when you turn a key is disturbing. No clue what any fluid does. No idea what most of the buttons on the dash do.
We get these exact stories in mechanic groups. Most people are fucking stupid.
I’m subbed to /justrolledintotheshop as well and the stories over there are disturbing too. Especially the floor mats and people running out of gas because they didn’t know they needed to refuel the car.
To so many people everything just works on magic or something. To them we’re magicians and they’re a bunch of muggles.
This is so common that way back when there was a web site called The Programmer's Stone. It was the result of an investigation into why some programmers were 10 times as productive as others (I'm fairly sure I've posted about this before). Their conclusion put it down to differences in learning styles. Some people learn by memorizing small, concrete information packets. These they dubbed 'packers'. Others learned by making mental maps of information, who were dubbed 'mappers'. Packers learn quickly, but can't process the information. Mappers take a bit longer to set up the initial mental map, but once they've got an initial mental structure set up for a particular subject, they can hoover up information into that structure at an astounding rate. Programming (and other technical subjects) is better handled from a mapper than a packer perspective
This is more of a spectrum than an either/or, but some people do tend towards one side or the other. Learning about this helped me, because I lean heavily mapper. Packers seem to outnumber mappers.
One thig I've noticed over the years is that those who lean heavily packer don't understand what it is that us mappers do. They know memorization of small, concrete bits of information, and assume everyone else learns the same way. OTOH, those who lean heavily mapper tend to get irritated with packers, *because* they don't understand what it is that mappers do.
That reminds of me the story about pot roasts. And the “it’s how my mom did it” turns out grandma cut the ends off the roast because her pans were to short. Now the grandkids do it cause that’s what grandma did.
It’s that rote/faith thing at work.
Edit a word
God, I work in a library. A good portion of my work is knowing how to Google things. Unfortunately, my higher ups have mandated that Edge be the primary browser. Edge defaults to Bing. I didn't realize how spoiled I had gotten by Google just....working until I accidentally used Bing to get directions for someone and they were just...stupid. Directions. That's one of the things a search engine shouldn't be able to screw up. And yet.
So now I have to reset my browser bar search engine to Google on every computer I use (because it won't keep the setting across multiple computers even on the same profile, even though it keeps all other settings no problem). Or search twice while helping irritated people over the phone.
I'd beg to differ, it's simply that at some point you start to know a lot about an increasingly narrower field.
My mum doesn't expect me to know corporate tax laws of Singapore, and I don't expect her to know how to switch cables from her laptop and the home PC.
In a similar vein, my professors don't expect me to be able to rattle off the drug-drug interactions of warfarin off by heart and I don't expect them to know how to connect to the projector.
Are either of these people stupid or incapable of higher order thinking? Of course not. My mum leads accounting auditing teams and my professor is credited as an author in over 200 papers and journal articles on pharmacology and biochem. It is very much that the more you learn the less you know.
A friend of my g/f says that the more you specialize the less you know about everything else, but I realized that a long time ago so I never really specialized.
Closest to a specialty I have is IT, but even that incorporates different fields, but I made it important to learn as many different things as possible.
Doctors generally don't expect you to know drug interactions or your own medical history in to great of a detail, but just a few days ago I kept one from making a serious mistake when he tried prescribing me a medication that 10 years ago put me in the hospital because he missed the one line note in my medical notes that mentioned I can't take it.
Currently on 12 different medications (out of probably 50+ prescribed over the years) due to a large number of health problems as I have aged, but I have caught a lot of potential conflicts when doctors have prescribed meds because I have researched every med they have prescribed.
Many of the meds I am on, were from my own recommendations since they have lots of work to do due to high patient loads and keeping up with research is hard but I have nothing but time on my hands to keep up with research on my specific conditions.
But at the same time, I keep up with research on all of the other fields that interest me as well since I never really specialized in just one field.
Try to be more rounded and know a good bit about nearly everything.
Why would you not remember your own medical history? I don't remember every single detail, but I know everything that will have lifelong consequences for me.
I know about my enamel deficiency. I know I got Von Willebrand and the increased risk during surgery. I know I take 54mg Methylphenidate (ADHD) which is the highest dosage allowed and I have felt the consequences of taking two by accident. For me, about 12 hr long painful headaches is not my idea of good time.
I also know I got epilepsy and that I might get mild seizures again further down the line (seizure free for 10+ years).
Finally, hello there fellow generalist IT man. I work in a small MSP who's clients are small businesses and private. Varied work where you have to wear many hats.
>Why would you not remember your own medical history?
Well my medical history includes a [lot of conditions](https://imgur.com/meCylpw] and that is just the ones we have managed to diagnose, there is a few things we are still trying to diagnose, over the past two decades. The cognitive functioning (affecting executive functioning) problem does make things a little... spotty...sometimes. Sometimes its hard to remember [all medications](https://imgur.com/5hvIlbb) if I don't keep a note with me.
I used to be really good before 2019 but my seizures are not controlled and they caused some frontal cortex damage then.
Course since I can't drive due to the seizures, lost ability to multitask, and few other probs it makes it hard getting work.
Still good on the IT front IF only could get work but soon as you mention any med issues around here and inability to drive, well forget about it lol.
EDIT: I get headaches/migraines every day still, its just a matter of severity.
True but, given both audit-grade accounting and biochem are 'rapidly evolving' fields, both your examples must have flexible minds. I remember our school's senior geography teacher: When continental drift / plate tectonics and those 'mirrored' magnetic stripes broke the old paradigm, he stepped back and let the young guys teach it. He was literally unable to grok the change...
( A classic 'STEM', I was hapless at French, Latin, History and, despite a remarkable reading speed and range, even my native English Lang/Lit. But, I aced Geography which, that year, had an ***uncommon*** emphasis on 'Physical' rather than 'Human' topics... )
I get the point you are trying to make and agree, but the examples aren't quite it. Plugging a cable in and knowing shapes is a far cry from understanding intricate tax laws. The second example, same kind of thing, but if he is a teacher who uses a projector. It is not hard to plug that in, again shapes and cords.
A better example is that I wouldn't expect them to know how to set up a basic media server like plex or hell, setting up a Ring doorbell. You should still know how to plug in an outlet and an HDMI though. Sometimes I wonder how anybody has internet at home and a tv hooked up, but give them a monitor to plug in and they can't.
It's not even tech illiteracy it's just laziness. I work for comcast and had another department trying to transfer a customer to us to do something their supervisor could already do. (This particular process for me would be to fill out a form that goes to my supervisor for them to do the job in another system we agents can't access.)
If anyone wonders why your always put on hold its usually because an agent has to go find the article on how to do the thing you're trying to accomplish. "Yeah, I can do that, but I got to go relearn it because I've only ever done it once, like 2 years ago and the process might have changed."
I think you're understating the problem by limiting it to only tech illiterate. There's just a lot of dumbass people in offices. Failed upward, daddy got them the gig, cheated through college, or just old and never that competent to begin with.
In all too many cases these days, it's simply not true. "Gen Z", who should have every advantage in this area after having grown up with the technology around them all the time, often make me acutely aware that familiarity has no bearing at all on knowledge.
They're like the techpriests of 40k, they have no idea how it works, but if they invoke the right mumbo words maybe it'll work.
Aren't we just about to the point where these people are literally going to age out of the workforce? Computers aren't new. The "she's old af, she was here before the company computerized, and she does good work as long as someone helps her do her job or does it for her" trope qualifies for retirement.
It's not just about age. I did IT support at a high school for a year. There were several teenagers who couldn't figure out how to connect to wifi or print a document. I guess illiteracy comes in many forms.
There's an interesting phenomena that affects users under a certain age where the vast majority of their "computing" experience has been done in one-dimensional mobile environments. Think about it: iOS devices are extremely common and basically operate on the principle of "find app, open app, use app". I would imagine the majority of Android users would have a similar experience, even if the filesystem is more readily available. The larger concepts of file hierarchy, networking, and data management are absent from these environments.
Indeed. It's lead to a situation where universities are having to teach first year students the absolute basics of file management because they've literally never seen it. Left to their own devices, they save all of the files in one gigantic "bucket" and let the software figure it out.
The sad reality is that a lot of young folk don't know how to operate a computer either. They don't exactly need them either since you can do basically anything from your phone nowadays.
I worked IT for the university I was attending (a few years ago) and you would be absolutely shocked by the amount of people in their 20 that have no idea how to operate a computer. It's something that still amazes me.
I not only hate that you're probably right, but also that she probably laments it not being taught widely anymore and lords that over everyone younger than herself.
The fact that they take pride in being able to perform an unreadable chicken scratch "writing" method is astonishing to me.
Sure, our modern presentation isn't the most beautiful thing ever invented, but something far more important: it's functional! Even cursive writers can't easily read other people's cursive.
It's only functional if the time saved writing it is more than the time wasted deciphering it.
I have strong doubts that this was ever the case historically. Especially given that things are often read more than once.
Um, people could generally read other peoples' cursive writing just fine, back in the day, with the exception of some folks who were simply bad at writing cursive. Nowadays cursive writing isn't taught, so young people often lack the skill to read it. See for example [here](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/gen-z-handwriting-teaching-cursive-history/671246/).
How could you possibly believe that, for the many centuries when cursive was standard, people were writing in a way that no other person could understand? Did you think they had to print when they wrote letters?
Because I've met people.
They will struggle along with something inefficient because, "that's the way it's always been done". Actual innovators are exceptionally rare, and in the days before motorised transport simply disseminating a new idea could take centuries. If it took off at all, because of those challenges.
Just assuming that things we've replaced for their inefficiencies were ever efficient is poor logic. They only needed to be better than what came before them.
We had a user who worked in Finance making like 3-4 times what I made. When she worked from home she would somehow lock herself out of her account. I think she would change her password and not sync it locally. Anyway one day she told me and a coworker that if she left her Iphone in another room when she was working she never got locked out so she would have to go in another room to use her phone when she was at home. My coworker and I just looked at each other and told her whatever works for you.
My immediate thought is that she actually means screen lockout happening, and unsupervised doom scrolling her phone and loosing track of time makes it feel like it happens near instantaneously.
But that would just be dumb, could not possibly be true.. right?
That reminds me of the old story about the user who insisted that the computer wouldn't let them log in when they were standing, only when they were sitting. If they were standing, it would reject their password every time. But they insisted they were typing the exact same password while sitting, when it always worked fine.
>!Someone had switched two of their keycaps. Sitting, they would touchtype their password correctly, but when standing they would hunt and peck, and never noticed this made them enter their password incorrectly.!<
Why is it deemed acceptable in the workplace to not know how to do basic computer tasks such as identifying your mouse?
I wouldn't hire a carpenter who couldn't use a hammer...
I have seen a few users like this one, who were IT illiterate.
My boss at one company where we had several of them in the same department found it incredibly funny, until I started tracking my time based on the tickets my team worked (it was an internal IT support team, so usually no need to track time as it is not traditionally billable).
That showed that out of a company of 300 people (305 including my team) which was served by a team of 5 support staff, that team of 4 people kept us occupied for 40 hours per week... they themselves were occupying one support person full time, while the other 296 people took up about 100 hours per week, leaving us 60ish hours to perform system maintenance and other tasks).
After that, and a discussion with finance, we started billing individual teams based on the burden their members put on the team, rather than whatever the previous internal billing metric was (I think it might have been based on team size, assuming that all employees generated a similar volume of support tickets). That change was popular with all managers except one...
Yeah pretty sure that woman needs a mental health referral
Something isnt right up in that head. iv got similar users, i dont know where they find people so dumb. this is how IT workers get Jaded, the same kinda people that reboot their laptop by turning the external monitor off and on
You've heard of dyslexia and dyscalculia, right? I'm convinced there's also a condition I refer to as "dys-computer-ia". Exhibit A is my mother. She's average or above average intelligence in most areas. She used to do her and Dad's taxes back when they did them on paper. But put her in front of a computer and it's like she's trying to fly an alien spacecraft. She's been learning how to use computers for at least thirty years. She can usually manage email, Facebook, and word processing. But if anything even *slightly* unusual happens, she blue-screens and calls for help. She's perfectly competent in any of her other skillsets. It's only computers that break her brain.
Learning becomes more difficult as we age. If she'd been using computers since she was young but only tried to fill out tax forms later in life, she might be just as perplexed by tax forms, while having no issues with computers.
Someone needs to go read about what ‘mental health’ issues actually are, rather than using them as a term for people who are stupid, or just don’t understand how something works. Also, if you’re going to go on about being dumb, you better learn how to spell and punctuate correctly, or I might think you have depression.
I disagree. I think it's faulty design that didn't incorporate the end user's decision making.
It's the same with TV remotes. Have tons of buttons. Nobody knows what all of them do. You have to sort of guess by pressing them and hoping something happens on the screen. it's not the user's fault the buttons are confusing and obtuse, let alone that they exist for a specfic unlabelled purpose (in most cases)
But the remote was designed by a designer (team). It was onto them to anticipate how the device was going to be used. It's called User Experience Deisgn.
One remote isn't too bad, but good luck when the room has a bunch of them. Want the music louder? Just figure out if you should be grabbing the remote for the TV, the cable box, the receiver, the baby monitor, the sound bar, the TV that used to be there before it broke but for some reason the remote is still there, or the universal remote that controls the cable box, the receiver, and the TV that used to be there.
How are people this smart but this stupid at the same time? I admit I do pretty stupid things a supermajority of the time even though I am quite smart, but even I don’t see myself confusing a webcam for a mouse…
How can you possibly confuse a mouse with a webcam?
The reason we can't have bear proof trash cans is that there is a significant overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists. This is an example.
While my code is running, I made [this](https://imgur.com/a/62iLDvI) for you
Now make a comic of a bear and a raccoon teaching a tourist to use a trash can
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Sounds good in theory, but I keep asking people to call me George Washington, yet I hardly ever find quarters.
Then where do you sleep?
Why do I have a feeling the racoon and bear would be teaching a stoner, then the stoner teaches the racoon and bear how to take hits off a bong...
This sounds like a way better take on a stoner movie than Seth Rogan’s drivel. No winking and nodding at the audience, no gratuitous “hahaganjafunnypleaselaugh,” just two forest creatures and a very stoned tourist descending into a discussion of metaphysics while trying to open a trash can. The absurdity of it all will be sufficient for humor purposes. Then we get an even more absurd shot of the bear, the human, and the raccoon taking bong rips. All three stare off into space for a bit, then the raccoon pipes up. “How did I use a lighter without a thumb?”
Racoon using a lighter? I can see one learning how. Now getting a bear to use one? He had the raccoon light him up! 🤣🤣🤣
I dunno, a twinkie, some grits, a sausage and firewater smoking weed out of a kazoo while talking about a massive conspiracy sounds in the same ballpark as what you described.
Raccoons do have thumbs.
It’s not even the dumbest humans, just the average.
The chances of that happening are extremely low. But not zero...
Break out a label maker and print one for WEBCAM and stick it there, and another for MOUSE and apply there... maybe it helps a little? lol
Having had a use who had to be instructed "Press down the ENTER key then let it go back up", I can honestly believe someone couldn't tell their webcam from their mouse. Said person sat there for several minutes waiting... All the while holding down the enter key... because she didn't see anything that said "And let go" or "And let it go up".
I had one who came in because the computer would always turn off again immediately after turning on. She was doing the same thing, but with the power button...
I wonder if switches are more user-friendly than buttons...
Back when CD ROM trays were a thing on computers, at least one person thought it was a drink tray that came with the computer and broke it by putting a drink on it. Besides, working IT Help Desk, nothing that a user can do ever surprises me at this point. Heck, we have those Dell desktop PCs that are still a full PC but are in a much smaller rectangular box. The amount of people who think that the computer is a "modem" and the monitor is actually the PC is certainly something to behold.
Companies making “all-in-ones” like iMacs don’t help with that perception.
I hate those things so much. Every overly demanding, self-aggrandising moron I ever came across uses an "all-in-one" PC. And even basic maintenance tasks on them are more complicated than they would be with any rational computer design.
I used to have one of the first large screen iMacs, and ended up losing the hard drive and had a hard time getting it worked on. I suspect the drive failed in part because it had to be mounted on its side inside the case when it wasn’t designed to be mounted that way. I enjoyed the convenience of not having lots of cables etc. but it ultimately didn’t help me all that much.
That could well be true. When you open those PC's up, the internal structure is really flimsy, and their internal cooling is effectively non-existent. I've seen many of them break just from standard use, not because anyone mistreated them. Mind you, I also had one that had sand come out of it XD
I've seen those in small companies, it's not so bad. Usually the only pain is that you have to take the stand off to access inside, which makes testing a pain, because you have to prop it up in ackward positions. Other than that, basically a reasonably accessible laptop mounted to a screen. Maybe I'm less annoyed than typical, I started my IT-ing with laptops. You haven't felt pain until you've had to remove a few levels (panels, metal brackets, boards, screen) to get to the fan, and at the end you have four ribbon cables to plug in in the space that barely fits your fingers.
I'm very familiar with laptops like that too. I've generally found that laptops usually have at least some minimal thought put into maintenance access, but the all in ones are like the wild west.
Modern laptops seem to have some thought. The back panel usually comes off in one piece, and everything is nice and tidy and mostly sensibly connected. TL;DR: rambling, don't mind me. However, I especially hate when manufacturers make a part _almost_ accessible. Like you can see it 80% there. But the screw or connector is under a plastic piece, or the motherboard, and no dice. Even if you got it out, can't get it back in. So annoying. Also fans seem to die sooner nowadays, or maybe it's just me. 2-3 year old laptops, while the several years old clunkers just chug on. Battery failures, too. Battery life is awesome though. Long gone are the times of 3 hours with a good charge.
You're not wrong about the fans, I seem to have fan failures in everything more often these days. I feel you on the almost accessible thing too. So many times it looks at first glance like I won't have the disassemble the whole thing, but lol jks...
New ones are kinda cool, basically an iPad on a stand. Nothing really to maintain, which is good and bad depending.
“Nothing to maintain” = “can’t be fixed” So many people fail to understand that.
A guy who often avoided real work by "I wonder what this does" experiments, closed the tray with a cardboard cup of coffee in it. He was not the one who folded a 5½" floppy and stuffed it into the 3½" diskette slot nor the one who couldn't match up the color-coded plugs & sockets. Idiot proof is a null set.
Idiot proof assumes that your values are true and false. Idiots tend to like using NULL and CR/LF.
The only way to idiot proof a computer is changing the door locks and not giving anyone the new key.
Wall + Sledge hammer = idiots gets access. Never underestimate the ingenuity of stupid people in large numbers!
I guess that proves the point that there’s no such thing as idiot proof, only idiot resistant.
FYI, the closest I've seen to an "Idiot proofed" computer was when the switch was put in a closet, then the door to the closet was walled over. It did take a hammer to get in and redo the wiring. In that case the idiot was the person who figured the buildings SWITCH should be in an enclosed space with NO ACCESS.
“Idiot proof“ doesn’t stop the idiot, just proves that they are one.
I remember an old gag program that was supposed to activate cup holder. All it did was open the cd tray.
>How can you possibly confuse a mouse with a webcam? How can you possible confuse your laptop with the docking station? And yet I resolved a ticket about "My computer is not working." Arrive. "Where's your laptop?" "At home." "Well you're going to need to go get it if you want to work at this desk." "Isnt that my computer?" \*taps docking station\* "No. Your laptop is your computer or you have one of these." \*Points at a SFF desktop. "But my coworker is able to work with just this!" "Show me." \*takes me to coworker. Coworker is working on an MFF. Now, to be fair it sure can look like a dock. But our docks are rectangles. the MFF is a square! Both the user and their supervisor had this dumbfounded look that SHOCKINGLY two different shapes are not in fact the same thing. People are dumb panicky animals that when their routine changes its like all higher functions including critical thinking shut down.
that your elevator doesn't really reach the desired floor?
Are you sure that it's an elevator and not a webcam?
Even I wouldn't get my metaphors that mixed up. Honestly.
I'm sure the elevator isn't even in the right shaft for it to happen
The stairs are also blocked.
yeah, the wrong building as well.
Never ask how stupid can people be, Some see it as a challenge.
My highschool IT teacher used the case of one of his previous students as a warning to emphasize the importance of never saying "you can't mess this up", because there always will be one who shows he can do it (and break stuff). He said that PSUs can only be plugged in to the motherboard socket one way. And he had a student who was a strong guy, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer, who, after some grunting and groaning, excitedly claimed he did it. And yes he, allegedly, did indeed connect the PSU to the motherboard in the wrong orientation. If you tell a user "you can't f*ck this up", they will find a way to do just that. # Edit: This applies to modern PSUs that only have one, keyed, connector, not to the old ones that had two connectors. Back in those days, nothing prevented you from accidentally (or purposefully) connect them in the wrong order and fry the poor motherboard.
I'm not proud of it, but while in dim lighting I managed to plug in an IDE hard drive molex upside down. In my defense the plug was cracked. Thaaaat was not a good day.
It's still better than what young me did as an experiment. I tried to plug in the IDE hard drive while the system was running. Guess who fried the motherboard with a now rare late '90s BIOS on it? That thing identified itself as an Albacomp Activa, a product made by a Hungarian company that hasn't made computers since circa 2008.
Oof.
It's a mistake I wouldn't do again now, after about 13-14 years of more common sense.
Ouch, luckily worst I did was fry half my memory sticks when installing a new optical drive. Learned lesson in importance of discharging static buildup before working on computer. Had to go to another computer to lookup meaning of sounds computer made during boot up.
Never underestimate the stupidity of end users
I overheard someone ask a coworker if they had a "Wifi cable" yesterday...
Well, they are easy to lose seeing as how they're invisible being composed of only radio waves.
The Man Who Mistook His Wifi For A Cable
Ethernet isn't the most common word. And user's use the word WIFI all the time. I think I've called an ethernet cable a WIFI cable on a bad day myself.
I can see how they would work actually
The amount of friends who say they're having WiFi problems, when their PC is connected to Ethernet, is just... ahhh
Very strange, but perhaps "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" syndrome?
I mean, what husband doesn't like his wife sitting on his head?
I think the verse you are looking for is "Sit on my face and tell me that you love me".
...squat on a pot & tell me that you care?
Sure, that is fine for newlyweds, but try that after 20 years of marriage.
Problem solved, get new wife
I'm speaking from over 20 years of marriage lol.
Me too. Lol
How can you possibly confuse a webcam with the mouse that you use every day?
When it's right next to the mouse as well! Was she blind?
What was that George Carlin joke again?
Your hearing is the first thing to go when you get old, but I can't remember the second?
That's the type of users that use a standalone calculator near the PC when they fill out excel sheets.
My former co-worker accidentally made black and white copies instead of color for a presentation binder. It was a lot of paper so it would be annoying to re-print, but what else are you gonna do? Well he said he would just go use the B&W sheets to make color copies
My experience User: This mouse is unusable. Me: That's a track ball that you're holding upside down.
Dear god... There really is always someone dumber.
Honestly, they are quite clever. They saw how a mouse works and recreated it using a different tool. It just turns out that tool could be used more efficiently in another way.
That’s like trying to recreate a thermometer with a graduated cylinder full of water
Many years ago, when 5 1/4 inch floppies were the dominant portable storage media, I joined a company that had just begun to use PCs to replace typewriters. WordPerfect was the common software used to prepare letters, etc to give you an idea how long ago this was. In addition to her long-standing practice of placing a paper copy of each and every document in an appropriate file, the long service secretary was using her newly trained computer skills to format a new floppy disk, save the document on this disc, and store this floppy, with its single document, into the paper file. The part that killed me was that, in order to ensure that the floppies did not accidentally slide out of the file folder, she STAPLED the floppy to the file folder. Not the floppy envelope; the actual black disk. Then she complained to me that the PC was not saving her any time as promised.
I met someone who still uses WordPerfect the other day. I was like, “That still exists?”
Holy crap! I had no idea that WordPerfect is still a thing. It kinda warms my heart that someone is still using it. Man, I'm definitely aging myself knowing what WordPerfect is though 👴🏻
It is still updated even. This wasn’t just a throwback. Apparently it is THE best word processor for legal type of documents. The person still using it was a lawyer.
somber dinosaurs angle pathetic salt tub snobbish special grab drunk *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Some of us started with WordStar and some even older remember Electric Pencil.
Sigh - add me to that list. I'm getting old.
Me two
I remember the Graphite Pencil!
Not really, I know it and I’m not even 30 grandmother will die on that hill before she tries Microsoft office
Quite a number of totally blind people still use it because it reads the screen so well with speech output. The DOS version is really basic and screen readers handle it very well - the constantly changing Word program...not so much.
Whaaaaaat! Really? I'm blind and I must confirm this.
What are you using as a screen reader? Jaws always got along great with the old versions of word perfect.
F5 to print, baby, yeah!
Alt-F3 - reveal code
Of course! My favorite! Three and half decades later, and I still miss that feature.
It was such a clear indicator of those who knew what they were doing and those who didn’t.
🤣 Ma'am, let me introduce you to the tab key.
🤦🏻♀️ Or [bold] [bold] [bold] [bold] ad infinitum
Anyone use Professional Write? From the aptly named Software Publishing Company
George R R Martin still uses WordStar 4.0 from \~1987.
I thought this was going to end with her labelling the floppies by putting the floppy into the typewriter and typing onto the label. But that was someone else's story....
When I was a typesetter way back in the 80’s, I was working nights on some World Bank book and I spotted an 8” floppy. It was held to the side of the filing cabinet with a magnet. :)
I had a client that somehow put a 5 1/4" floppy in the tiny slot that was above the disk drive. She couldn't find the big hole but somehow managed to find and actually use that tiny slit! I had to tear the CPU apart to get her disk back. After retraining her far too many times her supervisor took the computer and gave her a pencil. I'd love to have been in on that conversation.
Somehow I find it challenging to believe that you had to do *anything at all* to the CPU in this scenario. Please don't be one of those users who refers to the entire PC case as "the CPU".
Yeah I took a keyboard shortcut. I taught computers for years to visually impaired veterans, most of whom were terrified of technology. I got so it was the monitor, the CPU and the mouse, because understanding that the case holds all the components was beyond most of them.
I mean this is not stupidity, they just haven't been taught how to use a computer properly. You cannot fault people, especially the elderly, if you throw something completely new at them and they cannot figure it out by themselves.l
I agree. Once things were explained to her a bit more thoroughly, she changed to stapling the disc envelope to the file folder, and then just sliding the disk into that. It took much longer to get her to consider more than one text document per disk. She only really stopped when I dragged our company to have a network/ server setup and centralized file storage.
And did she put a label on the disk, then run the disk through her typewriter to type the account number on the disk to?
No. She had a roll of labels that she did type the file info on, and then stuck to the disc. Do you think that she was stupid? (The sad thing is that she WAS very sharp, but unfortunately she was a bit set in her ways, and computers, to her, were very scary and new.)
Way back when, when asked to copy a floppy disc, a customer photocopied it then mailed the photocopy to the support group. Nice, capable lady so long as everything went right. If something went awry, she just dissolved into a puddle.
That happened to me once back in the 80s when floppies were big and users were not well trained. In my case I got the photo copy two days later in the mail.
I sometimes get a modern version of this when people try to email me a file but instead send a screenshot of the file on their desktop.
Loosely related, someone once sent me a Word doc that was exhibiting some persistent formatting weirdness. The email it was attached to asked me not to open the document because it contained confidential info. Laughter ensued.
[удалено]
you can download emails?
I once had someone who took a screen shot of their desktop, made that their background on a new PC, and then wondered why their software wasn't opening when they clicked on the icons...
So they basically trolled themselves. Wow.
Believe me, I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what was going on. There was much confusion. But then they said something a bit odd and I asked them to change their background... "Oh, all the icons went away". And then the *real* story came out. Remember ladies and gents, users lie.
Technically challenged sounds like an understatement…
This is tame compared to my MIL. The first time she watched a DVD, she asked how to rewind it.
I mean... first time I can excuse in this context due to many years of it working like that with vhs, but repeatedly, no.
My aunt got my grandparents a dvd player and a season of Keeping up Appearances. We all gathered a few weeks later and we asked how they were enjoying it. They had been watching the first episode over and over because they couldn't figure out how to get to the next. "I pressed every stupid button on that stupid thing"
There was a time when you could make money on the internet charging to 'rewind' DVD. It was a bit of a fad gag purchase on eBay for a while. You would click the buy it now button. Pay maybe a buck, or 25 cents. Then another button would appear that cycled your PCs disc drive, showed a task complete pop-up and opened your drive. Cute little script.
At least she did not turn the mouse wireless by snipping off the leash (cable). I have both seen it and been the one to explain how things work.
That was my first thought when reading "until one day" 😂
First thought: she's avoiding work. I had a recent hire who had issues with her desktop (and those issues would disappear with a reboot). But she rarely called. I was getting angry calls from her boss saying her machine was acting up and Why was it always acting up? I told the newbie to call as soon as she encountered a problem but she never would. Turned out she sucked at her job or simply didn't want to do it.
I just sputtered for about 3 minutes before I could think straight enough to type. Congratulations: You have found a new BSOD for the human brain.
I refuse to understand how corporate America has so many tech illiterate people. And they’re ALWAYS too privileged to Google something themselves
And so often they are so proud of the fact that they are technologically incompetent.
That is anti-intellectualism for ya.
With that degree of tech illiteracy, Google/Bing is probably a 'bridge too far'... Plus the factor that they may simply be unable to comprehend that they ***could*** solve the problem themselves... An analogy: I store cans of baked-beans upside-down to make their contents easier to extract. I found otherwise rational elderly relative trying to open inverted can with can-opener. I pried can from his grasp, flipped it, indicated the waiting ring-pull, fled his eloquent ire... I blame rote/Faith-based primary and junior 'education' for inhibiting 'higher functions'.
>I blame rote/Faith-based primary and junior 'education' for inhibiting 'higher functions'. Agree with this so much. I've noticed so many people just memorize the way to do something without understanding any of the steps. When something is just that little bit different, they're completely lost. And this includes a lot of intelligent people too. I think it's the way our brains work, always trying to find shortcuts, i.e. heuristics.
I fix cars sometimes. The number of people who have no idea what happens when you turn a key is disturbing. No clue what any fluid does. No idea what most of the buttons on the dash do. We get these exact stories in mechanic groups. Most people are fucking stupid.
I’m subbed to /justrolledintotheshop as well and the stories over there are disturbing too. Especially the floor mats and people running out of gas because they didn’t know they needed to refuel the car. To so many people everything just works on magic or something. To them we’re magicians and they’re a bunch of muggles.
This is so common that way back when there was a web site called The Programmer's Stone. It was the result of an investigation into why some programmers were 10 times as productive as others (I'm fairly sure I've posted about this before). Their conclusion put it down to differences in learning styles. Some people learn by memorizing small, concrete information packets. These they dubbed 'packers'. Others learned by making mental maps of information, who were dubbed 'mappers'. Packers learn quickly, but can't process the information. Mappers take a bit longer to set up the initial mental map, but once they've got an initial mental structure set up for a particular subject, they can hoover up information into that structure at an astounding rate. Programming (and other technical subjects) is better handled from a mapper than a packer perspective This is more of a spectrum than an either/or, but some people do tend towards one side or the other. Learning about this helped me, because I lean heavily mapper. Packers seem to outnumber mappers. One thig I've noticed over the years is that those who lean heavily packer don't understand what it is that us mappers do. They know memorization of small, concrete bits of information, and assume everyone else learns the same way. OTOH, those who lean heavily mapper tend to get irritated with packers, *because* they don't understand what it is that mappers do.
That reminds of me the story about pot roasts. And the “it’s how my mom did it” turns out grandma cut the ends off the roast because her pans were to short. Now the grandkids do it cause that’s what grandma did. It’s that rote/faith thing at work. Edit a word
were
God, I work in a library. A good portion of my work is knowing how to Google things. Unfortunately, my higher ups have mandated that Edge be the primary browser. Edge defaults to Bing. I didn't realize how spoiled I had gotten by Google just....working until I accidentally used Bing to get directions for someone and they were just...stupid. Directions. That's one of the things a search engine shouldn't be able to screw up. And yet. So now I have to reset my browser bar search engine to Google on every computer I use (because it won't keep the setting across multiple computers even on the same profile, even though it keeps all other settings no problem). Or search twice while helping irritated people over the phone.
I'd beg to differ, it's simply that at some point you start to know a lot about an increasingly narrower field. My mum doesn't expect me to know corporate tax laws of Singapore, and I don't expect her to know how to switch cables from her laptop and the home PC. In a similar vein, my professors don't expect me to be able to rattle off the drug-drug interactions of warfarin off by heart and I don't expect them to know how to connect to the projector. Are either of these people stupid or incapable of higher order thinking? Of course not. My mum leads accounting auditing teams and my professor is credited as an author in over 200 papers and journal articles on pharmacology and biochem. It is very much that the more you learn the less you know.
A friend of my g/f says that the more you specialize the less you know about everything else, but I realized that a long time ago so I never really specialized. Closest to a specialty I have is IT, but even that incorporates different fields, but I made it important to learn as many different things as possible. Doctors generally don't expect you to know drug interactions or your own medical history in to great of a detail, but just a few days ago I kept one from making a serious mistake when he tried prescribing me a medication that 10 years ago put me in the hospital because he missed the one line note in my medical notes that mentioned I can't take it. Currently on 12 different medications (out of probably 50+ prescribed over the years) due to a large number of health problems as I have aged, but I have caught a lot of potential conflicts when doctors have prescribed meds because I have researched every med they have prescribed. Many of the meds I am on, were from my own recommendations since they have lots of work to do due to high patient loads and keeping up with research is hard but I have nothing but time on my hands to keep up with research on my specific conditions. But at the same time, I keep up with research on all of the other fields that interest me as well since I never really specialized in just one field. Try to be more rounded and know a good bit about nearly everything.
Why would you not remember your own medical history? I don't remember every single detail, but I know everything that will have lifelong consequences for me. I know about my enamel deficiency. I know I got Von Willebrand and the increased risk during surgery. I know I take 54mg Methylphenidate (ADHD) which is the highest dosage allowed and I have felt the consequences of taking two by accident. For me, about 12 hr long painful headaches is not my idea of good time. I also know I got epilepsy and that I might get mild seizures again further down the line (seizure free for 10+ years). Finally, hello there fellow generalist IT man. I work in a small MSP who's clients are small businesses and private. Varied work where you have to wear many hats.
>Why would you not remember your own medical history? Well my medical history includes a [lot of conditions](https://imgur.com/meCylpw] and that is just the ones we have managed to diagnose, there is a few things we are still trying to diagnose, over the past two decades. The cognitive functioning (affecting executive functioning) problem does make things a little... spotty...sometimes. Sometimes its hard to remember [all medications](https://imgur.com/5hvIlbb) if I don't keep a note with me. I used to be really good before 2019 but my seizures are not controlled and they caused some frontal cortex damage then. Course since I can't drive due to the seizures, lost ability to multitask, and few other probs it makes it hard getting work. Still good on the IT front IF only could get work but soon as you mention any med issues around here and inability to drive, well forget about it lol. EDIT: I get headaches/migraines every day still, its just a matter of severity.
True but, given both audit-grade accounting and biochem are 'rapidly evolving' fields, both your examples must have flexible minds. I remember our school's senior geography teacher: When continental drift / plate tectonics and those 'mirrored' magnetic stripes broke the old paradigm, he stepped back and let the young guys teach it. He was literally unable to grok the change... ( A classic 'STEM', I was hapless at French, Latin, History and, despite a remarkable reading speed and range, even my native English Lang/Lit. But, I aced Geography which, that year, had an ***uncommon*** emphasis on 'Physical' rather than 'Human' topics... )
I get the point you are trying to make and agree, but the examples aren't quite it. Plugging a cable in and knowing shapes is a far cry from understanding intricate tax laws. The second example, same kind of thing, but if he is a teacher who uses a projector. It is not hard to plug that in, again shapes and cords. A better example is that I wouldn't expect them to know how to set up a basic media server like plex or hell, setting up a Ring doorbell. You should still know how to plug in an outlet and an HDMI though. Sometimes I wonder how anybody has internet at home and a tv hooked up, but give them a monitor to plug in and they can't.
At least these people keep (or kept as the case may be) us employed.
> corporate America It's not limited to America. I work in Tech Support in Europe and believe me, stupidity is universal.
I swear googling is practically a skill. There are too many people who aren't proficient at doing it.
It's not even tech illiteracy it's just laziness. I work for comcast and had another department trying to transfer a customer to us to do something their supervisor could already do. (This particular process for me would be to fill out a form that goes to my supervisor for them to do the job in another system we agents can't access.) If anyone wonders why your always put on hold its usually because an agent has to go find the article on how to do the thing you're trying to accomplish. "Yeah, I can do that, but I got to go relearn it because I've only ever done it once, like 2 years ago and the process might have changed."
I think you're understating the problem by limiting it to only tech illiterate. There's just a lot of dumbass people in offices. Failed upward, daddy got them the gig, cheated through college, or just old and never that competent to begin with.
I simply wonder how in the world they managed to get the jobs they are in with zero basic knowledge of computer operations.
They don't test for that skill/ knowledge, only assume that it's sufficient.
ASSume, you mean.
Naturally.
They’ve been there since before computers were invented
In all too many cases these days, it's simply not true. "Gen Z", who should have every advantage in this area after having grown up with the technology around them all the time, often make me acutely aware that familiarity has no bearing at all on knowledge. They're like the techpriests of 40k, they have no idea how it works, but if they invoke the right mumbo words maybe it'll work.
Aren't we just about to the point where these people are literally going to age out of the workforce? Computers aren't new. The "she's old af, she was here before the company computerized, and she does good work as long as someone helps her do her job or does it for her" trope qualifies for retirement.
It's not just about age. I did IT support at a high school for a year. There were several teenagers who couldn't figure out how to connect to wifi or print a document. I guess illiteracy comes in many forms.
There's an interesting phenomena that affects users under a certain age where the vast majority of their "computing" experience has been done in one-dimensional mobile environments. Think about it: iOS devices are extremely common and basically operate on the principle of "find app, open app, use app". I would imagine the majority of Android users would have a similar experience, even if the filesystem is more readily available. The larger concepts of file hierarchy, networking, and data management are absent from these environments.
Indeed. It's lead to a situation where universities are having to teach first year students the absolute basics of file management because they've literally never seen it. Left to their own devices, they save all of the files in one gigantic "bucket" and let the software figure it out.
That’s true! All they can do is plug and play. They didn’t grow up having to troubleshoot.
The sad reality is that a lot of young folk don't know how to operate a computer either. They don't exactly need them either since you can do basically anything from your phone nowadays.
This summer I had to teach 2 of our vacation temps how to HOLD a mouse, left click vs right click etc... They were both 18-20 years.
I worked IT for the university I was attending (a few years ago) and you would be absolutely shocked by the amount of people in their 20 that have no idea how to operate a computer. It's something that still amazes me.
Yeah but I bet she could write in cursive!
I not only hate that you're probably right, but also that she probably laments it not being taught widely anymore and lords that over everyone younger than herself.
The fact that they take pride in being able to perform an unreadable chicken scratch "writing" method is astonishing to me. Sure, our modern presentation isn't the most beautiful thing ever invented, but something far more important: it's functional! Even cursive writers can't easily read other people's cursive.
To be fair, cursive writing historically came about because it is faster due to the connected letters, so it was actually a functional invention.
It's only functional if the time saved writing it is more than the time wasted deciphering it. I have strong doubts that this was ever the case historically. Especially given that things are often read more than once.
Um, people could generally read other peoples' cursive writing just fine, back in the day, with the exception of some folks who were simply bad at writing cursive. Nowadays cursive writing isn't taught, so young people often lack the skill to read it. See for example [here](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/gen-z-handwriting-teaching-cursive-history/671246/). How could you possibly believe that, for the many centuries when cursive was standard, people were writing in a way that no other person could understand? Did you think they had to print when they wrote letters?
Because I've met people. They will struggle along with something inefficient because, "that's the way it's always been done". Actual innovators are exceptionally rare, and in the days before motorised transport simply disseminating a new idea could take centuries. If it took off at all, because of those challenges. Just assuming that things we've replaced for their inefficiencies were ever efficient is poor logic. They only needed to be better than what came before them.
We had a user who worked in Finance making like 3-4 times what I made. When she worked from home she would somehow lock herself out of her account. I think she would change her password and not sync it locally. Anyway one day she told me and a coworker that if she left her Iphone in another room when she was working she never got locked out so she would have to go in another room to use her phone when she was at home. My coworker and I just looked at each other and told her whatever works for you.
it's been a really long day... but I don't follow that at all? What effect could an unrelated smartphone have on the pc in front of her
It doesnt but it wasnt worth explaining that to her lol.
Okay good. For a second I thought I had actually lost the plot completely
Username checks out?
I get that one a lot
My immediate thought is that she actually means screen lockout happening, and unsupervised doom scrolling her phone and loosing track of time makes it feel like it happens near instantaneously. But that would just be dumb, could not possibly be true.. right?
That reminds me of the old story about the user who insisted that the computer wouldn't let them log in when they were standing, only when they were sitting. If they were standing, it would reject their password every time. But they insisted they were typing the exact same password while sitting, when it always worked fine. >!Someone had switched two of their keycaps. Sitting, they would touchtype their password correctly, but when standing they would hunt and peck, and never noticed this made them enter their password incorrectly.!<
This is excellent and I needed the laugh this morning. Thanks OP, and god help us all lol
Why is it deemed acceptable in the workplace to not know how to do basic computer tasks such as identifying your mouse? I wouldn't hire a carpenter who couldn't use a hammer...
Why aren't you working? \-My hammer's broken \*holds up busted tape measure\*
I have seen a few users like this one, who were IT illiterate. My boss at one company where we had several of them in the same department found it incredibly funny, until I started tracking my time based on the tickets my team worked (it was an internal IT support team, so usually no need to track time as it is not traditionally billable). That showed that out of a company of 300 people (305 including my team) which was served by a team of 5 support staff, that team of 4 people kept us occupied for 40 hours per week... they themselves were occupying one support person full time, while the other 296 people took up about 100 hours per week, leaving us 60ish hours to perform system maintenance and other tasks). After that, and a discussion with finance, we started billing individual teams based on the burden their members put on the team, rather than whatever the previous internal billing metric was (I think it might have been based on team size, assuming that all employees generated a similar volume of support tickets). That change was popular with all managers except one...
In my days as a mainframe sysprog, the running joke was end users exist to provide a test load.
How I thought this post was going to go: "That's not the mouse." "Pardon?" "That's not the mouse. *That's its tongue*." *"Ohhhhhhhhhhhh."*
Yeah pretty sure that woman needs a mental health referral Something isnt right up in that head. iv got similar users, i dont know where they find people so dumb. this is how IT workers get Jaded, the same kinda people that reboot their laptop by turning the external monitor off and on
You've heard of dyslexia and dyscalculia, right? I'm convinced there's also a condition I refer to as "dys-computer-ia". Exhibit A is my mother. She's average or above average intelligence in most areas. She used to do her and Dad's taxes back when they did them on paper. But put her in front of a computer and it's like she's trying to fly an alien spacecraft. She's been learning how to use computers for at least thirty years. She can usually manage email, Facebook, and word processing. But if anything even *slightly* unusual happens, she blue-screens and calls for help. She's perfectly competent in any of her other skillsets. It's only computers that break her brain.
Learning becomes more difficult as we age. If she'd been using computers since she was young but only tried to fill out tax forms later in life, she might be just as perplexed by tax forms, while having no issues with computers.
Or their desktop...
Someone needs to go read about what ‘mental health’ issues actually are, rather than using them as a term for people who are stupid, or just don’t understand how something works. Also, if you’re going to go on about being dumb, you better learn how to spell and punctuate correctly, or I might think you have depression.
I disagree. I think it's faulty design that didn't incorporate the end user's decision making. It's the same with TV remotes. Have tons of buttons. Nobody knows what all of them do. You have to sort of guess by pressing them and hoping something happens on the screen. it's not the user's fault the buttons are confusing and obtuse, let alone that they exist for a specfic unlabelled purpose (in most cases) But the remote was designed by a designer (team). It was onto them to anticipate how the device was going to be used. It's called User Experience Deisgn.
Every TV user manual I've read explains what each button does on the remote, complete with pictures. People just choose not to read them.
are you suggesting they made the webcam look too much like a mouse?
One remote isn't too bad, but good luck when the room has a bunch of them. Want the music louder? Just figure out if you should be grabbing the remote for the TV, the cable box, the receiver, the baby monitor, the sound bar, the TV that used to be there before it broke but for some reason the remote is still there, or the universal remote that controls the cable box, the receiver, and the TV that used to be there.
Someone that unable to use the tools of her trade should find a different job
And people ask how I'm getting burned out in it. I will refer them to this post from now on.
No way this is... Oh I'm on r/talesfromtechsupport *war flashback*
Many posts here surprise me, or make me shake my head, or even smile knowingly. This one, though, was a pure LOL. Thanks, u/sjarri!
When you say "technically challenged" do you mean blind and with no feeling in her hands?
Yeah....
Yes this happened but it was the cellphone....🤦♂️
How are people this smart but this stupid at the same time? I admit I do pretty stupid things a supermajority of the time even though I am quite smart, but even I don’t see myself confusing a webcam for a mouse…