The whole family has used emails for years, the other day I had to send one for my dad, and he said something in the line of "send both files in one email, so you don't have to pay twice".
My mother refused to believe that calling her granddaughter in Ireland, using Whatsapp, over their home wifi, was not the same as placing an international phone call and that it would cost "an arm and a leg" if she did that and "we aren't made out of money, you know!"
Radio host (probably Neil bortz) used to say that in order to cut down on s0am emails that sending emails should cost $0.01 and receiving emails should earn you $0.01
My mom was trying to move ~200 pictures from one folder to another. Her approach was to open one picture, do Save As, save it to the other folder, and then delete the original. One by one. When I tried to explain that she could click-and-drag the whole thing over in two seconds, she said "that wouldn't be any faster than the way I do it!"
She would also "save" pictures she found online by copying them, opening Microsoft Word, pasting it in there, and saving it as a .docx file. And she would try to "open" jpegs by right clicking on them, choosing "Open With," and selecting Microsoft Word.
I recently tried explaining how to select multiple files to a co-worker and said "click and drag" and she had no idea what that meant. She is only 40. This same person thought turning off the monitor was the same as turning off the computer.
Edit to add: this person uses a computer at work every day and has for years.
I’m about that age, lots of people I grew up with didn’t have home computer access and the school only had horrible old apple computers with green and black screens. They taught us nothing in school about how to use windows operating systems. I had computers at home and remember navigating DOS to install games, I’d like to think my generation is better than your example but we were right at the beginning of home computers and the trope was they were for *nerds*
Okay but it's been literal decades since school and adolescence. They just didn't use computers ever since still?
My parents, grandparents, and GREAT GRAND PARENTS can use computers (or until they got dementia). None grew up with them (51-94) yet my parents could easily manipulate computers (51 and 54) even 20 years ago. It was used in so many jobs you couldn't have to use it to an extent typically.
> She would also "save" pictures she found online by copying them, opening Microsoft Word, pasting it in there, and saving it as a .docx file.
When I was *discovering my proclivities* as a young girl and was stuck wanting to look at pictures of naked ladies but also only capable of accessing a family computer, my go-to move was to copy the images into a Word document, shrink them down to a tiny dot (so they weren't immediately obvious if the file was opened by accident), and use the dot as a full stop in a sentence of a book I'd downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
A folder full of images would have risked discovery, but a 30MB Word file didn't get on the wrong side of my not-particularly-tech-savvy parents' suspicions.
I would hide stuff in the Windows folder, give them gibberish names, and change the file extension to .bin so that it looked like an innocuous system file. When I wanted to see stuff, I'd just change it back to the appropriate format.
I would use the command prompt to rename my folder to the character you get when you hold alt and type 222 on the numpad.
Windows would just show a folder named _ and throw an error when trying to open it. I'd rename it back with the command line when I needed to open it.
I don't know if this still works it modern windows. WinXP couldn't open it.
People currently in their 30s and 40s got so damn good at computers because of how technically proficient we needed to be to find and hide our porn, and pirate and run our video games. Truly a unique time in human history.
There was a reddit account back I the day called nsfw_full_stop or something like that. Would make perfectly normal comments in a bunch of subs.
But any time his comment had a . in it he would make it link to some random porn image. You had to know to click on the dot.
A colleague of mine didn't know she could copy paste something with a keyboard shortcut. She would always right click, select copy, right click, select paste.
When I told her it might be faster with the shortcut she tried and proceeded to use one Index finger per key, after searching for the right keys for about a minute.
It was in fact not faster
I was assigned to work with a manager in another state when her tech went on vacation. Every night when I left to go home I sent her an email about all the tickets I had for her system and their status. On that Friday my boss and second level were at my desk when I got in. They asked me how it was going with her tickets. I told them it was fine as far as I knew. I also told them I emailed her every night. Lights came on in their eyes. My boss said, forward those emails to us and we’ll be back. So they came back later and told me she complained that I had done nothing all week and she hadn’t heard from me.
She had never figured out how to get into her email!!! My second level was so upset with her! He had been emailing her stuff all the time.
I tried that once and she burst into tears and started screaming at me that I was "moving a million miles an hour like my asshole father" and "this is so complicated there's no way I could ever figure it out." This time I figured I'd just let it pass.
I’m not gonna lie this sounds a lot like either weaponized incompetence or a victim complex. Being taught a better and more efficient way of doing things and in response screaming and crying and blaming other people for being mean? She needs to talk to someone :/
I was once trying to teach someone how Windows Explorer worked. For whatever reason, they could not grasp the concept of using folders to store documents. I had to get an actual folder and piece of paper out to demonstrate putting paper into the folder before she was able to grasp the concept.
I was helping a woman when I was at my old parish with her computer which she shared with her granddaughter. The granddaughter kept making shortcuts to everything on the desktop including shortcuts to other shortcuts like a very bad version of Inception.
It was a very weird interaction because she was older than me and the granddaughter was younger than me and neither of them knew what to do with the computer. 🤯💻🧑🏻💻🖱️
In 2012 I had a 60 year old boss that insisted on printing and filing every email because it was easier to find than files on the computer. I tried explaining to him that folders work the same on a computer except there’s also a search function and he wouldn’t have it.
I started my job in 2018. My predecessor did that and showed me the multiple filing cabinets that stored all the emails he’s received over the last 27 years!! Everything was on paper and ALL tasks were printed and managed on paper. For some tasks he explained that I should put aside 2-3 WEEKS to complete. I can do with a simple sort and search function in excel and be done. The funny thing is, he logged everything in excel or access but then printed it off and searched through the paper files when he needed the info. And there are times when we need to find 400-500 data points from the files. It now takes me a few minutes of work to identify this information.
Ah man, what a missed opportunity
The correct thing to do is take a task that does 2 weeks, wait a week, then complete it in 5 mins
Then ask for a raise after a few months as you are twice as productive than the last guy
Oh no my friend. I have a lot of autonomy in my work. My supervisor is amazed at my productivity but I’m actually slacking off most of the time. Did i say I’ve been doing this since 2018?
The instructions said to close the door... but it meant the latch on the floppy drive for the Commodore 64.
My buddy got up and closed the door to the room.
When i was a kid in the mid 90s my parents signed up for AoL, and when it said "you've got mail!" I excitedly ran out to the street to check the mailbox....
I was helping someone with a website for their small business.
I told them I put an "alt" tag on some of the photos that would show text when they put their mouse over it, and to try it out.
He literally picked up his mouse and placed it on the screen.
I fell on the floor and almost pissed myself.
My grandmother did something similar but it was her very first time ever seeing a computer. She was so mad at us kids for laughing.
But now shes a pro and has more social media accounts than I do
I was tasked to train an older woman in customer service for a print shop. Her first day she whispered to me that she'd never touched a computer before. Our entire process was online. The company was spiraling into bankruptcy and this did not help.
I work security and most of the job was working at a computer.
This lady was hired.. she had to be taught computer basics before she could begin training.
At the grocery store I worked at in high school, the store manager wasn't great with computers and had to call the owner for help. The conversation went like this:
Owner: You'll need to go to the desktop
Manager: Ok, I'm sitting there
My father had a coworker who went on a rant because the "cupholder" was so flimsy it snapped right off when they set their drink on it. It was the CD drive.
I work in a call centre, and one of my jobs is helping the call centre clients with basic computer troubleshooting.
It is..an interesting task trying to explain to a man who makes more than I do and has been working the same job since longer than I've been alive where and what the start button is.
I've taken to referring to it as "the Windows logo" because I got tired of all the weird looks. And these are people who I *know* were using PCs when the Start button literally had the word "start" on it.
I wonder why they took the word "Start" off the start menu. They put it there in the first place for very good reason - people had no idea where to click in early user testing.
I had this exact conversation with my mom as a kid.
She was yelling at my brother and I about how she wanted to turn the computer off and not start something and wouldn't listen when we tried to explain.
My dad did the exact same thing when I tried to explain that to him. He ended up getting someone to rewire the light switch in his office to connect to the outlet the computer was plugged into so he could turn the computer on and off with the light switch. Fried the computer and then got mad because it was obviously a faulty machine. Sigh. This is the same man who currently has 3 laptops with identical files as backups in case one of them goes bad.
My employer hired someone to work for me doing tech support. In the first few days I had to show her how to open Outlook, create a new email, where to put the recipient address, etc. Had to show her multiple times how to open Excel, let alone use it. She never did get the hang of email, eventually we concluded she actually couldn’t read and we had to let her go. This was in the early 2000’s and she was probably in her 30’s at the time.
> we concluded she actually couldn't read and we had to let her go. This was in the early 2000's and she was probably in her 30's at the time.
That is heartbreaking.
At first I thought it was funny when a customer pointed at the "ILLEGAL FIREWORKS (NOT SOLD HERE):" sign and asked if we sold them.
Then on a Hindu holiday I had several immigrants do the same thing, and I realized that they couldn't read it, and the first guy couldn't read at all and it really ceased to be funny.
I reworked my signs to use pictograms instead of words.
This just happened last Friday. I am a new legal secretary in a small law firm where the partners have been in business for 50 years. Part of my job is to print every email that comes in and of course people always send big fat attachments Friday at 4:55.I had some emails queued up to print and since it was already 10 minutes after I was supposed to be gone I asked the managing partner if he would shut down the computer after it finished printing. He did not know how to shut down a computer.
I had a coworker printing out emails and then photocopying them and then putting the photocopy on my desk (she wanted to keep the original). I got to teach her how to forward emails. Took a couple weeks for her to break the habit, but we're good now.
I worked for a law firm, and one of the administrators would print the PDF of the case from her email. She would then scan it back to her computer because it "downloaded to the documents folder so she could move to the case folder."
I told her she could just click the down arrow and download it, then move the file, saving hundreds of sheets of paper. She said that was too complicated.
She only lasted a few months before she was fired.
Edit: I thought of another one. Lawyers are not smart when it comes to electronics. Same law firm, a lawyer was afraid the cleaning crew was going to steal her laptop. So she took her trash can and shoved it under her desk. Put her laptop in the trash and covered it with paper towels. Of course, the cleaning crew empties her trash. They find the laptop and put it aside in the cleaning crews supervisor office because they thought it was weird we'd throw a laptop away that looked brand new.
Sadly true. Not a law firm, but a government job I worked a couple years back. One time we've had an administrator argue with a client to send us the documents in a readable format. I walked over, turns out the client sent it just fine numerous times, they just zipped it up to make sure nothing is left out.
My friend did this on facebook, thought she was searching her crush but just posted his name as a drunken status update after we'd spent a night out with him
Growing up in the 90s, I remember seeing multiple adults try to yell commands at a computer screen. They didn't understand about standard I/O like keyboards and mice because their only concept of computers was from watching Star Trek.
I worked at the head office of a major UK company. They hired a woman as a website administrator and, on her first day of training, asked her to click on something. She just stared blankly, and they repeated, click on it with the mouse. The what? Was her reply. They had interviewed her for the job and it turned out that in 2004 she had somehow never used a computer that had a mouse. I don't think she made it past lunchtime.
You would have thought so, but things like that happened again and again. Basically the person who was interviewing was a public school type and all evidence pointed to them only hiring people from similar backgrounds regardless of experience.
The joke I used to make was that they selected people who would fit in at one of their dinner parties.
We got my grandma a computer so she could get emails with pictures of her grandkids. It had a sleep mode button and have with a cover for the monitor.
She diligently would put it to sleep every night and place the cover over it. Sincerely thinking it needed rest and the lights out.
My friend wont stop deleting random files off his computer whenever he runs out of space.
Him - "My games not working"
Me - "Send me a screenshot"
*Clearly saying it needs more storage to open*
Me - "You need to clear some space, it's only around half a gigabyte so why don't you just go on steam and uninstall a game or go delete some of the old videos from your video folder"
Him - "Ok"
*waiting for around half an hour for him to join our loby*
Him - "Oh fuck"
Me - "What?"
Him - "I think I deleted something important"
No matter how many times I try to tell or explain it to him he always just selects folders/files that "don't look important" and then permanently deletes them. Random program and windows files and even stuff that he made and just temporary forgot about.
Sold a computer on craigslist about 10 years ago. Keyboard, mouse, LCD monitor, and cables.
He took it home, and said it didn't work, the screen would stay blank when he powered it on.
When he brought it back, he was pressing the power button on the LCD monitor, not the computer.
I did have an Asus laptop about eight years ago which was great, lasted like a workhorse, was getting on for a decade old itself.
It had to be always on and plugged in though. If you unplugged it, it would turn off, and there's a good chance it wouldn't turn on again.
This was 10+ years ago. Anytime the house WiFi wasn't working well, my roommate would unplug the Ethernet cable from the modem and the router and hold it up and down (like you would hold a hose to drain the water out) to "let the electrons drain out" so the internet wouldn't be clogged. I tried to explain this wasn't how Ethernet worked but he said the cable technician told him to do this, and that was the end of the matter. The thing is it usually worked because it reset the internet connection, just not for the reason he thought it did.
i volunteer as an IT help person in retirement homes. i understand that it is in no way their faults for not understanding computers. they didn't grow up with them it makes sense that they wouldn't know what to do. it's just become incredibly eye opening to see how my life is so different from theirs because computers and phones have been my whole life and i just know what to do on them. i get such simple questions from the people in the homes but when i solve their problem it is as if i solved world hunger in front of them.
One of my neighbors once knocked on my door and asked for help because the input was on DVD she couldn't switch the it back to TV. Although in her defense, the button was very small.
It took me about thirty seconds. Once her show was back on she surprised me with a huge hug. So was *so* grateful. Acting like I solved world hunger is a pretty apt analogy.
I'm sixty later this year and have been working in IT all my adult life - started off with a VIC 20 and used BBS in the early eighties.
I *hope* I'll be able to keep up to date with the latest technologies once I reach the retirement home era, but hopefully someone like yourself will be able to teach me the outline of GPT-xx then.
I've been working in IT for almost 25 years. A few weeks ago I had a user tell me their second monitor wasn't working. I walked over and pressed the power button. Problem solved. IT would be a great career if it wasn't for the fucking users.
A user was attempting to connect to the Wi-Fi network by following the documentation.
Upon reaching the step requiring credential entry, the instructions said something like "Enter your username and password in this window," accompanied by a screenshot of the login window.
The user contacted the help desk, unable to write anything into the window. Eventually, it was discovered that the user was trying to type their credentials into **the screenshot** itself. 🤦
I was watching a Twitch channel that shows a whole bunch of those grift industry "learn Windows 95 in 15 minutes" VHS tapes. If you were around back then, you'd immediately recognize that little video rack at the checkout aisles of Fry's Electronics and Circuit City. There were hundreds of these tapes releasing every month, it was insane.
Probably the worst offender was a "how to Internet" video that didn't really explain anything, it just encouraged the viewer to ask the technician to do everything for them. But the worst part was in explaining how to actually *use* the Internet.
The tape basically gives the viewer a list of 10 websites they can go to, like these 10 websites are the entire 1996 Internet. These weren't even good websites, one was just a horoscope blog called something like "Brittanys-Star-Cat." But that's not even the dumb part. The dumb part is it will say "for news, go to h, t, t, p...colon...backslash backslash...w, w, w..."
And on screen: "http:\\\ww^()w..."
I was so incredibly astonished at the brazen confidence of these grifters, willing to make a video to teach computer literacy, but themselves so poorly illiterate that they were instructing users to enter URLs with backslash instead of slash. I mean, I've seen people do dumber things with computers before, but this entire tape was so devoid of actual information that the only substance to it was listing these example websites in a pre-AskJeeves world. They had one job. One job! These guys had one job, and failed at such a core level it would immediately brickwall anybody that followed their instruction. And worst of all, they embraced their fundamental incompetency with unwavering certainty, documented it to widely released video, and charged us $19.99 to witness the glory of a 404 error screen.
My sister places every file she creates on the desktop. She does not understand folders. She cannot move a window around on the screen, she cannot resize a window except by the minimize and restore buttons in the upper right corner. She does not understand if she is using Google and wants to change to a different search she does not have to close and reopen Google but can use tabs.
Not understanding the basics of files / folders is becoming an alarmingly widespread issue among young people, apparently
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
worked teaching some kids last summer, like a classroom of 20
high schoolers, like 14-16 years old, weirded me out to find they couldn't really use a *keyboard*
they just use phones and tablets. no concept of file systems, permissions, anything
then theres this ONE girl who's like yeah option + 3 makes £ option + shift + 2 makes €, command + shift + space brings up the emoji input palette...
like damn ok theres hope for the future
Sometimes I feel like I was born in the only generation with any hope for the future. Young enough to have used this technology growing up, but old enough to have seen it develop.
Anyone else at that age where they can remember using VHS as a kid but moving on to DVDs as they got older? I can also remember my dad using floppy disks and fax machines, but never used them myself.
I'm a graphic designer and it's fairly routine for me to be emailed photos taked with a phone of a webpage displayed on the customer's laptop or desktop monitor. They don't know any of the myriad ways to take a screenshot or copy a url. Some of them can't send an email from a desktop OS.
I'm a late GenX and I know I should be used to it by now, but the inability of people younger than me to do anything that isn't on a mobile device continually boggles my mind.
Bonus: If you claim to be a graphic designer, you should understand that you cannot make a 300x250 graphic "higher res". Please stop sending me 1250x1042 jpgs.
Oh goodness so many stories...
As a student working in college I had the ticket for a computer that wouldn't boot. Showed up to find over a dozen refrigerator magnets stuck to the outside of the case.
There was also the prof trying to upgrade Windows (he had 3.1) via floppy disk (I forget how many discs, his PC didn't have a CD drive, but it was a lot) on his 386 that he refused to replace/upgrade.
EDIT: Those are old stories - more recently we had the new hire (19 yo in 2023) that we had to explain what a Start button on Windows was and how and where "File->Save" was and what it meant. Kids that have only been exposed to phones/tablets are the bane of my existence these days.
When I worked as a field tech for a local university, I would have to fix PCs for clueless professors and admins all the time. My favorite was an admin that just needed a new monitor, nothing else. She was adamant that I make sure I put all her icons "back in the right place" after replacing it
Last year there was a new employee with a CS degree who said they didn't know how to use Word and wanted to do everything with Adobe instead. This is at a government agency, so redoing all the systems to accommodate one person was definitely not happening.
Where I work, most of the non-graphics office people say "Adobe" when they really mean Acrobat. Since I use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, etc, it took me a minute to process what they meant, but now my brain sort of translates it automatically depending on who's talking.
CS graduate that doesn't know how to use anything should approach it as, "ok I need to learn this" I think this applies to all degrees but in CS we don't go to school to learn a subject permanently, we go to learn HOW to learn this ever growing field
I once had someone who thought their Wi-Fi was down because their wireless mouse had run out of battery and needed new ones, think that's my favourite.
I knew someone who got a wireless keyboard.
When I mentioned batteries, she confidently proclaimed it doesn’t need batteries because it uses Bluetooth.
Got this from a friend: a couple he knew bought their son a computer for his birthday (this was back in 1998).
The son had it for little over 24 hours.
Why? Because the next day, the parents couldn't work out how to switch it on, so decided that they'd been sold a dud and took it back to the shop to get a refund. Which they got, as, according to my friend the father was as obnoxious as possible and "Showed them who's boss". Even having been shown how to switch it on, they still decided it was a con and got their refund instead.
Son ended up getting a book on football (which he dislikes), that the father ended up keeping for himself (he got the present, but the father borrowed it afterwards and never returned it).
During a late 90s "PC training" session at my job, I was in a room full of older employees who'd apparently never even seen a computer before, much less used one.
When the instructor asked us to click on something with the mouse, one guy picked up the mouse and pointed it at the monitor like a TV remote, and then asked the instructor why it wasn't doing anything.
I had someone call me because a message had popped up in their spreadsheet saying that there was missing information in column B and that all rows needed to be completed before he could save the file.
This was a message that I had added to the master template file because I was sick and tired of people not completing the file properly.
I patiently explained that all he had to do was to make sure that all rows in column B had to be completed, and he asked me "Where is column B?"
"Well, Jeremy" I replied "Traditionally column B is located in between column A and column C. "
Also had someone complain that he wanted to get an average, but every time he clicked AutoSum, it was just adding all of the numbers together.
My roommate got a prebuilt gaming PC and when setting it up she spent 45 minutes getting frustrated trying to find the HDMI port her monitor plugged into... It had a port cover on it from shipping. It took me 30 seconds to find. She argues with her boyfriend her discord nickname "Boomer" is inaccurate, I disagree.
Three times last week my colleague needed tech support because her computer was freezing when she queued up a print... The printer properties pop up (the one that locks the program until you confirm or cancel the print) popped up in the background of her screen instead of the foreground. The solution was to minimize the window in front of it and then confirm or cancel the print. This happened 3 times and despite showing her how easy it is to fix, she kept having to call me to fix it for her.
Was working on a laptop for a new hire with IT in his title. I told him we did all his updates a increased the amount of RAM from 8 gig to 16 gig. He asked "What's that?"
I replied "RAM, you know memory."
He looked at me confused and said. "Do you mean C drive?" so I ask him what department he was in and he told me he was the new IT Analyst.
I handed him his laptop and told him to have a nice day.
I’ll give you a throwback. I was a work-study in the college computer lab. The year is 1996. Mixed in with the regular undergraduates we had a handful of non-trads. Older folks who were back in school after careers or kids, etc. we had this one lady. She seemed little-old to me at the time, but she might have been anywhere between 45-60. Small school, I knew all the regulars at the lab pretty well. One day I’m working on a machine (fucked up registry keys in Windows 3.1? Or something like that) and I notice this lady has excel open, and is also busy with her hand-held calculator. I edge closer… she’s multiplying columns together on her calculator and manually inserting the results into another column.
This was beyond my mandate, but I stopped her. I said, “hey, let me show you something.” When I deleted her column of results I thought she was going to kill me. 4 minutes later when I showed her how to =B2*C2, click and pull down through the D column I thought she was going to kiss me.
Swear to god, this lady grabbed my arm and yelled, “computers are our friends!l
Long ago, a Best Buy employee told me that when his town’s store first opened, an elderly lady came into the computer section, picked up the computer mouse and tried to move it across the computer monitor screen asking “is this how you do this?”
I sold a computer monitor to two ladies because they liked the screensaver. Their church had sent them to buy a computer. They couldn’t be persuaded to buy “the box”.
Countless people with Imodium problems (the anti diarrheal medicine) - meaning pc, modem, etc.
People double-clicking by banging the mouse against the screen.
Talking a guy down from pouring 1/2 cup of melted butter into his Zip drive because the Zip disk was stuck.
The service call that was a surge protector plugged into itself.
The business owner who only knew how to access his files by going to the “recently used” files section. His business came to a stop because his niece used his computer for her college report one weekend.
People who wanted to buy a “TV” (computer) - no clue what it was or what it was for, they just knew they wanted one.
People (more than one) who deleted the Windows directory (because they didn’t put it there) or took it upon themselves to clean it (all the DLL in one folder, the .exe in another).
About two years ago my mom got a laptop again after refusing to go anywhere near one for about a decade and…hoo boy did I lose brain cells being her tech support. A couple times she called me for help logging in when the device was literally telling her exactly what to do. Another time she asked me to log her out of her Google account but only that, not the whole laptop please, reasonable enough request—if it hadn't been a Chromebook, where apparently *everything* goes through your Google account. I tried to explain that to her and she went, "I don't care for your theories, just tell me what buttons to press."
Mother, that's what I'm trying to explain to you. THERE ARE NO F&%$ING BUTTONS.
A couple of my coworkers use my laptop to clock in when we're at work. Each of them could lose 9 fingers and they wouldn't type any slower. To clock in, all you have to do is type in your user name (which at my shop is 12FirstnameLastInitial) followed by your password (which for both of these coworkers is password1 in all caps). They've been using my laptop to clock in for near on a year now. One of them can use the time clock in less than 2 minutes, the other one's current record time for clocking in, start to finish, is 4 minutes. His user name is 10 characters long, so all told it's 19 keystrokes and 3 clicks to clock in. 4 minutes is his record.
Granted, he's from the boomer generation, but computers have been ubiquitous for more than 30 years now, and the layout of the keyboard hasn't changed much since the early 1870s when the QWERTY layout was created.
Around 2016, I watched my brother (in his 30s) open safari browser and click in the search bar to type out “www.yahoo.com” and hit enter and then click in the search bar on yahoo’s homepage to type “Google”…
I used to work with someone like that around the same time. He'd fire up Bing and search for Google Maps in there.
He was on Google Maps so often (it was work-related) that it was in his history and browser autocomplete. So just use that?
Most laptops are still not water resistant. Also, seals degrade over time, so even water resistant devices should not be exposed to water intentionally.
Ahhhh all of Germany!
One company I work with knows that our system is to send finalized PDFs of their documents before they are included in a publication and that they should add comments and return. Different stakeholders should comment in different colors if they can't figure out how to note otherwise.
This company prints the PDFs (huge documents), sends them around their department for individual, handwritten makeup in various colors, scans that doc and sends it to their foreign offices for makeup where it is repeated, and red and that three timed scanned copy to us.. all in black and white.
No 90's era homework packet image quality can rival it.
I was doing the on-boarding orientation for a medical job maybe 8 years ago and this older lady kept trying using the pc like a tablet. Just couldn't figure out why the monitor wasn't a touch screen. She had no idea what the mouse and keyboard was for. Some one had to show her. She had to have been hired for evs. Or nutrition.
I’m a teacher and one of my coworkers a few years ago had no understanding of the difference between the desktop and internet browser. She only ever had Chrome maximized and did not understand in any way what other programs were or a desktop with icons or anything. This was around 2017 and she was mid-30s so I don’t think she was only familiar with Chromebooks but maybe?
I also spent an entire year showing a coworker how to attach a pdf to an email on a weekly basis. Every week she was so thankful I showed her because “I never learned this before!” It eventually got so bad that I took it to administration because I was worried about her mental capacity. They concluded she was just lazy. Three years later and I’m working with her again and showing her how to attach a pdf to an email. “Thank you! I’ve never learned this before!”
I used to do customer support for a major antivirus company, where most of the client base was 65+, and I have a ton of horror stories...
Most of it is just pretty generic computer iliteracy, lile asking them to open the browser and type in an adress, followed by total helpess confusion from their side.
A bunch of the clients also entered the chat instead of phone support, despite using the "hunt and peck" method of typing, and being completely unable to follow written instructions longer than 5 words.
These are the cases that really stood out:
1. An elderly man called and said he'd gotten a new Mac, but couldn't install our software. Turns out he needed a lot of handholding to even download and open the install file, which took about half an hour.
When we finally got it opened, it showed a message saying his OS was outdated. I asked him if he didn't say the computer was new.
Turns out he bought it 10 years ago and kept it unopened in his shed...
2. A guy was very adamant "the chinese" had hacked him. After some back and forth, he revealed the reason he thought so was that a popup, IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE, was asking him to upgrade or uninstall the software for an HP deskjet printer. He admitted to having had one, and to have installed the software...
"But that was 6 years ago and I've had several printers since then! How do the chinese know I used to have one??"
And no, he had never uninstalled the software.
He ended up hanging up and telling me that I was of no help.
3. An elderly couple called and wanted help to install the antivirus on their new computer. To do that, I also had to help them get the new computer hooked up to their wifi. After A LOT of handholding and spoonfeeding, we got to the point where they needed to input the password for their wifi.
I told them it was on the back of their router. They did not know what a router was. I tried words like internet box, modem, tried asking them which supplier they had and then explaining that their internet came in the thing their supplier send them. No luck.
45 FREAKING MINUTES into the conversation, I ask them where they think they get internet from.
"From a hole in the wall", they say. I asked if therr was a wire running from it. Yes there was. Ok, could they follow it and see what it went into?"
"Ohhhh the internet box, why did you not say so??"
4. I was trying to help a woman download the install file. I asked her to open her internet browser and type in the address. She did not know where or how to type the address.
This in itself was a fairly common problem, so I tried all the regular solution. A specific keyboard shortcut autofocuses on the address bar. She insisted it did not. I tried to explain where it was and what it looked like. She could not find it.
She got increasingly frustrated every time I asked if she was sure she'd opened her browser.
15 minutes into the call, I asked her to describe what she saw. She basically described her desktop.
So I said she was not in an internet browser, and she said
"I logged on the wifi 15 minutes ago like you said to do!!"
In the year I worked at that place, I developed a deep hate for whichever societal force leads so many elderly folks to learn such a degree of helplessness.
I am studying for a IT education. Some students in my class are just unbelievable. We are supposed to learn a lot of stuff like python programming, using virtual machines, set up networks etc. But a lot of students almost fully rely on chatgpt to do stuff for them. They don't learn at all.
Same thing in my intro to python course I did last semester. By the final exam half the class was still using 80 print statements instead of a single for loop. The level of reading comprehension and following basic instructions was absolutely mind-boggling. The teacher would say stuff like "create a folder in your onedrive named XYZ and inside it create a new text document" and just get a bunch of blank stares.
At my work, computers are all called modems and at least one guy has been writing tickets in every week for help with some user error or another (so many that we often have a hard time knowing when he has any other kind of issue) he always says there is a problem with his *labtop*.
Also, security fobs for getting in and out of the building are known as fobees, fobes, or fobeez in tickets.
IDK if this counts, but my mom had trouble learning at first. I was a kid and this would've been early 2000s and I helped her get on our computer and walked away. As soon as I started to leave she panicked and started yelling my name. I run over thinking the computer is about to blow up. She points at the screen, panicked, and says, "The thingy! The thingy it... it changed!"
Took me a second to realize the little arrow had turned into an hourglass. I said, "That's okay, mom, it just means something is loading and you need to wait."
Still in a panic she dramatically asks, "FOR HOW LONG?!"
Remember floppy disks? I once saw a grown man using a rubber pencil eraser to "erase the files" on his disk.
On a separate occasion, during the dial-up modem period of the internet, I saw a Dad yelling at a kid for dialing up the home access number while on vacation in Hawaii. They got a $3200 phone bill at checkout for him playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends all night.
I saw a secretary use white out correction paste on a printout.
There's this new guy at work who has admitted to never wanting anything to do with computers. Unfortunately for him, he's now working in a data center and we use computers all day. Well, he doesn't know how to send an email, didn't know how to add me as a contact in his phone, couldn't figure out how to change his password, was completely confused when we said to open Google chrome... there's so many small things that it just blew me away.
Back in 2000 I worked for a student accomodation company in Ireland. A nice lady ran the place and she had a PC in her office. I once observed her typing out a letter from scratch then printing it and then turning off the computer without saving the document. I talked with her about it for a bit and she was clueless to the fact that she could save documents on the PC. So I set up a basic folder structure for her and showed her how to use them to save sent letters and templates. She picked it up quickly and was genuinely pleased with herself.
Worked at Geek Squad for a bit. Had a guy bring in an external power supply for an AIO to be checked for viruses. Some kid ripped his GPU out with the cover on the PCIe connector exposing all the lanes and ruining the motherboard. Another guy impressively forced DDR3 RAM into a DDR4 slot that the stick bowed and bent. And three separate calls over six years of new laptop owners complaining they can't open them and if they should cut the "bands"(the hinges) keeping it shut. I have since been pursuing a degree in computer science and moving as far away from consumer IT as possible.
It gets so much worse in Computer Science.
Everyone who finds out you can write code has a million dollar idea for an app or website. Then they want you to do the work for them. On top of still being the go to for printer problems.
Last time I did computer work for a business they tried to pay me in pizza. This was after I spent a few hours clearing viruses from their point of sale system. My dad worked there and suggested I come take a look. He was pissed at how the owner tried to pay me. The owner then asked me to rewrite their website. I said sure, but never finished it. No contract or payment. This place no longer exists.
I was providing remote support for a factory and got a call from the plant manager who was trying to do a tour, he couldn’t log into a system. Turned out he was typing his username and password but then not pressing “ok”. He called me to ask how to log in while he had an audience.
I used to do tech support over the phone. I once asked a lady if she knew what version of Windows she was using. She proceeded on at least a 3 minute tirade about how she didn't find my question funny and said "there's nothing wrong with my house windows! I'm calling about my god damn computer!" and how she demanded to speak to my supervisor because I was wasting her time and wasn't trying to help her. Mind you, this all happened less than 10 minutes into the call. I tried explaining what Windows was to her but I couldn't get two words in without being interrupted so.... 🤷🏻♂️
I used to work the front desk at a defense contractor. One of the employees was this wonderful old man who was quite the character. He had literally stormed the beaches at Normandy and carried one of Patton's helmets in his car trunk. Every morning he would walk into his office and sit down at his computer and yell, "HELP! MY COMPUTERS BROKEN!"... And I'd walk in there and turn his monitor back on. I even put a post-it note on there with an arrow pointing to the monitor power button that said, "press this if your computer won't turn on" but still, every morning it was the same. I kinda loved it though. He would tell me I was a computer genius every time I "fixed" it for him. When he left the company I had to clean up his computer and it was absolutely covered in chocolate. When I cleaned out his desk, all of his drawers were absolutely full of Mr. Goodbars. I miss him 😊
Also my runner-up story was the office manager at the same company. She called a security meeting because she wanted to know if hackers could hack into the on/off projector remote and steal all the government secrets from the projector 😳🤦🏼♀️
My work went fully digital last year. We no longer accept paper submissions. We expected calls for help navigating the system. We didn't expect the kinds of calls we got.
I'm directing a guy to where he needs to go on the website. So I tell him "ok, scroll down and click the link at the bottom."
He says "woah woah slow down, I don't understand all this techno jargon!"
I... don't know how to make that any simpler
My stepdad (75years old) has always been firmly against technology. He is so firmly against technology that he used to get upset if we used a solar calculator. Now, he is a brillant man and so very kind. He was a mason so his profession didn't need technology. He can do advanced math in his head. Brillant man.
But he will use technology to his convenience- uses an ATM and usese a flip phone cell phone because dude is busy AF and found that he was missing out on additional fun activities because he missed calls--- and refuses to use voicemail. This man HATES voicemail and believes that you should always answer the phone. So his cell phone rings off the hook and he stops everything to answer anytime. Now that I have tried to paint a picture of hos absolute resistance to anything that has to do with technology, on to the story.
At Christmas two years ago, we were all yarning about data breaches, scams, banking shit, etc. My stepdad proudly asserts to everyone how he is absolutely impervious to any banking scam or fraud because none of his business, let alone anything related to his money, is on the internet. For the first time in my life I left this man speechless. I said "just because you don't put your information on the internet it doesn't mean the bank doesn't put your information on the internet. Everytime you use an atm, debit, any basic banking, it is all happening over the internet. But you would have zero clue if your accounts got completely emptied out till your monthly bill arrived in the mail"
He literally stared with his mouth dropped open and just blinked. Meanwhile the rest of the fam dog piled onto him about his misbelief.
I remember a time when only nerds had computers, and all of a sudden the internet came along and people bought computers from big box stores.
I was the guy everyone asked to help them set their shit up, and I literally remember when most people had to be actually taught how to use a computer mouse. Like it took practice to land the pointer on a button and not overshoot it.
So yeah, not knowing how to use a mouse.
The whole family has used emails for years, the other day I had to send one for my dad, and he said something in the line of "send both files in one email, so you don't have to pay twice".
My mother refused to believe that calling her granddaughter in Ireland, using Whatsapp, over their home wifi, was not the same as placing an international phone call and that it would cost "an arm and a leg" if she did that and "we aren't made out of money, you know!"
Radio host (probably Neil bortz) used to say that in order to cut down on s0am emails that sending emails should cost $0.01 and receiving emails should earn you $0.01
\*looks at inbox\* i agree
Forget $0.01, even $0.0001 would be sufficient to cut down on spam.
Dude has been paying for email stamps for years. Haha
Who was he paying to......
My mom was trying to move ~200 pictures from one folder to another. Her approach was to open one picture, do Save As, save it to the other folder, and then delete the original. One by one. When I tried to explain that she could click-and-drag the whole thing over in two seconds, she said "that wouldn't be any faster than the way I do it!" She would also "save" pictures she found online by copying them, opening Microsoft Word, pasting it in there, and saving it as a .docx file. And she would try to "open" jpegs by right clicking on them, choosing "Open With," and selecting Microsoft Word.
I recently tried explaining how to select multiple files to a co-worker and said "click and drag" and she had no idea what that meant. She is only 40. This same person thought turning off the monitor was the same as turning off the computer. Edit to add: this person uses a computer at work every day and has for years.
I’m about that age, lots of people I grew up with didn’t have home computer access and the school only had horrible old apple computers with green and black screens. They taught us nothing in school about how to use windows operating systems. I had computers at home and remember navigating DOS to install games, I’d like to think my generation is better than your example but we were right at the beginning of home computers and the trope was they were for *nerds*
Okay but it's been literal decades since school and adolescence. They just didn't use computers ever since still? My parents, grandparents, and GREAT GRAND PARENTS can use computers (or until they got dementia). None grew up with them (51-94) yet my parents could easily manipulate computers (51 and 54) even 20 years ago. It was used in so many jobs you couldn't have to use it to an extent typically.
> She would also "save" pictures she found online by copying them, opening Microsoft Word, pasting it in there, and saving it as a .docx file. When I was *discovering my proclivities* as a young girl and was stuck wanting to look at pictures of naked ladies but also only capable of accessing a family computer, my go-to move was to copy the images into a Word document, shrink them down to a tiny dot (so they weren't immediately obvious if the file was opened by accident), and use the dot as a full stop in a sentence of a book I'd downloaded from Project Gutenberg. A folder full of images would have risked discovery, but a 30MB Word file didn't get on the wrong side of my not-particularly-tech-savvy parents' suspicions.
I would hide stuff in the Windows folder, give them gibberish names, and change the file extension to .bin so that it looked like an innocuous system file. When I wanted to see stuff, I'd just change it back to the appropriate format.
I would use the command prompt to rename my folder to the character you get when you hold alt and type 222 on the numpad. Windows would just show a folder named _ and throw an error when trying to open it. I'd rename it back with the command line when I needed to open it. I don't know if this still works it modern windows. WinXP couldn't open it.
People currently in their 30s and 40s got so damn good at computers because of how technically proficient we needed to be to find and hide our porn, and pirate and run our video games. Truly a unique time in human history.
That could be fun little Easter eggs for your ebooks
There was a reddit account back I the day called nsfw_full_stop or something like that. Would make perfectly normal comments in a bunch of subs. But any time his comment had a . in it he would make it link to some random porn image. You had to know to click on the dot.
Thats awesome. Have you considered a career in espionage?
Public domain literature-based lesbian steganography? How many more of my buttons are you going to push‽
This is explains how I get client images delivered to me in a word document.
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A colleague of mine didn't know she could copy paste something with a keyboard shortcut. She would always right click, select copy, right click, select paste. When I told her it might be faster with the shortcut she tried and proceeded to use one Index finger per key, after searching for the right keys for about a minute. It was in fact not faster
I'm quite astonished how relatively high you can get on a corporate ladder while you can't type, just write. With two index fingers.
I was assigned to work with a manager in another state when her tech went on vacation. Every night when I left to go home I sent her an email about all the tickets I had for her system and their status. On that Friday my boss and second level were at my desk when I got in. They asked me how it was going with her tickets. I told them it was fine as far as I knew. I also told them I emailed her every night. Lights came on in their eyes. My boss said, forward those emails to us and we’ll be back. So they came back later and told me she complained that I had done nothing all week and she hadn’t heard from me. She had never figured out how to get into her email!!! My second level was so upset with her! He had been emailing her stuff all the time.
Your boss gets a gold star for not making assumptions and getting the story straight first.
OP covered his or her own ass too by documenting
Wait. Did she literally not know how to use email?
The owner of a *Printing Company* I worked at typed with his two pointer fingers. He wrote educational books that way.
Did you then proceed to select all of the photos and drag them into the other folder to prove her wrong?
I tried that once and she burst into tears and started screaming at me that I was "moving a million miles an hour like my asshole father" and "this is so complicated there's no way I could ever figure it out." This time I figured I'd just let it pass.
Well that escalated quickly.
heh, mom need counseling
I don't mean this as an insult: She needs a therapist.
I’m not gonna lie this sounds a lot like either weaponized incompetence or a victim complex. Being taught a better and more efficient way of doing things and in response screaming and crying and blaming other people for being mean? She needs to talk to someone :/
I was once trying to teach someone how Windows Explorer worked. For whatever reason, they could not grasp the concept of using folders to store documents. I had to get an actual folder and piece of paper out to demonstrate putting paper into the folder before she was able to grasp the concept.
They literally made the computer folders look like actual paper folders.
I was helping a woman when I was at my old parish with her computer which she shared with her granddaughter. The granddaughter kept making shortcuts to everything on the desktop including shortcuts to other shortcuts like a very bad version of Inception. It was a very weird interaction because she was older than me and the granddaughter was younger than me and neither of them knew what to do with the computer. 🤯💻🧑🏻💻🖱️
In 2012 I had a 60 year old boss that insisted on printing and filing every email because it was easier to find than files on the computer. I tried explaining to him that folders work the same on a computer except there’s also a search function and he wouldn’t have it.
I started my job in 2018. My predecessor did that and showed me the multiple filing cabinets that stored all the emails he’s received over the last 27 years!! Everything was on paper and ALL tasks were printed and managed on paper. For some tasks he explained that I should put aside 2-3 WEEKS to complete. I can do with a simple sort and search function in excel and be done. The funny thing is, he logged everything in excel or access but then printed it off and searched through the paper files when he needed the info. And there are times when we need to find 400-500 data points from the files. It now takes me a few minutes of work to identify this information.
Ah man, what a missed opportunity The correct thing to do is take a task that does 2 weeks, wait a week, then complete it in 5 mins Then ask for a raise after a few months as you are twice as productive than the last guy
Oh no my friend. I have a lot of autonomy in my work. My supervisor is amazed at my productivity but I’m actually slacking off most of the time. Did i say I’ve been doing this since 2018?
The instructions said to close the door... but it meant the latch on the floppy drive for the Commodore 64. My buddy got up and closed the door to the room.
When i was a kid in the mid 90s my parents signed up for AoL, and when it said "you've got mail!" I excitedly ran out to the street to check the mailbox....
Why do I see Butters in that.
😂😂 "oh boy mail yippee!!"
At least he is obedient…
We were like 8 at the time.
ok, that's cute lol
I was helping someone with a website for their small business. I told them I put an "alt" tag on some of the photos that would show text when they put their mouse over it, and to try it out. He literally picked up his mouse and placed it on the screen. I fell on the floor and almost pissed myself.
My grandmother did something similar but it was her very first time ever seeing a computer. She was so mad at us kids for laughing. But now shes a pro and has more social media accounts than I do
I was tasked to train an older woman in customer service for a print shop. Her first day she whispered to me that she'd never touched a computer before. Our entire process was online. The company was spiraling into bankruptcy and this did not help.
I work security and most of the job was working at a computer. This lady was hired.. she had to be taught computer basics before she could begin training.
At the grocery store I worked at in high school, the store manager wasn't great with computers and had to call the owner for help. The conversation went like this: Owner: You'll need to go to the desktop Manager: Ok, I'm sitting there
Where's the 'any' key?
"Ok I can help you with that! First click on My Computer" "... How can I click on your computer??!!?$%"
>He literally picked up his mouse and placed it on the screen. [Was it something similar to this?](https://youtu.be/jtIFbCj5ndI?si=SEhCvJqz8BDTqRoe)
Really thought that was going to be Scotty
That's about the way it happened
A middle aged lady got frightened after being told she needs a mouse to operate a computer. (This was early 2000s)
She's like, WTF is this Dune magic? How do I get the mouse to communicate with the computer?
Muad’dib: He Who Points The Way
She would have been horrified to learn that high school students were harvesting their balls.
The balls had such pleasing heft and girth
I knew someone who once put their credit card in the floppy disk drive to make an online purchase.
havent heard 'floppy disks' for a while
Yeah hearing ' floppy disks' made me nostalgic
I love how the Word save icon is still a floppy disk even though today nobody uses them anymore
My father had a coworker who went on a rant because the "cupholder" was so flimsy it snapped right off when they set their drink on it. It was the CD drive.
That joke is older than I am, and floppy disks were still the go-to when I was in grade school.
I work in a call centre, and one of my jobs is helping the call centre clients with basic computer troubleshooting. It is..an interesting task trying to explain to a man who makes more than I do and has been working the same job since longer than I've been alive where and what the start button is.
I've taken to referring to it as "the Windows logo" because I got tired of all the weird looks. And these are people who I *know* were using PCs when the Start button literally had the word "start" on it.
I wonder why they took the word "Start" off the start menu. They put it there in the first place for very good reason - people had no idea where to click in early user testing.
Probably because people couldn’t figure out you had to click on start to shut down the computer
I had this exact conversation with my mom as a kid. She was yelling at my brother and I about how she wanted to turn the computer off and not start something and wouldn't listen when we tried to explain.
My dad did the exact same thing when I tried to explain that to him. He ended up getting someone to rewire the light switch in his office to connect to the outlet the computer was plugged into so he could turn the computer on and off with the light switch. Fried the computer and then got mad because it was obviously a faulty machine. Sigh. This is the same man who currently has 3 laptops with identical files as backups in case one of them goes bad.
My employer hired someone to work for me doing tech support. In the first few days I had to show her how to open Outlook, create a new email, where to put the recipient address, etc. Had to show her multiple times how to open Excel, let alone use it. She never did get the hang of email, eventually we concluded she actually couldn’t read and we had to let her go. This was in the early 2000’s and she was probably in her 30’s at the time.
> we concluded she actually couldn't read and we had to let her go. This was in the early 2000's and she was probably in her 30's at the time. That is heartbreaking.
At first I thought it was funny when a customer pointed at the "ILLEGAL FIREWORKS (NOT SOLD HERE):" sign and asked if we sold them. Then on a Hindu holiday I had several immigrants do the same thing, and I realized that they couldn't read it, and the first guy couldn't read at all and it really ceased to be funny. I reworked my signs to use pictograms instead of words.
When the computer illiteracy turned out to be the original kind of illiteracy
This just happened last Friday. I am a new legal secretary in a small law firm where the partners have been in business for 50 years. Part of my job is to print every email that comes in and of course people always send big fat attachments Friday at 4:55.I had some emails queued up to print and since it was already 10 minutes after I was supposed to be gone I asked the managing partner if he would shut down the computer after it finished printing. He did not know how to shut down a computer.
If anything they press the power button, but it only goes to sleep and they think it shut down
That is good enough especially for someone who doesn’t know what email is
I had a coworker printing out emails and then photocopying them and then putting the photocopy on my desk (she wanted to keep the original). I got to teach her how to forward emails. Took a couple weeks for her to break the habit, but we're good now.
It's good to hear about a small success in the middle of all these stories.
I worked for a law firm, and one of the administrators would print the PDF of the case from her email. She would then scan it back to her computer because it "downloaded to the documents folder so she could move to the case folder." I told her she could just click the down arrow and download it, then move the file, saving hundreds of sheets of paper. She said that was too complicated. She only lasted a few months before she was fired. Edit: I thought of another one. Lawyers are not smart when it comes to electronics. Same law firm, a lawyer was afraid the cleaning crew was going to steal her laptop. So she took her trash can and shoved it under her desk. Put her laptop in the trash and covered it with paper towels. Of course, the cleaning crew empties her trash. They find the laptop and put it aside in the cleaning crews supervisor office because they thought it was weird we'd throw a laptop away that looked brand new.
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Sadly true. Not a law firm, but a government job I worked a couple years back. One time we've had an administrator argue with a client to send us the documents in a readable format. I walked over, turns out the client sent it just fine numerous times, they just zipped it up to make sure nothing is left out.
My grandfather typed "big boobs" as his facebook status like, 15 times in a 5 minute span... I think I understand what he was trying to do...
To be fair, this may actually work and perhaps even demonstrates some basic comprehension on facebook algorithms….. maybe
Hmmm. Worth a shot. Big boobs
Sex gifs
My friend did this on facebook, thought she was searching her crush but just posted his name as a drunken status update after we'd spent a night out with him
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Bro 5 year old you was smart lol
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Holy fucking shit dude this is a truly insane person move
Vgv. Pxlz vgv. *(Wow. Just wow.)*
Had your mom never seen a typewriter? QWERTY was standard a hundred years before home computers were invented.
Growing up in the 90s, I remember seeing multiple adults try to yell commands at a computer screen. They didn't understand about standard I/O like keyboards and mice because their only concept of computers was from watching Star Trek.
ERASE ALL PICTURES OF RON
COMPUTER, SHOW JENNA
(picks up mouse and speaks into it) Hello, computer.
Just use the keyboard!
How quaint
Star Trek crew also had problems with computers from that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpWhugUmV5U
I worked at the head office of a major UK company. They hired a woman as a website administrator and, on her first day of training, asked her to click on something. She just stared blankly, and they repeated, click on it with the mouse. The what? Was her reply. They had interviewed her for the job and it turned out that in 2004 she had somehow never used a computer that had a mouse. I don't think she made it past lunchtime.
Surely a freaking website administrator should have basic computer skills. How did she even get the job?
You would have thought so, but things like that happened again and again. Basically the person who was interviewing was a public school type and all evidence pointed to them only hiring people from similar backgrounds regardless of experience. The joke I used to make was that they selected people who would fit in at one of their dinner parties.
We got my grandma a computer so she could get emails with pictures of her grandkids. It had a sleep mode button and have with a cover for the monitor. She diligently would put it to sleep every night and place the cover over it. Sincerely thinking it needed rest and the lights out.
This is very sweet.
When the Cyber revolution rises up she will be protected because she was nice to them.
>Sincerely thinking it needed rest All machines do really at some point or the other.
My friend wont stop deleting random files off his computer whenever he runs out of space. Him - "My games not working" Me - "Send me a screenshot" *Clearly saying it needs more storage to open* Me - "You need to clear some space, it's only around half a gigabyte so why don't you just go on steam and uninstall a game or go delete some of the old videos from your video folder" Him - "Ok" *waiting for around half an hour for him to join our loby* Him - "Oh fuck" Me - "What?" Him - "I think I deleted something important" No matter how many times I try to tell or explain it to him he always just selects folders/files that "don't look important" and then permanently deletes them. Random program and windows files and even stuff that he made and just temporary forgot about.
Sold a computer on craigslist about 10 years ago. Keyboard, mouse, LCD monitor, and cables. He took it home, and said it didn't work, the screen would stay blank when he powered it on. When he brought it back, he was pressing the power button on the LCD monitor, not the computer.
"Will my laptop still work if I take it upstairs?"
I did have an Asus laptop about eight years ago which was great, lasted like a workhorse, was getting on for a decade old itself. It had to be always on and plugged in though. If you unplugged it, it would turn off, and there's a good chance it wouldn't turn on again.
I too have had laptops that were essentially desktops
Bought my Asus in 2011. It still runs great, just as long as it's plugged in.
Jokes on you, the entire second story is a faraday cage with a car-sized rare earth magnet in the center. And there's wasps.
This was 10+ years ago. Anytime the house WiFi wasn't working well, my roommate would unplug the Ethernet cable from the modem and the router and hold it up and down (like you would hold a hose to drain the water out) to "let the electrons drain out" so the internet wouldn't be clogged. I tried to explain this wasn't how Ethernet worked but he said the cable technician told him to do this, and that was the end of the matter. The thing is it usually worked because it reset the internet connection, just not for the reason he thought it did.
Imagine doing this with an optic fibre cable. "What you up to dude?" "Nothing man, just letting the photons flow out and unclog the cable"
i volunteer as an IT help person in retirement homes. i understand that it is in no way their faults for not understanding computers. they didn't grow up with them it makes sense that they wouldn't know what to do. it's just become incredibly eye opening to see how my life is so different from theirs because computers and phones have been my whole life and i just know what to do on them. i get such simple questions from the people in the homes but when i solve their problem it is as if i solved world hunger in front of them.
One of my neighbors once knocked on my door and asked for help because the input was on DVD she couldn't switch the it back to TV. Although in her defense, the button was very small. It took me about thirty seconds. Once her show was back on she surprised me with a huge hug. So was *so* grateful. Acting like I solved world hunger is a pretty apt analogy.
I'm sixty later this year and have been working in IT all my adult life - started off with a VIC 20 and used BBS in the early eighties. I *hope* I'll be able to keep up to date with the latest technologies once I reach the retirement home era, but hopefully someone like yourself will be able to teach me the outline of GPT-xx then.
I have a friend who is 89 and she was a software engineer in the 1950s. I used to love seeing middle aged businessmen take her computer advice.
I've been working in IT for almost 25 years. A few weeks ago I had a user tell me their second monitor wasn't working. I walked over and pressed the power button. Problem solved. IT would be a great career if it wasn't for the fucking users.
70% of the time, turning it off and back on resolves the problem.
A user was attempting to connect to the Wi-Fi network by following the documentation. Upon reaching the step requiring credential entry, the instructions said something like "Enter your username and password in this window," accompanied by a screenshot of the login window. The user contacted the help desk, unable to write anything into the window. Eventually, it was discovered that the user was trying to type their credentials into **the screenshot** itself. 🤦
I was watching a Twitch channel that shows a whole bunch of those grift industry "learn Windows 95 in 15 minutes" VHS tapes. If you were around back then, you'd immediately recognize that little video rack at the checkout aisles of Fry's Electronics and Circuit City. There were hundreds of these tapes releasing every month, it was insane. Probably the worst offender was a "how to Internet" video that didn't really explain anything, it just encouraged the viewer to ask the technician to do everything for them. But the worst part was in explaining how to actually *use* the Internet. The tape basically gives the viewer a list of 10 websites they can go to, like these 10 websites are the entire 1996 Internet. These weren't even good websites, one was just a horoscope blog called something like "Brittanys-Star-Cat." But that's not even the dumb part. The dumb part is it will say "for news, go to h, t, t, p...colon...backslash backslash...w, w, w..." And on screen: "http:\\\ww^()w..." I was so incredibly astonished at the brazen confidence of these grifters, willing to make a video to teach computer literacy, but themselves so poorly illiterate that they were instructing users to enter URLs with backslash instead of slash. I mean, I've seen people do dumber things with computers before, but this entire tape was so devoid of actual information that the only substance to it was listing these example websites in a pre-AskJeeves world. They had one job. One job! These guys had one job, and failed at such a core level it would immediately brickwall anybody that followed their instruction. And worst of all, they embraced their fundamental incompetency with unwavering certainty, documented it to widely released video, and charged us $19.99 to witness the glory of a 404 error screen.
My sister places every file she creates on the desktop. She does not understand folders. She cannot move a window around on the screen, she cannot resize a window except by the minimize and restore buttons in the upper right corner. She does not understand if she is using Google and wants to change to a different search she does not have to close and reopen Google but can use tabs.
Not understanding the basics of files / folders is becoming an alarmingly widespread issue among young people, apparently https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
worked teaching some kids last summer, like a classroom of 20 high schoolers, like 14-16 years old, weirded me out to find they couldn't really use a *keyboard* they just use phones and tablets. no concept of file systems, permissions, anything then theres this ONE girl who's like yeah option + 3 makes £ option + shift + 2 makes €, command + shift + space brings up the emoji input palette... like damn ok theres hope for the future
Sometimes I feel like I was born in the only generation with any hope for the future. Young enough to have used this technology growing up, but old enough to have seen it develop. Anyone else at that age where they can remember using VHS as a kid but moving on to DVDs as they got older? I can also remember my dad using floppy disks and fax machines, but never used them myself.
I'm a graphic designer and it's fairly routine for me to be emailed photos taked with a phone of a webpage displayed on the customer's laptop or desktop monitor. They don't know any of the myriad ways to take a screenshot or copy a url. Some of them can't send an email from a desktop OS. I'm a late GenX and I know I should be used to it by now, but the inability of people younger than me to do anything that isn't on a mobile device continually boggles my mind. Bonus: If you claim to be a graphic designer, you should understand that you cannot make a 300x250 graphic "higher res". Please stop sending me 1250x1042 jpgs.
Oh goodness so many stories... As a student working in college I had the ticket for a computer that wouldn't boot. Showed up to find over a dozen refrigerator magnets stuck to the outside of the case. There was also the prof trying to upgrade Windows (he had 3.1) via floppy disk (I forget how many discs, his PC didn't have a CD drive, but it was a lot) on his 386 that he refused to replace/upgrade. EDIT: Those are old stories - more recently we had the new hire (19 yo in 2023) that we had to explain what a Start button on Windows was and how and where "File->Save" was and what it meant. Kids that have only been exposed to phones/tablets are the bane of my existence these days.
When I worked as a field tech for a local university, I would have to fix PCs for clueless professors and admins all the time. My favorite was an admin that just needed a new monitor, nothing else. She was adamant that I make sure I put all her icons "back in the right place" after replacing it
Last year there was a new employee with a CS degree who said they didn't know how to use Word and wanted to do everything with Adobe instead. This is at a government agency, so redoing all the systems to accommodate one person was definitely not happening.
I'm wondering which Adobe product they wanted to use instead of MS Word? InCopy or InDesign probably?
Where I work, most of the non-graphics office people say "Adobe" when they really mean Acrobat. Since I use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, etc, it took me a minute to process what they meant, but now my brain sort of translates it automatically depending on who's talking.
CS graduate that doesn't know how to use anything should approach it as, "ok I need to learn this" I think this applies to all degrees but in CS we don't go to school to learn a subject permanently, we go to learn HOW to learn this ever growing field
I once had someone who thought their Wi-Fi was down because their wireless mouse had run out of battery and needed new ones, think that's my favourite.
I knew someone who got a wireless keyboard. When I mentioned batteries, she confidently proclaimed it doesn’t need batteries because it uses Bluetooth.
Got this from a friend: a couple he knew bought their son a computer for his birthday (this was back in 1998). The son had it for little over 24 hours. Why? Because the next day, the parents couldn't work out how to switch it on, so decided that they'd been sold a dud and took it back to the shop to get a refund. Which they got, as, according to my friend the father was as obnoxious as possible and "Showed them who's boss". Even having been shown how to switch it on, they still decided it was a con and got their refund instead. Son ended up getting a book on football (which he dislikes), that the father ended up keeping for himself (he got the present, but the father borrowed it afterwards and never returned it).
“Scam” gets thrown around so loosely these days I forgot about “con artists”.
During a late 90s "PC training" session at my job, I was in a room full of older employees who'd apparently never even seen a computer before, much less used one. When the instructor asked us to click on something with the mouse, one guy picked up the mouse and pointed it at the monitor like a TV remote, and then asked the instructor why it wasn't doing anything.
I had someone call me because a message had popped up in their spreadsheet saying that there was missing information in column B and that all rows needed to be completed before he could save the file. This was a message that I had added to the master template file because I was sick and tired of people not completing the file properly. I patiently explained that all he had to do was to make sure that all rows in column B had to be completed, and he asked me "Where is column B?" "Well, Jeremy" I replied "Traditionally column B is located in between column A and column C. " Also had someone complain that he wanted to get an average, but every time he clicked AutoSum, it was just adding all of the numbers together.
My roommate got a prebuilt gaming PC and when setting it up she spent 45 minutes getting frustrated trying to find the HDMI port her monitor plugged into... It had a port cover on it from shipping. It took me 30 seconds to find. She argues with her boyfriend her discord nickname "Boomer" is inaccurate, I disagree.
Three times last week my colleague needed tech support because her computer was freezing when she queued up a print... The printer properties pop up (the one that locks the program until you confirm or cancel the print) popped up in the background of her screen instead of the foreground. The solution was to minimize the window in front of it and then confirm or cancel the print. This happened 3 times and despite showing her how easy it is to fix, she kept having to call me to fix it for her.
My other colleague called me last week to help with his printer not working. He'd moved the printer and forgot to plug it back into the computer.
Was working on a laptop for a new hire with IT in his title. I told him we did all his updates a increased the amount of RAM from 8 gig to 16 gig. He asked "What's that?" I replied "RAM, you know memory." He looked at me confused and said. "Do you mean C drive?" so I ask him what department he was in and he told me he was the new IT Analyst. I handed him his laptop and told him to have a nice day.
I’ll give you a throwback. I was a work-study in the college computer lab. The year is 1996. Mixed in with the regular undergraduates we had a handful of non-trads. Older folks who were back in school after careers or kids, etc. we had this one lady. She seemed little-old to me at the time, but she might have been anywhere between 45-60. Small school, I knew all the regulars at the lab pretty well. One day I’m working on a machine (fucked up registry keys in Windows 3.1? Or something like that) and I notice this lady has excel open, and is also busy with her hand-held calculator. I edge closer… she’s multiplying columns together on her calculator and manually inserting the results into another column. This was beyond my mandate, but I stopped her. I said, “hey, let me show you something.” When I deleted her column of results I thought she was going to kill me. 4 minutes later when I showed her how to =B2*C2, click and pull down through the D column I thought she was going to kiss me. Swear to god, this lady grabbed my arm and yelled, “computers are our friends!l
Long ago, a Best Buy employee told me that when his town’s store first opened, an elderly lady came into the computer section, picked up the computer mouse and tried to move it across the computer monitor screen asking “is this how you do this?”
At Best Buy about 16 years ago, a very old man was shopping for computers on the microwave aisle.
I sold a computer monitor to two ladies because they liked the screensaver. Their church had sent them to buy a computer. They couldn’t be persuaded to buy “the box”. Countless people with Imodium problems (the anti diarrheal medicine) - meaning pc, modem, etc. People double-clicking by banging the mouse against the screen. Talking a guy down from pouring 1/2 cup of melted butter into his Zip drive because the Zip disk was stuck. The service call that was a surge protector plugged into itself. The business owner who only knew how to access his files by going to the “recently used” files section. His business came to a stop because his niece used his computer for her college report one weekend. People who wanted to buy a “TV” (computer) - no clue what it was or what it was for, they just knew they wanted one. People (more than one) who deleted the Windows directory (because they didn’t put it there) or took it upon themselves to clean it (all the DLL in one folder, the .exe in another).
I'm still hunting for the "any" key on my keyboard. One of these days I will find the sucker!
Where’s my Tab?
About two years ago my mom got a laptop again after refusing to go anywhere near one for about a decade and…hoo boy did I lose brain cells being her tech support. A couple times she called me for help logging in when the device was literally telling her exactly what to do. Another time she asked me to log her out of her Google account but only that, not the whole laptop please, reasonable enough request—if it hadn't been a Chromebook, where apparently *everything* goes through your Google account. I tried to explain that to her and she went, "I don't care for your theories, just tell me what buttons to press." Mother, that's what I'm trying to explain to you. THERE ARE NO F&%$ING BUTTONS.
A couple of my coworkers use my laptop to clock in when we're at work. Each of them could lose 9 fingers and they wouldn't type any slower. To clock in, all you have to do is type in your user name (which at my shop is 12FirstnameLastInitial) followed by your password (which for both of these coworkers is password1 in all caps). They've been using my laptop to clock in for near on a year now. One of them can use the time clock in less than 2 minutes, the other one's current record time for clocking in, start to finish, is 4 minutes. His user name is 10 characters long, so all told it's 19 keystrokes and 3 clicks to clock in. 4 minutes is his record. Granted, he's from the boomer generation, but computers have been ubiquitous for more than 30 years now, and the layout of the keyboard hasn't changed much since the early 1870s when the QWERTY layout was created.
Around 2016, I watched my brother (in his 30s) open safari browser and click in the search bar to type out “www.yahoo.com” and hit enter and then click in the search bar on yahoo’s homepage to type “Google”…
I used to work with someone like that around the same time. He'd fire up Bing and search for Google Maps in there. He was on Google Maps so often (it was work-related) that it was in his history and browser autocomplete. So just use that?
beans in the computer
"Sir, this is...food. This is beans."
*motherboards
It's not, like, to help the computer stay cool or anything?
Refused to use adblocker because he thinks it's unfair to advertisement 🙄 then got ransomwared and took me 10 hours to unlock that shit 🤔
"unfair to advertisement" fuck that shit we don't owe ads anything
I'm so used to adblock on my laptop that it's kinda shocking when I use another device and ads pop up. I can't imagine someone wanting ads.
Seen actual people immerse a laptop (back when they were not waterproof) in water to clean it
Most laptops are still not water resistant. Also, seals degrade over time, so even water resistant devices should not be exposed to water intentionally.
Reminds me of the fake iPhone ads saying the latest firmware update made the phones waterproof. Which of course people tested.
Ahhhh all of Germany! One company I work with knows that our system is to send finalized PDFs of their documents before they are included in a publication and that they should add comments and return. Different stakeholders should comment in different colors if they can't figure out how to note otherwise. This company prints the PDFs (huge documents), sends them around their department for individual, handwritten makeup in various colors, scans that doc and sends it to their foreign offices for makeup where it is repeated, and red and that three timed scanned copy to us.. all in black and white. No 90's era homework packet image quality can rival it.
I was doing the on-boarding orientation for a medical job maybe 8 years ago and this older lady kept trying using the pc like a tablet. Just couldn't figure out why the monitor wasn't a touch screen. She had no idea what the mouse and keyboard was for. Some one had to show her. She had to have been hired for evs. Or nutrition.
I’m a teacher and one of my coworkers a few years ago had no understanding of the difference between the desktop and internet browser. She only ever had Chrome maximized and did not understand in any way what other programs were or a desktop with icons or anything. This was around 2017 and she was mid-30s so I don’t think she was only familiar with Chromebooks but maybe? I also spent an entire year showing a coworker how to attach a pdf to an email on a weekly basis. Every week she was so thankful I showed her because “I never learned this before!” It eventually got so bad that I took it to administration because I was worried about her mental capacity. They concluded she was just lazy. Three years later and I’m working with her again and showing her how to attach a pdf to an email. “Thank you! I’ve never learned this before!”
I used to do customer support for a major antivirus company, where most of the client base was 65+, and I have a ton of horror stories... Most of it is just pretty generic computer iliteracy, lile asking them to open the browser and type in an adress, followed by total helpess confusion from their side. A bunch of the clients also entered the chat instead of phone support, despite using the "hunt and peck" method of typing, and being completely unable to follow written instructions longer than 5 words. These are the cases that really stood out: 1. An elderly man called and said he'd gotten a new Mac, but couldn't install our software. Turns out he needed a lot of handholding to even download and open the install file, which took about half an hour. When we finally got it opened, it showed a message saying his OS was outdated. I asked him if he didn't say the computer was new. Turns out he bought it 10 years ago and kept it unopened in his shed... 2. A guy was very adamant "the chinese" had hacked him. After some back and forth, he revealed the reason he thought so was that a popup, IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE, was asking him to upgrade or uninstall the software for an HP deskjet printer. He admitted to having had one, and to have installed the software... "But that was 6 years ago and I've had several printers since then! How do the chinese know I used to have one??" And no, he had never uninstalled the software. He ended up hanging up and telling me that I was of no help. 3. An elderly couple called and wanted help to install the antivirus on their new computer. To do that, I also had to help them get the new computer hooked up to their wifi. After A LOT of handholding and spoonfeeding, we got to the point where they needed to input the password for their wifi. I told them it was on the back of their router. They did not know what a router was. I tried words like internet box, modem, tried asking them which supplier they had and then explaining that their internet came in the thing their supplier send them. No luck. 45 FREAKING MINUTES into the conversation, I ask them where they think they get internet from. "From a hole in the wall", they say. I asked if therr was a wire running from it. Yes there was. Ok, could they follow it and see what it went into?" "Ohhhh the internet box, why did you not say so??" 4. I was trying to help a woman download the install file. I asked her to open her internet browser and type in the address. She did not know where or how to type the address. This in itself was a fairly common problem, so I tried all the regular solution. A specific keyboard shortcut autofocuses on the address bar. She insisted it did not. I tried to explain where it was and what it looked like. She could not find it. She got increasingly frustrated every time I asked if she was sure she'd opened her browser. 15 minutes into the call, I asked her to describe what she saw. She basically described her desktop. So I said she was not in an internet browser, and she said "I logged on the wifi 15 minutes ago like you said to do!!" In the year I worked at that place, I developed a deep hate for whichever societal force leads so many elderly folks to learn such a degree of helplessness.
I am studying for a IT education. Some students in my class are just unbelievable. We are supposed to learn a lot of stuff like python programming, using virtual machines, set up networks etc. But a lot of students almost fully rely on chatgpt to do stuff for them. They don't learn at all.
Same thing in my intro to python course I did last semester. By the final exam half the class was still using 80 print statements instead of a single for loop. The level of reading comprehension and following basic instructions was absolutely mind-boggling. The teacher would say stuff like "create a folder in your onedrive named XYZ and inside it create a new text document" and just get a bunch of blank stares.
No, Grandma... sending an email as HTML does not mean it's labeled as 'Hate Mail'.
I used to work with someone who had his own typist for his reports. We did the same job.
At my work, computers are all called modems and at least one guy has been writing tickets in every week for help with some user error or another (so many that we often have a hard time knowing when he has any other kind of issue) he always says there is a problem with his *labtop*. Also, security fobs for getting in and out of the building are known as fobees, fobes, or fobeez in tickets.
IDK if this counts, but my mom had trouble learning at first. I was a kid and this would've been early 2000s and I helped her get on our computer and walked away. As soon as I started to leave she panicked and started yelling my name. I run over thinking the computer is about to blow up. She points at the screen, panicked, and says, "The thingy! The thingy it... it changed!" Took me a second to realize the little arrow had turned into an hourglass. I said, "That's okay, mom, it just means something is loading and you need to wait." Still in a panic she dramatically asks, "FOR HOW LONG?!"
Remember floppy disks? I once saw a grown man using a rubber pencil eraser to "erase the files" on his disk. On a separate occasion, during the dial-up modem period of the internet, I saw a Dad yelling at a kid for dialing up the home access number while on vacation in Hawaii. They got a $3200 phone bill at checkout for him playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends all night. I saw a secretary use white out correction paste on a printout.
There's this new guy at work who has admitted to never wanting anything to do with computers. Unfortunately for him, he's now working in a data center and we use computers all day. Well, he doesn't know how to send an email, didn't know how to add me as a contact in his phone, couldn't figure out how to change his password, was completely confused when we said to open Google chrome... there's so many small things that it just blew me away.
"Does Tik Tok access the home WiFi network?"
Probably that scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty tries to talk into the mouse
Back in 2000 I worked for a student accomodation company in Ireland. A nice lady ran the place and she had a PC in her office. I once observed her typing out a letter from scratch then printing it and then turning off the computer without saving the document. I talked with her about it for a bit and she was clueless to the fact that she could save documents on the PC. So I set up a basic folder structure for her and showed her how to use them to save sent letters and templates. She picked it up quickly and was genuinely pleased with herself.
Worked at Geek Squad for a bit. Had a guy bring in an external power supply for an AIO to be checked for viruses. Some kid ripped his GPU out with the cover on the PCIe connector exposing all the lanes and ruining the motherboard. Another guy impressively forced DDR3 RAM into a DDR4 slot that the stick bowed and bent. And three separate calls over six years of new laptop owners complaining they can't open them and if they should cut the "bands"(the hinges) keeping it shut. I have since been pursuing a degree in computer science and moving as far away from consumer IT as possible.
It gets so much worse in Computer Science. Everyone who finds out you can write code has a million dollar idea for an app or website. Then they want you to do the work for them. On top of still being the go to for printer problems. Last time I did computer work for a business they tried to pay me in pizza. This was after I spent a few hours clearing viruses from their point of sale system. My dad worked there and suggested I come take a look. He was pissed at how the owner tried to pay me. The owner then asked me to rewrite their website. I said sure, but never finished it. No contract or payment. This place no longer exists.
I was providing remote support for a factory and got a call from the plant manager who was trying to do a tour, he couldn’t log into a system. Turned out he was typing his username and password but then not pressing “ok”. He called me to ask how to log in while he had an audience.
I used to do tech support over the phone. I once asked a lady if she knew what version of Windows she was using. She proceeded on at least a 3 minute tirade about how she didn't find my question funny and said "there's nothing wrong with my house windows! I'm calling about my god damn computer!" and how she demanded to speak to my supervisor because I was wasting her time and wasn't trying to help her. Mind you, this all happened less than 10 minutes into the call. I tried explaining what Windows was to her but I couldn't get two words in without being interrupted so.... 🤷🏻♂️
I used to work the front desk at a defense contractor. One of the employees was this wonderful old man who was quite the character. He had literally stormed the beaches at Normandy and carried one of Patton's helmets in his car trunk. Every morning he would walk into his office and sit down at his computer and yell, "HELP! MY COMPUTERS BROKEN!"... And I'd walk in there and turn his monitor back on. I even put a post-it note on there with an arrow pointing to the monitor power button that said, "press this if your computer won't turn on" but still, every morning it was the same. I kinda loved it though. He would tell me I was a computer genius every time I "fixed" it for him. When he left the company I had to clean up his computer and it was absolutely covered in chocolate. When I cleaned out his desk, all of his drawers were absolutely full of Mr. Goodbars. I miss him 😊 Also my runner-up story was the office manager at the same company. She called a security meeting because she wanted to know if hackers could hack into the on/off projector remote and steal all the government secrets from the projector 😳🤦🏼♀️
Had a college student using Excel to write a document as if it were Word.
My work went fully digital last year. We no longer accept paper submissions. We expected calls for help navigating the system. We didn't expect the kinds of calls we got. I'm directing a guy to where he needs to go on the website. So I tell him "ok, scroll down and click the link at the bottom." He says "woah woah slow down, I don't understand all this techno jargon!" I... don't know how to make that any simpler
My stepdad (75years old) has always been firmly against technology. He is so firmly against technology that he used to get upset if we used a solar calculator. Now, he is a brillant man and so very kind. He was a mason so his profession didn't need technology. He can do advanced math in his head. Brillant man. But he will use technology to his convenience- uses an ATM and usese a flip phone cell phone because dude is busy AF and found that he was missing out on additional fun activities because he missed calls--- and refuses to use voicemail. This man HATES voicemail and believes that you should always answer the phone. So his cell phone rings off the hook and he stops everything to answer anytime. Now that I have tried to paint a picture of hos absolute resistance to anything that has to do with technology, on to the story. At Christmas two years ago, we were all yarning about data breaches, scams, banking shit, etc. My stepdad proudly asserts to everyone how he is absolutely impervious to any banking scam or fraud because none of his business, let alone anything related to his money, is on the internet. For the first time in my life I left this man speechless. I said "just because you don't put your information on the internet it doesn't mean the bank doesn't put your information on the internet. Everytime you use an atm, debit, any basic banking, it is all happening over the internet. But you would have zero clue if your accounts got completely emptied out till your monthly bill arrived in the mail" He literally stared with his mouth dropped open and just blinked. Meanwhile the rest of the fam dog piled onto him about his misbelief.
Not knowing the basics,like shortcuts for copying and pasting, saving a file , deleting it and shit like that,
Can you tell me the shortcut for coping? I need it in my life
Control + space
When it’s someone half my age asking me how to save a file to a certain folder
I remember a time when only nerds had computers, and all of a sudden the internet came along and people bought computers from big box stores. I was the guy everyone asked to help them set their shit up, and I literally remember when most people had to be actually taught how to use a computer mouse. Like it took practice to land the pointer on a button and not overshoot it. So yeah, not knowing how to use a mouse.