I work with phones and you might think nobody would struggle with 150 year old technology, but alas many do.
I don’t get frustrated though, everyone has different skills and someone not sharing my skillset doesn’t make them less capable.
There are so many other reasons to lose patience with some of my coworkers, tech illiteracy is nowhere near the top of the list. If anything, I like helping people with tech.
the only time I get annoyed or frustrated is when they don’t read whatever pop up they get and immediately press “ok” or “continue” and it borks everything
Sometimes it’s just a dialog with a single “Ok” button, and they stare at me and ask “now what?”. Like, you literally have only one option, what do you think?
From my exp, it’s asking for validation that what’s happening is expected. Also, sometimes the next step is not to click OK as another process may need to happen first.
I’m all good with people asking questions like that. They don’t have any intuition about what you’re showing them, so they’re hesitant to make assumptions and that’s ok.
This reminds me! At work we often send emails to customers through our ticket system so they are recorded. A new guy got a pop-up asking if he wanted to send the email. He looks at me and says “What do I do?” I say “Well you have 2 options: Yes to send the email or Cancel.” He clicks Cancel and is then confused the email never sent. He quit a few days later which honestly was better for all of us.
I work in software engineering/development. There’s a guy on my team who manually copy/pastes every Linux command he runs, into a fucking text file. He does this so he has a record of which commands he ran. As a result, he has a 12,000 line text file, full of garbage. With few exceptions, Linux stores every command you run, chronologically, with a configurable limit. He knows this, but insists on saving all of them to a Fucking. Text. File.
Watching him work makes me want to rip my eyeballs out.
Employer doesn’t know what he does, he does less work in the same amount of time.
Wow.
Maybe you can show him
history > out.txtand blow his mind?With all the time you save by not copying your commands into a file for your reference, maybe you can invent a machine that will give your superior mental capacity to everyone else.
This was not meant to be a gloating post. I’m simply explaining someone’s terrible and infuriating workflow.
I’m slowly learning not to look into any of my coworkers’ workflows
Sometimes I get tasked to help him fix his problems. I usually just end up checking out his branch and fixing it myself.
I saw someone, instead of opening a folder in VS Code, have a separate Explorer window that they’d navigate through and then right click --> Open in VS Code whichever file they wanted to edit
I had a coworker who is actually quite competent and intelligent. We’re still really good friends. But I think he only less than 10 keystrokes in vi: up, down, left, right arrows. x (delete char), i (insert mode) and whatever key sequence he used to save and exit. I use :wq! but he may be a ZZ type of person.
This makes me want to rip my eyeballs just thinking about it. Jesus.
I’m imagining when they type, it is at a speed of approximately 100 words per week.
Yeah. He’s a pretty old guy and has the single-finger old man typing style.
I do the same, kind of but I paste them in word and format them nicely, based on my mood. Today I made a very nice initial of my npm publish command, it looks really nice.
This one here is for your co-worker only! Not for you, not for anyone else, just for him:
history | grep <word> and ! would blow his mind.
CTRL + r is even better
Hmm, I sometimes do this, when tackling a particular problem, along with some notes. It is often nonlinear and branching. I use it to construct a problem-solving script in the end. And it’s markdown file.
Are we OK? ;)
Sounds like you’re taking a structured approach to problem solving. Not wasting time capturing information that’s already there.
We cool.
Good lord, you can even ctrl-r to search your command history so even searchability is not a reason to copy into a text file.
I’ve shown him reverse history search several times. But he just won’t use it.
I get annoyed when they want to do things but don’t want to learn how. they want someone else to do it as opposed to show them how they can do it.
Its a me problem but I get a little frustrated when helping team members (we’re 100% remote so this is generally via a shared session) and they don’t click right where I want them to. I don’t lose my patience though.
well I have been rendered speechless on several occasions. The most recent is when I told an employee at a high level in our organization who was setting a password not to use his name, old passwords, or anything sequential like abc123. I spent the next half hour trying to figure out why it wasn’t accepting his password until I had him tell me one of the rejected ones. hisname123456789. He told me it’s not abc123. This man has multiple degrees and uses a computer every day. How is he this tech illiterate and just plain illiterate
This man has multiple degrees
Maybe that’s it. I’ve done hospital tech support and some of the doctors I’ve assisted have such unique combinations of high-level degrees that there may be only a few dozen people worldwide that can match them. Each and every one of them is hyper-focused on their specialty, sometimes to the point that they’ve missed picking up ordinary man-on-the-street knowledge.
Ooh, can I share a sweet story instead, because this made it pop into my head and it’s a memory of a wonderful person that I wish everyone could have known?
I used to work at this small business when I was younger, and one of the employees was an older guy in his 80s who had retired and worked a few hours a week just to keep busy. He loved us teens and twenty somethings and we adored and respected him.
As time went on, the assistant manager left and I ended up being promoted to assistant manager. And eventually daylight savings happened and the clock changed. This employee came in for his first shift after the time change and looked half dejected and half embarrassed and he quietly explained to me that he didn’t know how to change the time on his watch, that the previous assistant manager had always done it for him, so now he was trying to deal with his watch being an hour off. I happily changed the time for him, and after that I changed it for him every time change. Even after he retired for good he would come in during my shift and give me his watch and I’d set it forward or back the hour so it could be right and he’d be thrilled every time.
That’s very sweet. One of the things that got me interested in wanting to work in IT support was that I worked at a breakfast diner where mostly older folks would eat. My regulars would always ask for help to try to fix silly things on their phone and would always be so happy when I could help.
Things are different now, but once in a while you find someone overly grateful for doing something so simple and it’s always a very nice feeling.
That’s a great story
Mum writes all passwords down…in random notebooks and on scraps of paper.
Want to set up Netflix on new device? Time to guess which email was used and hope we find the password for it so we can reset the Netflix password again.
Absolutely nightmarish.
My mum’s an academic so she’s been using computers all her life, she’s not exactly “techy” but I am eternally grateful I was able to get her set up with bitwarden as a password manager.
I have a boomer boss and he has a hard time with email. He also didn’t know how to zoom in when taking a picture.
So completely forget excel.
Not with friends, but co-workers? I work in IT so you bet I fucking do.
It’s not annoying when they can’t do it. It’s aggravating when they refuse to learn to do it and just want you to do the whole thing for them every single time.
I always verbally walk them through it. That helps them memorize the steps and if they insist I do it I can tell them to fuck off with a clean conscience. If they don’t wanna help themselves then I won’t either. I don’t usually have a problem with this method.
And then they say “you never show me how to do anything!”
Or, they act like they understand when you do show them, but go strait to the boss the next time and complain that you refuse to show them…
I was a cashier at Walmart, once upon a time. The new guy i had to train refused to look at the corner of the screen to read the totals back to the customers. When I pointed it out that he should get in the habit of doing so his response was “I don’t feel that i should have to do that.”
I just… Walked away and got the supervisor to assign him a different trainer. I refuse to train someone above the age of 25 with that attitude.
What did he do instead? Just stare at them wordlessly until they produced currency?
Something like “you can swipe your card now,” or similar.
A minimalist approach.
My managers do this to their department leaders. They can’t even work the cameras.
I’m losing my patience with three people. In none of the cases it’s tech illiteracy, it’s something interacting with it:
- Friend who calls me every 2~3 months because he forgot his Facebook password. It reached a point that I annotated his password in my machine, but I don’t need it because I memorised it.
- Neighbour who sends a 10min audio file, full of contextually irrelevant stuff, to ask a simple “how do I do X?”. No, 10min is not an exaggeration.
- Mum. Asking her any relevant piece of info means asking the same question up to five times in a row, because: she didn’t hear it, didn’t pay attention to it, answered something “random”, assigned it a name that only her knows.
I’m not even a “computer guy” dammit. I don’t work with programming, IT, or related.
I worked at a Verizon store and had a few customer’s passwords memorized because they were in with problems weekly.
Ouch.
How many of those were Karens expecting this to be your job? Just curious, it’s one thing to help clueless people, another to help clueless and entitled ones. (At least the friend that I mentioned is a bro. A dumbarse when it comes to this stuff, but still a bro.)
There were plenty of Karens, but I only went the extra mile of setting things up for friendly people.
Just a heads up, if seemingly simple things can only be fixed by going away and calling someone else, there’s a good chance you could have been nicer.
Of course, sometimes that is the only way.
I get #1 from my family rather often. And I set them up with password managers. SIGH
At this rate I don’t even know what to do:
- 2FA - he struggles with it, so I had to turn it off
- writing his password in a piece of paper, telling him to store it - he lost it
- making an easy to remember password for him - he’s still forgetting it
- telling him “I don’t remember” - he’ll come here and ask me to reset it
What concerns me the most is that, if I didn’t do this for him, someone else would. And some people give no fucks about the others’ privacy. Like, I’m grateful that he trusts me, but he shouldn’t be relying on trust on first place!
Yeah, I might get to the point with him where I say, " if you can’t manage your password, it’s not really safe for you to be using Facebook. There are too many bad actors who try to take advantage of people online."
Either he should have enough wit about him to remember where he has stored his password (sticky note under keyboard?) or he probably shouldn’t be sharing things online. He is going to get scammed.
IT tech here, lack of knowledge/skill does not bother me, lack of will to learn does.
helping people with their problems is quite fun when they are interested
Some people have this incredibly annoying habit of seeing anything remotely tech related as magic and they switch off their brain, assuming that they could never understand it.
Them: “My computer is broken”
Me:“Whats the issue?”
Them: “i dont know, i tried to open my email and its got some error message and wont open”
Me:" what does the error message say?"
Them:“err, cannot open email during update, please wait until update is complete”
Me:“is your email app updating?”
Them:"yes.
Me:“wait for it to finish and try again…”
(Obviously tbats not a real scenario, but im not good at examples and just wanted to get the general gist across)
That was something I got tired of saying, about error messages, “what do the words on the screen say?”
I had something so similar happen recently where a link on our external site was down. This person calls me and it literally went:
Them: “this link is broken. Can you tell them fix it?”
Me: “there’s a banner at the top of the page that says they’re trying to fix it. Here’s an alternative link.”
Them: “well that’s from last week so they should’ve fixed it by now”
Me: “must be real broken then”
Them: “well can you find their email so we can email them to tell them to fix it”
Me: “no, they’re fixing it”
Them: “well you’re IT can you email them to ask them how long it will be and tell me when it’s fixed”
No that’s not my fuckin job bud. Here’s their general contact page if you’re dying for this very non urgent thing.
My mother tried to print but got an error message. Instead of reading it, she called me. The printer told her it was out of paper 😐
Yep, but it does give me job security though…
And they get mad at you when you are trying to help.
I’ll say too often interfaces are written for devs and not users.
