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 a great story
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.
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.
I’m mostly patient with my parents or friends as long as they try to understand. But I’m a software engineer and when my very well paid coworkers don’t understand how to operate their IDE for the fifth time that day I have a hard time not to bite them in the neck.
Only when they ignore or argue with the person theyve asked for help.
If you’re going to do that, you can flail on your own.
I have a saying “I wasn’t asking you to do that, I was telling you to do it”. If they don’t respect it, they don’t get help.
That’s an excellent point. Not technology, but people ask me for tips on playing golf. I tell them what I think they need to correct and how to do it. And they start arguing with me. And I’m like I don’t care if you play like shit, you ASKED ME for help.
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.
This one here is for your co-worker only! Not for you, not for anyone else, just for him:
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.
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.
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.
Employer doesn’t know what he does, he does less work in the same amount of time.
history | grep <word> and ! would blow his mind.
CTRL + r is even better
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.
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.
Oh yes indeed!
I was a hardware tech at a cell phone, tablet and computer shop. For a while the boss hired this lady around 22 years old to work up front. Now this chick couldn’t cut a piece of plastic to save her life!
See, there’s different size SIM cards out there, and sometimes when upgrading a phone you gotta physically cut the SIM card to a smaller size. We actually had all the proper punchout tools, but somehow she couldn’t even manage to put the card in the indented area the right way.
She’d sometimes put the card in upside down or backwards, cutting the SIM card all wrong and destroying it. And even when she did manage to cut the card the right way, the card might have slight burrs on the edges.
Now of course that’s not her fault, that’s an imperfection of the punchout tool. But she didn’t even have the common sense to pull the fingernail file from her own purse, or come ask a tech in the back for a file, to remove the burrs.
So not only did she destroy many SIM cards, but she even destroyed many SIM slots in the phone by forcing a card with burrs into it.
Well, one day it’s just me and her working. Coincidentally, we had like five iPhone 5s come in all back to back. 2 busted screens, 2 bad charger ports, and a bad speaker I think. Keep in mind I’m the only tech that day.
As these phones came in, everyone asks about how long should it take? She tells them all the typical 20 minutes!
Like WTF? Does this dumb chick not realize that I can’t fix them all simultaneously?! All these customers are gonna come back mad at me because I didn’t finish in the ridiculous timeframe she quoted them.
20+20+20+20+20, duh! Common sense should have told her it’s gonna be a while.
Anyways, I wanted to punch her to be perfectly honest, but I decided to go out back and punch a brick wall instead.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
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 didn’t lose my patience but it did make me think of a tale. I was once asked by a coworker to see if they were visible in a zoom event they were attending (goofy concern to begin with since they had left their desk to come to me to ask). Upon return to their cube, with the meeting still ongoing I pointed out that no, they weren’t visible or audible in the meeting because they didn’t have a webcam. This was during the “return to office” phase of the pandemic and our in-office stuff was decidedly pre-pandemic so none of the workstations were equipped with videoconferencing equipment.
I’m not even IT staff.
I’ve been spending my week trying to train someone barely capable of anything why feeling bad for her because it’s not her fault and life is complicated for her.
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.
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.
Yea mainly when I was trying to teach my friend how to get pirated games. It is crazy that people can just keep using computers with surface level understanding. I accidentally yelled him a few times now I try to be more patient because I ubderstand what’s second nature to me is unfamillar to him
When using computers became more mainstream in the late 90s I thought “phew, finally people will learn to use them and not act like it’s some arcane and nerdy thing they couldn’t possibly understand! They’ll have to figure it out for work and the average person will finally understand the basics like file system hierarchies, right click menus, switching between windows and…” nope. We entered the period of “monthly_report.pdf.exe” instead and then, mobile phones which have enabled people to use computers without learning anything about how they work at all.
I suppose the bright side is that it means that IT work will always be available to those of us that know how to program a VCR and a Betamax
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.
No, but I think this is only because I’m the ‘tech guy’ in my family and I’ve had years of helping my grandparents in their misadventures in using Windows, and I know it’s not their fault that they don’t understand, so I’m naturally patient with them
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.
