Not surprising. I'd figure it'd take at least two hours to explain what the point is. ("See, now you can find out what happened to people you knew in high school, and then you can send them eggs full of deer!")
My mom has recently discovered emailing. She can't believe that it's almost instantly received by the person she emails. Last night I was emailing a guy about an ice hockey game about 11 at night, she told me I couldn't send an email that late, it's an unreasonable time to expect someone to talk, all I said was "He can just read it in the morning" and she suddenly remembered how email works and that it's not like a phone call.
She can be pretty funny sometimes. I was trying to get her to right click for some reason the other day, so she moved the cursor to the right side of the screen and left-clicked, it was one of those moments where you just smile at the sheer simplicity of the moment and how not everyone immediately realized that "right click" means press the right sided mouse button.
What seems so simple, remedial and, well, common knowledge to me is a whole other ball game when someone hasn't even really experienced a computer or the internet.
There was this one guy once who came into Gateway (this was 2002/3-ish)and demanded from me that I sell him a Laptop.....with only DOS on it. Yeah, fun day that was.
Gateway might not have offered such a product at the time, but such products did exist. In fact, you can buy a laptop from Dell today that comes with FreeDOS installed.
At the time, DOS alone would not have functioned due to lack of appropriate drivers. Though it was not as bad as the time a guy came in and repeatedly asked me to sell him a pair of overalls.
I like the revenge section, such as: * Customer: "Hello, I have a problem. My name is Bob Murton." * Tech Support: "I'm sorry, but I can't help you with that problem." or * Customer: "I think I broke the Internet!" * Tech Support: "So it was you!" * Customer: (click)
So, my 14 year old sister comes into my bedroom and says "I need your laptop, I need to print something". Knowing that my sister is very computer illiterate and not used to printing stuff, I give her the instructions "Take the laptop over to the desk over there, plug in the USB for the printer and the power cord 'cause it's low on batteries". At this point, her eye's start to water and she says in an about to cry voice "I can't" "Why can't you! You just plug it in!" "But what what if I mess up?" At this point, I slightly die and get really peeved "You CAN'T mess it up!" "But what if I break your laptop?" at this point a tear slides down her cheek, at which I thrust the laptop to her and leave area. Stupidity might be contagious.
I have an uncle that works in communications and the stories that he tells always crack me up. He is routinely baffled that my mother can set up and run the hotel she works at booking and reservations software and trouble shoot it when it goes horribly tits up but can't understand Facebook. Having said that it is infuriating when you its all gone wrong and the person sent to help you is a dick and makes sure you know how stupid you are.
Damn, this thread was perfect to read while sitting in this ridiculous hotel check-in line... And I picked up some great vocab words (i.e. ragegasm and thumbgig)
As a bit of an aside, I just realized I might be getting close to creating a black hole. I decided to work from home today and ended up basically doing this:
I VPN'd into my company's network, and then remote desktop'd into my work machine. From there, I remote desktop'd into my development server, and then created a virtualized server environment on there, to pull an installer from the web (intranet) and install something that authenticated against my company's servers, on the network that is local to my work machine.
...I don't think I could ever explain that to anyone at any of my previous jobs.
Comments
Once I helped a friend get online for the first time.
* Me: "Ok, do you have your Internet Explorer ope--"
* Him: "What!? Your Internet EXPLODED?"
He was hysterical. I explained it all to him, but he was still terrified. Later, when I was done showing him how to surf the web, he asked:
* Him: "Are you sure the Internet is safe to use?"
She can be pretty funny sometimes. I was trying to get her to right click for some reason the other day, so she moved the cursor to the right side of the screen and left-clicked, it was one of those moments where you just smile at the sheer simplicity of the moment and how not everyone immediately realized that "right click" means press the right sided mouse button.
What seems so simple, remedial and, well, common knowledge to me is a whole other ball game when someone hasn't even really experienced a computer or the internet.
No, seriously.
* Customer: "Hello, I have a problem. My name is Bob Murton."
* Tech Support: "I'm sorry, but I can't help you with that problem."
or
* Customer: "I think I broke the Internet!"
* Tech Support: "So it was you!"
* Customer: (click)
Knowing that my sister is very computer illiterate and not used to printing stuff, I give her the instructions "Take the laptop over to the desk over there, plug in the USB for the printer and the power cord 'cause it's low on batteries".
At this point, her eye's start to water and she says in an about to cry voice "I can't"
"Why can't you! You just plug it in!"
"But what what if I mess up?"
At this point, I slightly die and get really peeved "You CAN'T mess it up!"
"But what if I break your laptop?" at this point a tear slides down her cheek, at which I thrust the laptop to her and leave area. Stupidity might be contagious.
I VPN'd into my company's network, and then remote desktop'd into my work machine. From there, I remote desktop'd into my development server, and then created a virtualized server environment on there, to pull an installer from the web (intranet) and install something that authenticated against my company's servers, on the network that is local to my work machine.
...I don't think I could ever explain that to anyone at any of my previous jobs.