I used to work as a security guard in a large school building in Downey, CA, about 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles. One guy who came in to relieve me–supposedly the permanent person on the next shift–didn’t raise the flag in the morning; and when I came in to relieve him at 4 pm Saturday, several doors were open, and he had let people go out some side doors and set off the alarm!! Golly, I wonder how he knew which end of the key to stick into the ignition switch so he could drive his pickup to the post!! Duuuuhh!!
Here’s a question my sister encountered today: “How many are in a dozen? Five?”
She swears to God it happened.
And now for mass cluelessness!
Our office e-mail system has wild-cards, so you can, for instance, send an e-mail to everyone in the Ft. Worth office. Also, when you reply to an e-mail, you can reply to the sender or all recipients.
A couple of years back, someone sent an e-mail with some obscure question to everyone in the company. OK, that’s a little stupid, but maybe understandable.
Then someone sent a reply, saying “Why are you sending this to me? Take me off of your list” Don’t understand wild cards, do you?
Then they hit the “All recipients” button. Did you really want the CEO to get that?
Then we had several dozen more people do the exact same thing including some who said, “Yeah, take me off too”. Not only are you clueless, but you don’t even learn from other people’s mistakes.
It actually bogged down the email server, and the Support Center had to send an email to explain the situation and tell people “Don’t Do That, Doofuses!”
And we still had a couple of people after that do the same thing.
It still makes me giggle.
Zyada,
We had a similar thing happen. I’m the e-mail administrator and I always get complaints that people don’t use the reply feature correctly. So, I sent out a message with helpful hints on using the reply function, don’t reply with attachment and don’t reply to all, etc. The Executive VP of the company promptly replied TO ALL saying that he appreciated the suggestions and thought it was a good idea, sheesh!
My favorite email idiots are the people who set up an auto-response message when they’re on vacation, but set it to Reply To All. So whenever they’re included on an address list, everyone who got that message also gets a copy of the “I’m out this week” mail. The network people are constantly instructing everyone on how to do it right, but some people just don’t listen.
Better yet was the guy who had turned on the Return Receipt feature for his auto-respose. So every time you opened or deleted mail that he sent, he received another message reporting the status. Which of course triggered the automatic reply again, and sent out more mail.
But the most fun email incident was when the CEO went on vacation with my boss, his son. Each of them set up his auto-response to Reply To All. (You can see where this is going already, can’t you?) The first time somebody sent a bulletin to the whole company, the automatic mailers responded to the whole company. Which meant that each got a message from the other, to which it responded. Then they responded to the responses. Before you could say “ad infinitum”, the email server did its impression of a drunken Kennedy, and crashed spectacularly.
I’m not a warlock. I’m a witch with a Y chromosome.
I feel your pain zette, I used to be a computer instructor at a large OEM support center. HR had this feeling that anyone, no matter how incompetant, could do the job as long as they really wanted to. I have 60 year old retirees in my class with no computer experience that I was supposed to teach to be a tech support person in 4 weeks. Some of them had never seen a mouse!
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my original post- the untrainable woman I was speaking of also had extremely shaky hands (ala Parkinsons). So I’m trying to teach the nuances of the click and double click, and she absolutely cannot double click. Can’t be done. So I don’t want to make an issue of it. I explain (at least 10 times) that she can just click once (she could do that fine) and then push “enter” on the keyboard (does the same thing). She just would not do it, and continued trying to double click, getting more frustrated by the minute. I don’t know how many differnet ways I could have said it…I showed her, she would do it- the next thing you know she’s trying to double click again! Yikes…
Don’t anyone flame me for that, either…the point is, I showed her an alternative, and she chose- over and over- not to take it. Bizzare??? Yep…
An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; A pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity.
No one has mentioned the clueless ones whose egos prevent them from admitting that there may be something they don’t know. Sales reps and middle managers tend to fall into this category. Had one person explain how internet savvy he was and then couldn’t follow in class when the instruction was to click on the hyperlink.
It’s easy to make fun of them but don’t forget that it can also give you an edge - you now know something about them that they think nobody knows! Spend it wisely.
Gulp!
>^,^<
KITTEN
Coarse and violent nudity. Occasional language.
Mouse balls…now there’s a phrase I just cannot bring myself to say in front of a class…Maybe I should try it to see who can keep a straight face the longest…maybe incorporate it about every other sentence for a while… lol!!
Speaking of friggin’ clueless…Today I was at Target…I’m approaching the automatic doors…a girl (about 20) and her mom and some other woman are approaching the doors. Her mom and the other lady and shooting the breeze, and the girl walks right up to the set of doors marked **NOT AN ENTRANCE!!<b/>
She stands there a second, says "What is UP with these doors??? Totally annoyed…Just then, the mom says "Kimmie!! It says “Not an Entrance!!” and at that exact moment, the doors swing out and whack her right in the stupid face. I hate to be cruel, and it all took place rather quickly, but I saw it comin’ a mile away…“Kimmie” wasn’t hurt- just her pride- because I burst out laughing…Am I a bitch? Maybe…But I would challange any of you not to laugh at that one…it was a beauty…
Heeeellloo?? Is this thing on???
An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; A pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity.
Man, I wish I could have thought of another name for the round things that our computer’s pointing devices use. Then I would look much less clueless. Oh well.
Oh, I remember another clueless tech story.
I was telling my friend about viruses and how she has to watch out and make sure none of her floppies had viruses. I checked her disks to make sure she didn’t have one. One of the disks had one and I put it aside next to the other disks. She said “oh no, not next to each other they might catch it”
I laughed.
She didn’t.
pat
Ahh… a thread close to my heart.
One of my favorite phrases is “Ten percent of the population is in the bottom ten percent of the IQ curve.” Self-evident, but nevertheless, a bit of shock when you first think of it.
I used to teach software for a major instruction company. We had a retired doctor who bought a subscription. He took Beginning Word from me three times. I don’t know if he took it with someone else too. By the third time he could get mostly through the exact same practice sessions without asking for help every three minutes. I think he might have had to retire on account of senility.
When practicing deleting files, one woman deleted God knows what (I was avoiding her by that time; she got lost about every ten minutes), and after that it wouldn’t boot. IT had to ghost down the OS again.
You get together the combination of bottom five percenter, never used a computer before, lack of mechanical thinking skills, and a superior attitude, and you’ve got a situation that greatly mitigates the student’s murder. Aaarrgghh.
One woman was very frustrated. She couldn’t get all this. And when I told her to right-click anywhere in the white part of the screen, she gave me a funny look and typed “click.”
Then there are the people that don’t know right from left. “No, ma’am. Use the right side of the mouse.” (Looks at finger on left button) “That is the right.”
But my absolute favorite (and yes, this happened to me, no ULs here):
I’m demonstrating to a class how to clean out a mouse when they get dirty, just to be helpful for the next time it’s driving them crazy with the skipping. Ohhs and ahhs at the sight of the ball out of their own mouse. Then one girl picks up the ball, looks at the monitor, says under her breath, “What happens now?” and rubs the mouse pad with the naked ball. I tell you, it was hard to leave the job at work some days. You just can’t get some people to learn, but you can’t tell them that either.
As sad as it is, really, someone is occupying the bottom of the IQ curve, and they live on someone’s street, and they shop at your store. One of the managers said that job made him realize that all those kids at his high school who were getting D’s and F’s went out and got jobs.
And of course because we’re in America, with fewer and fewer people earning their money with their backs, especially if they’re white, and are too proud to do “immigrant work,” you have all these people that in previous centuries would not have been required to do all this attempting what may be over their heads. At least to do it well, without a major pain in the butt teaching them.