I’m a tech Luddite and use my devices for either entertainment or simple communications with those I need to contact.
Whilst I have used computers in a business setting/s, it’s been via the business software with no real nous needed.
But every now and then I have to do ‘other’ stuff, like respond to emails and having to attach files in a specific format, or apply for visas when the website won’t accept a pic…these are just examples.
And I have fucking panic attacks when things go awry and I don’t know how to fix them. I lose my shit and just cannot function and just try to delay whatever needs to be done. The people around me at the moment are as hopeless as me with dealing with this shit, but they are far more sanguine about it all.
I just fall into a trembling mess.
Any one else like me? And if you managed, how did you overcome the anxiety of not being able to do stuff that REALLY should be fucking simple. But isnt.
Realize you are not alone~there are more of us than you know.
It is more than ok to ask for help. I just did that yesterday, drove to my local Apple Store and asked the kind young man to sort several things out for me between my iPad and iPhone. I’d tried myself, gave it the college try over a reasonable stretch of time. Finally gave myself permission to ask for help. No scorn, no shame, no rolled eyes, just patient help at no cost. It was a Doper who showed me it was ok to ask for help, he helped me innumerable times over long distances, patiently teaching til I could do it for myself. I wouldn’t still be there if not for his patient, no shame help cheerfully offered and gratefully, humbly received by me.
I’ve also had good experiences asking for tech help at my public library branches. Two of our branches have staff who’ll make an appt to sit down with you and demystify tech issues and teach you how to get more out of your tech. Our tax dollars at work. After all, that’s why librarians go to school all those years, to put information in our hands, to empower us with “how”.
A third idea I’ve learned the very hard way? Don’t wait til the deadline or the last minute to tackle something like a visa application or property tax exemption, etc. That way if it goes sideways you’ve got time to calmly untangle the snafu or to ask for time. This is the hardest one for me to reliably do but when I do, it is a huge relief and weight off of me.
So, know you’re not alone, ask for help and don’t wait til the last minute or tackle anything new or tricky when you’re tired.
It is a-ok to ask for help. There is no shame. Everyone has a blind-spot and we need help when going there.
I’d think the OP could find the help they need pretty easily. A relative, a neighbor, a friend, someone at the local bar, even online. Certainly here on the SDMB.
I’m not averse to asking for help…shit, I toted my laptop into the nearest town last week to a computer dude who showed me how to take screenshots. But at the moment I live a gazillion miles from anywhere where people might have more computer literacy than me. Once I get back on my feet (housing, financially yada yada) I shall befriend a local teenager and engage them as my computer tutor, and pay them thrice what McDonalds would pay.
But in the meantime, the panic persists, and I just don’t really get it. I’ve always been a strong, capable and always ready to seek help/advice when I needed it. I brought up four kids single-handedly, I worked, I did shit that many other women would have had an attack of the vapours. I took it all in my stride.
But fucking computers do my head in and trigger me. Stupid. Irrational. And completely disastrous in this day and age.
I’m a computer programmer, and they still frustrate me! They’re just not very easy to use. It’s not just you. Even kids who grew up with tech and use their phones all day still struggle with computing stuff.
You can always ask here on the SDMB. There’s a few dopers who often try to help.
And you’ve heard about that whole AI boom, right? The ChatGPT app is often pretty good at answering computer questions. It doesn’t always give the right answer, but it’s much better than Google at understanding what you mean (even if you don’t phrase it completely accurately). Being able to chat with it for followups can be really helpful. Worth a shot if you haven’t tried it yet.
It’s largely replaced futile web searches for me, and if you use the voice mode, it’s just like having a conversation with a nice person who’s tech-literate (but occasionally schizophrenic and prone to hallucinations).
But you’re all right. No need to be so hard on yourself. All the other stuff you do is way harder than computers. I couldn’t even keep a houseplant alive, much less four kids…
I’m very comfortable with computers, but I have reluctantly had to deal with a smart phone. Though they are ostensibly the same thing, I find the limited interface and the inescapable touchscreen to be almost the opposite of what I’m familiar with, and the ‘logic’ of everything I thought I knew is distorted beyond recognition.
It just doesn’t do what I know it should be able to do, in the way that I feel it ought to do it. Because I didn’t grow up with it and instead have been confronted with it, I obstinately struggle.
Just yesterday I was trying to change my work password. 15 freaking characters. Uppercase, lower case a number and special characters. Can’t be a repeat of a previous one. No repeating letters (not 3 in a row) and of course no words found in a dictionary. That’s our requirement.
Would it take it? Of course not. It’s rather ridiculous. We’re not NORAD, and all of our data is public information.
Sure, someone could try to jack us up just to do it, but sheese.
What might not be quite so OK is to ask someone to teach you how to do it yourself; depending on your capacity to absorb the information, and the teaching skills and patience of the person you’re asking, it might be a lot harder to teach you than it seems.
Wanting to learn is noble, but ‘just teach me’ might just be too big an ask (or rather, there might be no ‘just’ about the process).
Perhaps someone can help you remotely? You and your tutor or helper need to install the same remote control software and then they can show you things, like how to take screenshots.
I started programming in machine language, so I understand computers pretty well.
Part of the problem is this:
That has nothing to do with the computer and everything to do with some yutz who defined the password requirements.
Getting help is good, but knowing how to navigate through the zillions of programs we all have to navigate through doesn’t help when something unexpected comes up. To deal with that you need to understand how computers work at a more fundamental level than being able to open Word files or send email.
For example, my wife, who is very smart, has a very hard time understanding the difference between a file menu in word and the file menu in File Explorer. To understand I’d have to teach her the concept of a file system, and that ain’t going to happen for the same reason it is not good for someone to try to teach a spouse how to drive. (My father-in-law tried, and my mother-in-law never drove for 70 years.)
Another example - we had a thread about someone’s slow computer where they thought it was using all the disk space instead of the actual problem, 100% disk activity. Which shows not enough memory. But how is someone expected to know that without taking an operating systems class?
Programmers are not immune to this. Programmers - have you written in assembly language? Have you ever had to handle interrupts? When I taught CS101 in 1979 I taught PL/1 for the students (we were on Multics.) When my daughter took CS101 nearly 30 years later the closest thing they did to programming was a few lines of JavaScript.
I’ve been thinking of writing a book called “What Happens After you Press Enter” with all the details, but my editor doesn’t handle that kind of book so I’d have to write a book proposal. But if you really want to understand what is going wrong, that’s the thing you need.
Also a tech luddite. Also experience panic attacks/uncontrollable rage when something ‘so easy’ turns out to be essentially impossible. Frequently around passwords and other access shit. I’m totally okay asking for help. But help often doesn’t. I’ve had tech people eventually sigh and tell me to use a complicated workaround to, for example, transfer photos from my (apple) phone to my (apple) computer. Or check my bank balance.
I have very low tech needs, folks. But even the simple ones I used to have, are always being scraped away, replaced with hugely complex, expensive, constantly outdated apps which are essentially unusable.
The thing that makes me murderous is the knowledge that there is no other option. You live alone in a hut in the woods and eat mice and bugs, or you carry a computer wherever you go, recording everything you do, say, and think. Nothing in between.
I’ve always (well, almost always) found that when I get into a situation I don’t understand or need to do something I’ve never done before on my computer, googling a very simple search term (like “[issue/name/error] doesn’t work” or “how do I [action]”) that includes my OS, provides access to:
YouTube videos that show in graphic detail how to step through something.
Online articles explaining “the 5 ways to fix {issue]”
Message boards/reddit links to people with the same or similar questions, sometimes with solutions.
Generally, one or more of these is on point, though I am always wary of recommendations for third-party software “fixes”.
Agree 100%. Somebody got the information off off the net that this is the most secure type of password. But it’s not.
It’s gonna be written down somewhere. And after 3 failed attempts if you can’t remember it you have too do it all over again. New pwd. I do check in on vacation. I do, as we all fat finger stuff.
I’m having that problem RIGHT now. Changed my password due to a requirement. I DO have it written down, It’s 18 freaking characters but got locked out. Of COURSE I fucked it up.
Got it sorted out, but what a pita. I may need to travel and work from a hotel for a few days.
(my cousin is sick and I need to see her) Screen size is gonna suck, but I’m not carrying my system into a hotel.
I use a 43" monitor at home (I work from home), coworkers stick with two 20 inch monitors. I don’t know how this will be on a 17" screen. Oh yeah I do. Gonna have to be a laptop.
I was listening to a radio call-in program the other day where the listeners were asked how they had interacted with AI. One person called in to say that she had a new electronic gadget of some kind (don’t remember what it was) and was having trouble using it. She uploaded a picture of it to the version of GPT 4 that can process images, and it immediately recognized what it was and described in detail what the different buttons did. She was so impressed that she cut and pasted the information and is now using it as a user guide, which she found far more informative that whatever had come with the device.
Yeah, even at this early stage, it’s really impressive already. It’s replaced Google for like 80%-90% of my questions… about everything from programming to Mac questions to veterinary medicine to history to art to music to coming up with trivia games and co-creating art to shopping to cooking. I’ve never found a tool as indispensable as quickly as this.
It has the breadth of all of humanity’s internet knowledge (if not the in-depth expertise of true human specialists), but is infinitely patient and much kinder than most humans.
Of course it’s probably going to replace me within a few years and all of humanity within a few decades, but maybe if we’re nice to it now, it’ll keep us around as pets or zoo animals later
I think we make things worse for ourselves by not being in love w/ tech. When we do something only occasionally, it doesn’t stick with us, so the next time we want to do it is is just as difficult as the first. And I do not derive any joy/satisfaction/accomplishment from figuring out how to share a vid from my phone with a friend.
Not to mention the changes and updates. Recently my work laptop’s keyboard started repeating Es Rs and Ts. They gave me a new laptop, but setting it up was so frustrating I told them I’d prefer using my old laptop w/ the wonky keyboard.
Almost every time I run into some challenge signing in somewhere or doing something, I decide I could do just fine without it.
I’m like @GuanoLad; I’ve been using PCs for 42 (got an original IBM-PC in 1982 and feel entirely comfortable with them (except Word–can’t use it), but my smartphone utterly defeats me. I can use it to make phone calls–usually. But if the wrong screen loads I am just lost. I can take pictures, but I cannot download them to my computer. Sometimes I want to throw it in the trash. Horrible little monsters.
And they change with every new version! One year there’ll be buttons for navigating, the next year they are just replaced by invisible gestures that require you to touch one edge of the screen just so or else nothing happens. And the settings that previously took one click now takes five and a swipe and a dance =/ It’s infuriating…
