FWIW, based on how I read his reply, he *did *say that in the first place. He was just rather snarky about it.
Let us end this hijack now, please. Anyone who has a problem with how people post and respond are invited to take them to the Pit.
Ellen Cherry
MPSIMS Moderator
I used to do computer contract work. One owner of a small retail business (5 stores) purchased a POS register system that would dial in to a server to upload the day’s receipts to a database.
Well, this guy didn’t know a database, or anything approaching an office application. His entire experience was confined to AOL email and chat rooms and he stubbornly refused to do anything different. However, he insisted on using his POS software he’s purchased…
So ultimately I had to write a script that, for each store, would at the end of each day dial into his personal AOL account, and email a .rtf file (which I also had a script that cleaned up the extract and reformatted it so it would read and print nicely) of the store’s POS data to him.
Each morning he then printed out his emails, stuck them in a binder, which ultimately got handed to his unlucky accountant.
“You’ve got mail!”
:smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
I once had someone complain that their internet was really slow and that their bottom desktop bar was broken.
It didn’t make sense to me, I knew that they had a fast internet connection. I sat down to look at it and realized that every time they connected to the internet, they were still using their dial-up option AND that they weren’t closing out from old screens - they were just minimizing. So their bar was “broken” because it had about 45 open windows on it . . . .(don’t ask me why the windows weren’t stacking - i dunno).
So once I closed all their windows, disabled their dial-up and deleted the icon from the desktop and then made their IE icon say CLICK HERE FOR INTERNET (oh and clear out all their cache files and temp internet files) it was amazing how fast their computer was . . . .
You can disable that feature under the taskbar Properties settings. I do, because I loathe it. (Mainly because you can’t customize it in any way–it’s either on or it’s off.)
The sublime "The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude" video.
Actually, Excel Hell is more apropro to the topic at hand.
When in college, I was taking COBOL with a new professor. The professor had experience with COBOL, but guess what? OUR COBOL compiler was on a UNIX mainframe and she had NO EXPERIENCE with UNIX! I spent the first week or 2 of class showing all the students AND the professor how to login, create/move dirs, how to use vi, etc… Luckily, I had already taken our UNIX class or the class would not have been able to have been offered at all!
My I repost this at my livejournal community “Mock the Stupid”?
I don’t understand what the problem is. He employed you to do something, and you did it. What makes him “computer retarded”?
The student in the OP was trying to log in to a web site but didn’t know what a web browser is. That is comparable to someone who watches television but doesn’t know what a remote control is.
You don’t need to know the names of those things to operate them, though. I used the internet for several years before I knew what the word “browser” referred to. It’s not like I was discussing them with anybody.
It’s amazingly, shockingly common. Seriously. The number of people who don’t understand why, say, “Do these computers have Youtube on them?” is a stupid question would blow your mind.
Not quite, you can watch television without a remote control (I think any Doper over the age of, say, 30, has - heck even lately if I can’t find it there are still buttons on the TV (although since we got digital cable a month or so ago, we have to watch through the cable box which doesn’t have buttons and only works with its remote)) but you can’t browse websites without a browser (for all intents and purposes).
I think that part of the problem, at least for kids, is that school and library computers are often configured to limit where users can go and what they can do, so by the time they’re in college, they have no idea what to do because they’ve never been able to do it. For example, my local school district has a very strict “no attachments” policy for students. They can’t attach work to an e-mail to turn it in, nor can they access their personal e-mails to do it that way. When these same students get to college, they don’t know how to send an attachment or do similar tasks because they’ve never been allowed to.
I regularly as an onsite tech run into a vicious combination of, what is feasible and or cost effective and “I am the customer so just make it happen or I will find someone who will”
my most recent case involves a customer who just has to advertise on craigslist.
But he wants ads in pretty colors like “competitor x” ok so we need to set up a photobucket Account, design an ad, then I will give you a link to post in the craigslist window.
Basically he just wants to be able to type raw text somewhere and have it magically formatted to whatever colors/layout he wants and have it look like a guy who hired a graphic designer every time, and it’s somehow my failing that I cannot just “make it happen” without him having to know anything about HTML, art program, or hosting graphics on other sites.
My mother once called me round to fix her TV. Turned out they’d lost the remote control and had no idea how to turn the TV on without it.
Even when I showed them how to do it and change channels and so on, they were so afraid of doing something ‘wrong’ that they just permanently left the TV on the same channel until eventually they bought a new TV.
It’s exactly the same mentality as being afraid to try anything at all with computers. My mother types everything in then retypes it all, like a typewriter, refusing to ‘risk’ going back in with the cursor and making corrections.
(I did, however, once have a TV that couldn’t be switched to the AV channel by the buttons on the set, making it useless for me).
Woman requests access to Database X for Client X, which I own, on Friday when I’m out. I see the request when I return on Monday and approve it. This morning, woman emails me.
Yes, that’s exactly right. If you want access to Database Y, which *contains information for *Client X, *clearly *the correct way to go about getting it is to request access to Database X, because it has Client X in the name. :smack: