So a few of my coworkers and I have been tasked with reviewing a bunch of technical reports. The other day, one of them told me she is having difficulty with the reports because she doesn’t know one of the statistical terms an author uses.
This irritates me, I have to say. For one thing, while the author uses “dispersion” quite frequently, it’s not like it’s impossible to infer the meaning from the figures and context. And we aren’t being tasked with critiquing the statistical analyses. But really, what troubles me is that I strongly suspect this coworker has not bothered to consult Google to clear up her confusion. I say this because in the past, whenever she has admitted to not knowing something and I suggest googling it, she says, “That’s a great idea!” Googling information is second-nature to me. No one would ever have to tell me to google something I’m confused about.
There’s nothing wrong with being honest and not wanting to “fake it till you make it”. When someone asks me a question, I’m perfectly fine with saying “I don’t know”. I’m also fine when someone says the same thing to my inquiries. What I’m not fine with is someone who thinks not knowing or understanding something gets them off the hook. That might have worked 20 years ago. But in the age of instant information, it’s not a good excuse.
“I don’t know” is a valid answer when it might be something you are not expected to know. Personally I think the amount of ignorance people are willing to confess to is staggering. Wild horses would not be able to drag from me that I had trouble with a simple word like “dispersion”. I would look it up and if I still didn’t understand it, might ask for help in clarifying the context, but there is no way I’d just flat out say “I don’t know!” and expect that it would get me anywhere.
In my job, when I have to use, “I don’t know”, I generally follow it up with, “I’ll try to find out.”
I deal with people every day in my workplace who are not lazy, generally speaking, but whose thought processes simply don’t work that way. There are a number of folks who think I’m some kind of genius because I can resolve their Word or Excel issues by figuring how to manage some obscure task. But 75% of the time, I’m “figuring it out” by asking them to give me a couple of minutes, going back to my desk, and Googling the issue. These people genuinely want to know the answers, and I am rarely asked the same question twice. It just never occurs to them to use Google that way.
So while I agree that it’s nonsensical for people to not use the world’s most obvious resource, I see it so often that I just don’t think to be critical of them for it.
I’ll agree that access to the internet at the office is like having a reference library at your fingertips. So I think I would become annoyed with a coworker who consistently refused to avail themselves of it. But only if what they are looking up has a fairly straightforward answer.
If the information lookup is involved or time consuming then you enter another arena where “I don’t know” is acceptable.
In your example, if the person can look on-line for a definition of “dispersion” as it relates to statistics, but does not, I get annoyed. If the person thinks they need to learn statistical analyses then I’m not annoyed. Of course, if they think they need to learn statistical analyses to accomplish the assigned task then I need to remind them that they probably don’t.
We deal with a lot of people in the community. One of them is a pharma rep. She is lovely.
One of our coworkers was very innocent and very naïve. But I didn’t really know how much until one day when we all had a meeting with the pharma rep.
The conversation turned to IUDs (interuterine devices) and modern technology. And somewhere in the middle of the conversation my coworker piped up with, “But…don’t they rot inside the woman’s body?”
This is the kind of ignorance I would never confess to. I would nod, and smile, and go home and look it up, if I didn’t know better. And she was 25 and had a boyfriend, so I was really kind of appalled.
Now she is the sweetest girl I ever knew, and I almost hate to tell this story, but it is relevant. (The pharma rep them proceeded to explain very gently about IUDs and woman’s bodies.
I used to have this pinned on my corkboard at work:
I work with people like this as well. It just does not cross their brain to use Google. I do think it’s a terrible excuse because after the 5th time of, “Let me Google that for you. It says (answer to their question). It was the first result on Google, see? You can even see it in the description before clicking the link.” I expect them to catch on that they should be Googling things that are so incredibly easy to Google. They should be learning and adapting. But they don’t, which is pretty unforgivable for something so simple and easy. If they at least say, “I tried to Google it but I didn’t find/didn’t understand the result I wanted…” that’s OK because at least they tried. All I ask is that they try.
Mostly I find these people think they are too overworked or too important and are too lazy to go through even the basic effort of reading and understanding a couple sentences and instead want everyone else to prepare and handle everything for them. So, pretty much they act like a baby.
True. But it can be a good thing sometimes. There’s a flip side to no one ever needing to ask a factual question: You’ll never get asked the factual questions that you didn’t know that you were wondering about before someone asked you. It’s the “unknown unknowns”, you know?
Sure, there are threads where someone could have easily found the answer for themselves. But if they had, I would have missed out on learning something about those subjects.
Now, what *really *gets my goat is people who are unsure about how to spell a word, and instead of checking, they stick a “(sp?)” on the end of the misspelling. I don’t mind accidental spelling mistakes. I make them myself all day long. But if you know that you don’t know the spelling? Dude, you’re on the internet. It takes you the same amount of time to stick the word into Google and check it as it takes to write that “(sp?)” in the first place.
I never understood that. Although, in fairness, I don’t see it that often anymore.
It drives me bonkers. Count me among the Microsoft Office “wizards” in this thread. I even tell people how I figured it out, hoping that they’ll take the knowledge ball and run with it, but it never happens.
Related and equally annoying: misspelling anything, ever. Especially frustrating is seeing (sp?) or “however you spell that” after a misspelling. You just typed it into a powerful information machine that most likely has a spellchecker built into the browser!
The first page of hits includes references to various senses of the word, including the general meaning (“the action or process of distributing things or people over a wide area”), the optics meaning, a World of Warcraft spell, and (what you are apparently referring to) statistical dispersion. The link regarding statistical dispersion is to the Wikipedia article, which I suspect would make a person’s eyes glaze over if they hadn’t at least taken a statistics class sometime. And it can be dangerous to assume you understand the technical meaning of a term based on how it is used in everyday language.
So in this particular example, at least, I’d hesitate to find fault with your coworker.
I think that’s why I’m feeling irritated. This coworker always beats herself up about how stupid and dumb she is while simultaneously playing up how smart I am–right before she asks me to do something for her. So when she came to me yesterday, I immediately heard in the subtext of her whine, “You’re going to have to review this report rather than me, since I don’t want to bother with it.”
But she’s also the first person who gets all huffy if management consults with others before they consult with her. Maybe if she stopped calling herself “stupid” all the time, they’d have more faith in her.
Ha! I would definitely use that with family and friends. But at work, there are advantages to being considered the local software genius. I can spare five minutes of Google effort to keep my reputation up.
I should note that this was a MUCH bigger problem when we didn’t have a full-time IT person in the office. Then, I had several inquiries a day, and I did snap at folks occasionally for not making an effort to find an answer for themselves. Now, I get asked something maybe once a week.
I am training someone now, and must say a dozen times a day when she questions me “what’s google say about that?”. Obviously not about co. things, but she’s new to InDesign and PhotoShop and design and all it entails in general, and 99% of that stuff is on line.
I blame her mother.
No seriously, I do. This kid (yeah, sorry) is so used to saying “I can’t find it, I can’t figure it out, it’s not here” and her mother swooping in to solve the problem (I know her mother, and this is the way it is) that she is either too lazy or too used to giving up and having someone else show her/do it, that she won’t persevere. Hard thing to overcome, makes me the hard ass, but if she’s going to work independently at some point, she needs to figure this out.
My standard answer when asked factual things: Did you Google it?
One would hope that it would eventually result in Googling first, then possibly asking for clarification later. But I think there are people who just forget that search engines exist. Case in point - my husband. He’s a smart man and he knows how to use Google. But I know how his brain works, and sometimes when he’s noodling thru a problem, Google doesn’t occur to him. If I’m uninvolved in anything, I’ll do it. Otherwise, I remind him of the resource available to him.
But I do get aggravated at people who can’t be bothered to do a simple search for which the answer will be the first thing to come up.
This and this are my experience. I wish parents would understand they are really doing their children a disservice with this sort of parenting. My previous coworker had to talk to her parents every day, and every time she had a problem in her life, daddy swooped in and fixed it. I think that’s terrible. It gave her such a lack of self esteem in her own life - she was never brave enough to try anything on her own.
And the other side of it is of course, they think they can get you to do it for them. I am a team player and I don’t mind doing some unpleasant tasks but I hate the whining and I hate the “I don’t know” when it’s something you could have learned about.
There’s something to be said for that. But it would also be nice to be able to have a conversation with you without you looking things up on your phone every five seconds. Also, you’ll walk into a lamppost if you don’t look up from that thing now and then.
OK, I apologize. I have no idea whatsoever how well this describes you as you go about your day. But I do know people like that.