First of all, Amazon Floozy Goddess, give the guys from Radio Shed a little slack - they’ve met very few women in their lives.
I saw this happen all the time in my tech support days. When I worked at 3dfx on the phones, I was the back-up Macintosh support person, behind a woman named Diana. She got a call like the above one day who demanded to speak to someone else, getting me (a male).
Of course, I had no idea what the hell he was asking about so I ended up putting him on hold for long periods of time while I asked Diana questions (yes, I made sure he knew this).
It’s like being a female computer engineer. People first boggle that you’re an engineer, and then when they ask what kind, they boggle again.
FTR, I like INF and UT2K3.
People will ask me what kind of computer I have. I usually start with ‘Well, it’s got an Abit NForce motherboard and an Athlon XP …’ and that’s as far as I get before they interrupt with ‘Is it a Dell? Gateway? Compaq?’
No, you festering schmuck. It’s a catsix original.
. . . to which the proper response would have been to hold up your money or credit card and say, “This can be used at [insert name of competitive store down the street] as well as here. Do you know what I mean when I say that?”
Then smile. Always smile.
Oh, and cazzle, I see your point, but I still say the problem lies with the people who make judgments based on those kind of women. I mean, I don’t think computer un-savvy women should be considered representative of ALL women any more than I think Al Sharpton should be considered representative of all Black people.
If either of those were true, I’d have to shoot myself.
Ah, a woman with spunk. I LIKE women with spunk! Makes their inevitable descent to mewling sex kitten all the more enjoyable. (I kid the Women With Spunk of the World).
Anyway, I know what you mean re: C64. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Kwik Write, a word processor for the C64 that could do just about anything you could ask a word processor to do in the days of daisy wheel and dot matrix printers, and did it a lot faster than any of the klunky “business PCs” that were out at the time.
FWIW, I’ve been talked down to by women at Radio Schtick, and I’m a guy. Radio Shock is NOT supposed to cater to 373ctr0n1c 133+, no need to insult me just because I don’t remember what extender normally attached to headphones!
Daerlyn tells me she has great fun with this while on night shift, alone except for another woman.
“abcdefg.net technical support, Lisa speaking.”
“Hi. Can I speak to a technician, please.”
“Certainly, I’ll transfer you.”
“abcdefg.net technical support, daerlyn speaking.”
Occasionally, some of my sister’s friends or my wife’s friends will come to use our computer for one purpose or another. As a general rule, they are not terribly computer savvy.
One day, our new neighbor comes over and asks if she can print something she has on disk. “Certainly” I say. My wife, who is also not very computer savvy, but knows enough to get by was there as well. Not wanting to risk having a complete novice bollux up my system, I ask my wife (surreptitiously, of course) to just keep an eye out and make sure that she doesn’t accidently change every setting that we have.
After she left, I asked my wife “So, did she know what she was doing?”
“Yeah, she was OK.” was the reply.
I later found out that she has a PhD in Computers and is a professor teaching computers at the local college. :o
My mom is the only woman I have ever met who is almost totally computer-illiterate. It’s mostly because she’s scared of the damn thing. Most of the people I come into contact with who have no clue when dealing with computers are middle aged men who are stuck in the dark ages. In my experience, it’s harder to deal with a man who doesn’t know how a computer works than it is to deal with a woman. In order not to appear stupid, they insist they know exactly what they’re doing and how the computer works. Finally, by the time the guy is screaming incoherently at the computer, he’ll get help, only to find out that it was something so simple a child could have fixed it. With most women I’ve helped, they call before they’re completely frustrated, apologizing for bothering me, and actually listen to me as I walk them through the process of fixing their computer. Yeah, it’s usually just as ridiculously easy to fix as most every problem, but at least they ask for help before they’re foaming at the mouth.
Still, even as a woman myself, I can see where the stereotype exists, especially when dealing with people like my mom. Basically, instead of wanting to understand how it works so she can fix it herself, she’ll want me to just fix it and not tell her what was wrong - just make it work again. Then next time the same thing happens, she calls me again with the same idea - I don’t care what you do. Just make it work like it’s supposed to. In my experience, even though a lot of men will wait until they’re ready to throw their computer out the window, they’ll ask you how to avoid the problem in the future.
Another thing I find funny is when someone references a degree as being in ‘Computers’.
It’s such a general descriptive that it actually says very little about what that person’s degree is in. Is it in Computer Science? Information Science? Information Technology? Computer Engineering? Web Design?
It’s like if I heard that someone had a Ph.D. in ‘Language’. I’d be asking ‘Oh? Which one?’
Partially this stems from my parents, who tell people that their daughter works with ‘computers’ and that people invariably assume that I can use Microsoft Word. Or they will say to me ‘He/She/It works with computers also. Why don’t you talk to him/her/it?’
Then I have to explain that as knowledgeable as I am regarding computer hardware and programming, it’d be a bloody short conversation if he/she/it were in say, computer aided drafting.
Keep it on the carpet, not in or on a computer desk. I suppose you could get a carpet sample and put it in your computer desk if you wanted to.
Don’t open it up or clean it out for several months.
Open it up- it should be nice and furry.
Mr. Neville did this in his old apartment. When I got him a new graphics card for his birthday one year, we opened up his computer to put it in, and it looked like it had a thick, furry, gray beard. I was sneezing for days afterward… :o (closest I can get to a sneezing smiley…)
I was seriously considering gluing nice thick furry carpet samples to the inside of my machine to cut down on noise, but the heat trade-off was unfavorable.
And as for the OP, when I talk computers to any female my age, I assume they know about 80% of what I know about hardware (which puts them in a pretty good knowledge bracket). I also pay close attention to their facial expressions, so I know if I’ve assumed too much knowledge. When I talk about computers with anyone more than ten years my senior – engineers excepted – I assume they know diddly-squat and work from there.
Of course, pressing a reset button takes virtually zero knowledge, and by doing this you haven’t really helped them solve their problem at all. All you’ve done is give the computer a chance to restart and go through the same process all over again. To actually help them solve the problem for the long term, you would need to fix whatever is causing the freeze-up in the first place.
(Probably IE, but that’s another rant, says the Firefox user)
It could be that they’re using Windows 98, or worse, Windows 95. Both of those freeze up for no apparent reason an ungodly number of times in a single day.
Although I have had far less problems with the NT based operating systems, and would like to see Microsoft put out a Unix based OS.
Back in those days I was a poor geek. When all the cool geeks had 486s, I had an XT that my mom built for a school project at Heald Technical. I don’t think GEOS would have run even if I could get a copy. If I wanted to use GEOS I had to use the Commodore 64, but I didn’t have a modem for it so if I wanted to play Trade Wars on the BBSes it was back to the XT.
