I’m left handed. On my computer at home I use the mouse on the left side. Everywhere else I use the right side. So I guess I’m just uber talented…no wait she’s really stupid.
When I first met a mouse, I didn’t realise how it worked, so I didn’t know you could pick it up and move it without moving the pointer. (I was about 8.) Was I stupid? Maybe. But you would think by now a typical person would know you can’t do much damage with a mouse unless you click it, and experiment…
Have you ever been asked which key is the “any” key? I have!
While I’m well aware of the difference between the computer and the monitor, I think I can explain the thought process involved. Many (most?) people have a tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects without even realizing they’re doing it. Subconsciously, one comes to think of the monitor as the computer’s “head” – it’s usually the top part, after all, and it’s the part of the machine you’re looking at ninety percent of the time, not to mention the part it uses to communicate with you. And everybody knows that we keep our brains inside of our heads, so it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the computer does too.
:: suddenly realizing that people are giving me very odd looks :: Well, OK, maybe I’m just weird.
Just wait until her neighbor calls you tomorrow and asks you to move the mouse back.
One man’s “duh!” is another man’s koan.
Hey, how do I get in on those secret meetings? Oops, er… I, uh, I mean poker club.
Fretful, I put my monitor* on top of my verticle tower, taped arms to the side of the tower, glued old sneakers to the bottom of it, and put a hat on top of the moniter**
Anthropomorphising at its best.
- no, not a lizard
** n,nal
I’m left handed and ambi-moused (or is that bi-mousual?). Sometimes I set up a left hand mouse so that you have to run it at an angle to get the cursor to go straight up & down. This creates much geek mirth when a righty tries to use my machine.
kferr, I think “bi-mousal” is more like my setup. I have a PC and a UNIX box. My PC mouse is set up for left-handed use, my UNIX box is set up for right-handed use on a mouse tray that’s attached to the underside of my desk.
Very confusing for anyone wanting to work on my system. Either one.
She must have had sinister motives.
I have my laptop set up on the same desk as my desktop PC. I have found myself using them both, one mouse in my right hand, one in my left, tiered keyboards. And I’m right handed.
And she’s clearly not that dextrous.
My response in situations such as that given in the OP was, “I am not responsible for errors in the organic component.”
I was not an IT worker. I was a receptionist. But after I fixed the damage a ‘hacker’ had done to the public access computers in our office (by using those nifty little buttons on the front of the monitor to adjust the screen back to normal), I gained a reputation. The real IT guys were in another city, and hard to get a hold of, so alot of my co-workers and superiors ran their little computer foibles past me first. If it was an actual computer problem, I’d send them along to the real tech support people. Generally, it was issues like a computer starting in safe mode and baffling my supervisor, or showing one of the case workers the amazing things you can do to a Word table by dragging the edges of columns. Nothing that actually required a call to Tech support, since nothing was the least bit broken. I was amazed at what people could manage to not know about computers when they work on them all day, every day, but what the heck. It was kinda fun to help out that way, and they didn’t play on computers all night like I did.
One poor woman, though…
She had been transfered to a new department, in another part of the building, and just didn’t trust the new set up. She called me down one day to help her find out why her emails were “missing words”. I got some one to cover for me, went down three floors to her new office…and show her how to scroll over.
As long as I was down there, she wanted me to figure out why her screen ‘didn’t look right’. It didn’t look like the old computer she had upstairs. Things weren’t exactly where they used to be. It looked smaller. She didn’t like it.
So, I increase her resolution.
No, that’s not right. She just wants it to look the same way that it looked upstairs. The letters aren’t to small, everything looks smaller.
I check what resolution we use upstairs, make sure her new computer is set to that.
But it just doesn’t look right. It’s too small. Can’t I make it look like it did upstairs? She’s used to that. She’d like it to look that way again so she won’t get mixed up.
I start wondering if this might not be something I need to send her to the real tech support people for, since I have no idea what the problem is. Changing the resolution doesn’t help, large fonts is clearly not suiting her…
Oh.
“Nicole, you know that your new screen is 3 inches larger than your old one, right? And you’re sitting alot farther away now that you have a bigger desk…That’s going to make things on the screen look a somewhat smaller.”
“Oh. So it’s not broken?”
“No, it’s not broken…”
“Okay. Thanks!”
This was not normally a stupid woman. I think that the computer is just so mysterious and finicky a creature that some people tend to assume that any problem they have must be mysterious and technical, so they don’t bother applying normal reasoning to it. Tech support must be called, lest they break the mysterious and finicky computer. Thus, a left handed person won’t conclude that they can pick up and move a mouse on their own, and my former co worker couldn’t figure out that being farther away from her monitor would make it look smaller. If it has to do with computers, it can’t be that simple!
How Gauche…!
Amazing story, merge. Every time I hear a story like that, I have the same thought: What were the people like who didn’t get the job?
Or, as a corollary to the above, I often think ‘The person responsible for hiring this amazingly unthinking employee… what methods is s/he using, and is it time for a rethink?’
I’m curious to know how she reacted when you moved the mouse.
Otherwise, I’m in agreement with everyone here, what an idiot.
All I can think is that she thought it would have to be unplugged to move it over- man, what a dipshit.
My two all time favorites from when I was in IT:
The guy who called ME on the phone because his power strip had caught fire.
The guy who called me to ask how to type a Roman numeral 4 on his computer keyboard.
I don’t work in IT, but I have the reputation in the department. No, I don’t know how it happened either.
“Nick!”, I heard a plaintive cry last Thursday. “I can’t save anything”.
Our LAN was down. I saved her documents to the C: drive and told her that as it was now five to five, there wasn’t much point waiting for the system to come back - she may as well log out. Only Lotus Notes won’t let you log out of the network if it can’t update itself, so she’d have to close all her other programs, then turn her computer box off manually.
Five minutes later. “Nick, my computer won’t turn off”.
No, it won’t - you have to close out of all your applications except Notes, then hit the power button.
“But I did that”, she cried. “Nothing’s happening.”
I looked over my shoulder. She had, indeed, closed out of all her programs. She can just hit the power switch now. She presses the button and, indeed, the computer fails to power down.
“I see your problem”, say I. “That’s the eject button for your floppy drive. The power button’s the big blue one next to it.” I shouldn’t have said that. I knew what was coming. And after getting that you-think-you’re-so-good-with-this-shit-but-you-don’t-know-everything look, she follows through with the snappy comeback that the universe is now demanding from her.
“No it’s not - that’s the ‘ON’ switch.” She said this loud enough for the entire department to hear. Now it’s somehow my fault that everyone thinks she’s a moron.