My poor mom. Poor mom. I pretty much yelled at her today.
Mom hands me two CD-Rs. I had scanned some sheet music on my scanner for her (for whatever reason—backup or something) and put them on these two CDs. The CDs said “[Title of musical piece] SHEET MUSIC, Mac/PC” They’re just graphic files of sheet music. That’s all they are.
She wants me to “play” the CD on the CD player. You see, she’d performed the songs from the aforementioned sheet music at church, and she’d assumed that these CDs are the recordings that were made of her singing.
I had to explain to her several times that it wasn’t going to play music, even though it was a CD. I had to explain that no, it wouldn’t play on the computer, either. It wasn’t going to play anywhere, because it wasn’t audio music, it was a graphic file of some sheet music. It wasn’t going to play, any more than her paper sheet music would play if I stuffed it into the CD-ROM drive of my computer, or if we placed the paper on the turntable of a record player.
Now, I don’t blame her that much for not understanding that the CD contained sheet music (even though, of course, it was clearly written on the CD’s label). It was the belligerant, “But why won’t you play this CD for me?” after I repeatedly kept explaining it to her that made me crazy.
I know we’re all sometimes as clueless, but sometimes it’s funnier than other times. I figured I’d start a thread so that some of the rest of you could share your encounters with of some of the more belligerant clueless.
Years ago I was logging into a BBS (this was before HTML, and the internet was unknown to the masses) and like many or most login screens it showed asterisks and not letters as I typed my password.
My Mom saw this and asked why it did that. I said something like “that’s so if somebody is watching, they don’t see my password.”
She then asked, “How does it know if somebody is watching?”
I used to temp, and at some assignments the presence of an additional person in the office required people to shift to another workstation. I’m sure this is kind of a pain if you’re used to being in the same spot every day, but that wasn’t the problem people had with it. They were often very concerned that if Mary logged onto Jane’s computer then she’s be unable to access her own files on the network, and would just get all Jane’s stuff instead. More than once I had to carefully explain that if Mary logged in with her own name and password then she’d get the same network files she always did, and it wouldn’t matter which computer she was at. I never added “That’s the whole point of having a network and a password in the first place, you idiot!”, but I thought it real loud.
Reminds me of this top 100 quote on bash (a compendium of funny stuff that’s happened on IRC…the page I linked is work safe…some of the other quotes are questionable).
One of my housemates about 12 years ago was a guitarist/vocalist and he and his friends were always jamming, and were semi-computer-literate as well. To record their stuff they were using cobbled-together analog equipment including a stereo VCR as the primary recording medium, and always having headaches trying to edit.
When I first got SoundEdit 16, I came over and told him that I had his problem solved, we’d just record the band digitally and edit it in SoundEdit and burn CDs (I had one of the fairly-early 2x SCSI CD burners).
And then spent the next two days trying, without success, to explain that this wasn’t the same as MIDI, which he already had.
Once, during my grad student days, my advisor sent around an email to inform various people that he would be away for a 3-week family vacation. He added that if anyone wanted to reach him, they could email him at nick@beach.lajolla.notedu.
Some two weeks into this vacation, my officemate turned to me in frustration and complained that he just could NOT get hold of our advisor. I started to laugh, but then realized he was serious. “Umm… that’s because the address he gave isn’t real, Andy. See the ‘notedu’ on the end of it?” My otherwise bright officemate then turned a remarkable shade of crimson when he realized he’d completely missed the joke. No one would have been the wiser, except for the fact that he decided to bitch mildly at my advisor upon his return. :smack:
My friend/boss loves the concept of using technology, but is a complete technophobe when it comes to doing anything himself. It has taken patient tutelage over the better part of 7 years to get him to the point where he’ll read and respond to email on his own. He was always afraid that by hitting the wrong button on the keyboard he would “erase everything” on the hard drive.
I hope you had some fun with this… plenty of opportunity to wind her up, get her to email Google to see if they can restore the web from their back-up copies, etc etc…
Wish I’d have thought of that. Actually, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t, since she was really upset, and I was having problems not wetting my pants laughing. Turns out she’d just accidentally moved the shortcut to IE to another part of her desktop.
Many years back my Dad bought a “Pull-Out” stereo and then bolted it into his dash so it won’t get stolen. My Kid Brother and I spent hours trying to explain the concept of the Pull Out, to no avail.
So, when he refused to get a cell phone, instead installing a much more expensive car phone in his truck–so that he didn’t have to carry it around with him–neither of us spent much time trying to explain to him that you don’t have to take a cell phone everywhere. That was 3 years ago, he still has the car phone.
I’ve taken to just replying “no” alot to people when they go on about their computer problems.
“I clicked the thing for the Internet and it popped up that I connected but Yahoo didn’t come up and there’s a little thingy in the corner with an X.
Know what I mean?”