As a complement to this thread where people admit to their own bad computing habits, in this thread, you get to vent your spleen over what annoys you when you see other people doing things on a computer that you’d never do yourself. Here are mine:
[ul]
[li]People who save everything to the desktop. I like my desktop to be clean and clutter-free. I hate hunting around in a sea of icons looking for a particular shortcut. I only like having shortcuts to frequently used applications readily available.[/li][li]If you must have icons all over your desktop, at least do me the courtesy of keeping them aligned and orderly. The only thing worse than a desktop full of icons is a desktop full of randomly scattered icons, especially when they are stacked atop one another so that one is partly hidden.[/li][li]People who write by hand information that they could more easily copy from the computer. Last night my nephew was writing by hand a list of filenames. I was going to show him how he could do this in something other than Pencil 1.0 but he wanted to write them out himself. Okay, whatever floats your boat.[/li][li]Icons without extensions. It doesn’t look complete if all I see is “sales_report” instead of “sales_report.xls”.[/li][li]people who dont capitalize or use punctuation (yes, I did that on purpose).[/li][/ul]
I have more, but I can’t think of what they are. I’m sure others here will remind me of them.
How do these habits that other people have affect your life? Unless you are working on other people’s computers all day – and maybe you are – why do you care if I have icons on my desktop or don’t turn on the option that allows me to see file extensions? (When, by the way, the default setting in Windows is OFF?)
These are invariably the same people who make a mess of their PCs, and then ask you to help them fix things. It takes you 30 minutes to wade through the crapola before you can begin to figure out what’s wrong. Been there…
People that don’t know how to use shortcut keys for copy and paste, and other things. It’s annoying looking at the projector waiting for someone to move their mouse all the way up to the copy icon, then all way back down to the insertion point, then all way back up to the paste icon, then all the way back to the text, highlight it without knowing how to select whole words, then go back up to the italics icon.
People who blow all windows up to full-screen “so they can see” - the only way to navigate among windows is via the taskbar. They don’t seem to grasp that the text size remains the same, and a lot of websites just show you the same size block of text, but with huge margins.
A co-worker of mine has a bad habit of changing people’s display settings and not changing them back
I work with some-one who, when moving between windows, closes them rather than minimises. Then opens them (by clicking through the file pathway) when she needs them again moments later.
My mother opens every link she clicks in not just a new tab but a new window. I once was trying to help her find something online and she had 37 IE windows open.
In my case, comparatively short-term workers leave files all over the desktop of their assigned computer with no sensible (to an outside observer) order to them. Then after they’re gone, someone’s gotta go through and figure out what project each belongs to, and put them into well-organized folders. That someone is me.
a) Those who have EVERY possible toolbar so that they only have like 30% of the screen available
b) My coworkers have no idea that after the IT installed IE7 (and then 8) you had to go through a simple process of confirming a couple of things, so that each time they used it thay had to click on “cancel” or something.
c) Those who never remember how to attach something or configure the printer after you taught 100000e26 times.
Thank you, thank you! I thought it was just me. I’ve wanted to run up and seize the keyboard from them and show them how it’s done. You can only hope that people doing a demo with a computer might actually know how to use it efficiently.
Oh, and people using Power Point and not putting it in slide show mode, just scrolling through the slides one by one on the left. Maybe I’m being a little anal about that, but I find the mini slides to be a distraction. And when you’re looking at biology diagrams, the bigger the better.
OMG! NeighborLady, this and the fact that you still can’t remember Ctl-V is “Paste.”
It was paste when I first taught it to you eight months ago, it was paste when we’ve used it every couple of weeks as I’ve worked with you since and, as of last Wednesday night, it was still paste.
And please still saying Wow!, as I click on an icon and then making whinnying noises and rocking (I SWEAR) every step along the way after that. WHAT IS THAT?
Using the down arrow at the bottom of the scroll bar to scroll down a long document.
No one ever seems to realize that if you click on the scroll bar, you move up or down an entire screen (I’m betting that at least some of the people posting in this thread have never noticed this). The down arrow only moves you line by line and is much slower.
Most people also don’t know that CTRL-Insert copyes and Shift-Insert pastes, often in places where Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V don’t work.
By all means, drop by my cubicle to show me that one thing you were talking about earlier. I’ll pull up the web page, or spreadsheet, or source code, or trend plot, or whatever it is, and we can look at the problem together. Nice to see you by the way. How are the kids?
Ah yes, I think I understand now. The new combobulator script must be miscalculating the — but which values is it supposed to — Aaaaah! Aaaaaah! AAAAH! You’re touching my screen! You’re touching my screen! You’re getting your fat, greasy fingerprints all over my screen, you clodhopper! Stop it! Do your pointing with a goddamn pencil or something! What is wrong with you?! AAAAH!
I think that’s hardly true. I work with a guy whose real desktop and his computer desktop are both a total mess. He’s a great 'old school programmer (he’s over 50 years old). It seems like he’s always looking for something, but you’ll never have to help him fix things.
However since this is a thread about people’s annoying habits… I think it’s because he IS old school… but this guy types on his computer keyboard like it’s a manual typewriter. WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! The concept of touch typing is lost on him.
My wife does variations on this. I’m sure I’ve told her that <ctrl><enter> adds “http://www.” and “.com” around anything she types in the address bar.
Not only that but she over uses her mouse. For example she’ll type something in a search engine or an online form, and then use her mouse to either click in the next box (instead of tab), or use her mouse to click on the search button (instead of the enter key).
