I once had a user who asked where his emails had gone. I went to his office and he informed me of how he stored his emails in Outlook. For ones he might need again, but maybe not, he stores in his deleted items folder…But because he doesn’t like looking at the number of unread items in there, the regularly empties it. So, if he wants one of those emails he clicks on the deleted items and chooses the ‘recover deleted items’ from the action list… He was really upset when I told him that the items in that bucket get automatically deleted from the server after 40 days. Our mistake for assuming that items deliberately deleted twice were items he really didn’t want to delete!
We really should be allowed to point and laugh at certain people and not expect to lose our jobs.
Caps lock on - capital letters - caps lock off. My god, it drives me batty. Absolutely around the bend stark raving crazy. And I spend all day helping people with computers. We get all the other things (but what’s wrong with maximize? I can’t stand a non-maximized browsing experience. Got a new Mac today and found an awesome little program that makes the maximize work right on Macs - never got around to looking for one in the five years I had the old one, but man do I love it now!)
I don’t actually judge people for it, but I find myself getting irritated watching anyone using a computer if they are at all slower or less efficient at it. It makes me want to grab the mouse away from them and do it myself.
I also find the new mac mouse to be extremely irritating, and by extension, anyone in possession of it. It has two buttons like a PC mouse, but they aren’t actually buttons - they are just “areas of sensitivity” which I inevitably end up accidently pressing when trying to move the mouse. Some also have little sensitive areas on the side for activating exposé which I find impossible to hold the mouse without activated constantly. The slightly older mouse is also slightly annoying as the entire thing is a button, which while it isn’t as easy to accidently activate, if the mouse cord is under it it becomes impossible to depress.
Poor choice in background images. We’re talking about photos of grandkids, sports teams, bands, psychedelic patterns, Jesus, anime, and other things that make icons and text on the desktop nearly impossible to discern. On top of that, many of those backgrounds are either centered in a sea of black space, stretched out and proportioned oddly, or unevenly tiled.
As a system admin, the thing that annyoed me was passwords. Like the controller that used “1” as her password. Or the H/R Manager who used her name.
They have access to all the payroll and sensative info and that was their password. Then they had the nerve to complain to the GM after I changed the system to require EIGHT digits and or letters (with at least one of each) for everyone’s password. “It’s too hard to remember.”
So I go to the H/R manager’s office and yep you guessed it, she wrote her password on a sticky note and put it on her computer monitor.
Her reply, “Well…no one should be in my office.” As if a person looking to hack into a file wouldn’t THINK of going in her unlocked office when she’s at lunch. LOL
I guess the one that has been bugging me the longest is people who have no concept of their computer’s file system structure.
The “save everything to the Desktop” behavior is probably one manifestation of that. “My Desktop is my computer… where else would I put it?”
The tendency to save without paying a bit of attention to WHERE you saved it, and to give blank looks when asked “Well, where did you save it to?”… DO NOT tell me “in Microsoft?!” yeesh! This was spectacularly annoying back in the heyday of removable disks (floppies, SyQuests, Zip disks etc). But now we have network drives.
People who, when asked to look in a certain folder for something, try to do so by opening a program and going to the program’s File Menu ——> Open dialog-screen, hello, are you unaware of the Finder (or the Windows Explorer)?
People who can’t find something and to whom it simply does not occur to start off by opening their file hierarchy from the top and look in the possible folders. I just don’t get it. How can you not know that there is a disk (at least one) and it has folders containing files and subfolders and EVERYTHING that is on your computer is one of those?
OK then there’s the concept of network (internet in particular) and the difference between a file that IS on your computer versus being something you SAW on your computer but is hosted elsewhere. I can forgive someone for not getting that the folder the boss told them to save all their Excel files into is actually down the hall on a file server, especially if they aren’t geeky-technical. But you should comprehend that Google or the Straight Dop are not on your computer and that your Letter to Mom.doc file IS. And to use that knowledge to determine where and how to look for something if you can’t instantly find it.
Sometimes that’s caused by the geniuses who decide that it makes sense to force workers to have upwards of 30 passwords. One of my bosses almost fainted when he discovered I didn’t have a list in writing of all my passwords - but the thing is, I just used the same password in every system that accepted the same format. Instead of more than 30 passwords (Boss had more than 70), I only had 4. That was against company policy: my opinion of that company policy wasn’t very polite.
Glad to know someone got a laugh. That scene is so burned into my brain that I can’t even hear the number 37 anymore without having to stifle a chuckle.
Someone at works refuses to use tabs in their browser. That is annoying. Definitely a “so what” thing, but still. Tabs are just efficient. Then again, it’s the same guy that thinks Google is evil, and he refuses to use Google (but no problem with YouTube!).
We have many large shared drives with easy to understand directory structure–alphanumeric. Not so hard, we all learned the alphabet in preschool.
Except for one of our bosses, who because he “can never find anything in that mess” has taken it on himself to rename all of his commonly used folders with “AA” to bump them to the top of the directory so he can find them easier.
So our network drive now looks like:
AA_Budget
AA_Customer
AA_Reports
…
Often, I’ll be looking for a folder, or my shortcuts will have broken, and I’ll go there and sure enough it’s been renamed to “AA_”. :mad::mad:
Heh. Several years ago my sister was doing some sort of clerical work for her best friend’s parent’s business (designing educational books for children). Apparently this outfit used Photoshop extensively, and because I was pretty darned good with Photoshop she thought I might like to consider working there. So she took me in for a tour of the place and was showing me all their shiny new Windows computers … with shiny new 19" monitors … all set to 800x600 :smack:
Maybe more recent versions of Windows are better at this (I think they were running Win98), but I was just boggled. I was — and still am — a Mac user, and as long as I’ve been using Macs the OS detects your monitor size and automatically selects the appropriate default for that size (but of course lets you change it to your own preference). Still, Windows going to 800x600 by default regardless of screen size is one thing, but the user leaving it there …
Dear Og, I was completely baffled by both Apple and Microsoft going on and on and on about their amazing new search features every time they released an OS upgrade. I was always asking, “Who the hell needs that? Don’t people know where they’re saving things?” I finally asked that question on a Mac mailing list and discovered the answer was, “No, no they don’t. You wouldn’t believe how many people just hit “OK” when the Save dialog pops up without ever looking to see where the file is going.”
The other answer is “in Adobe”. This is why I wish software companies didn’t feel compelled to include their company name in in their product names, i.e. “Microsoft Word”, “Microsoft Excel”, “Adobe Photoshop”, “Adobe Acrobat”, etc.
To add my own peeve to the list: people who set their screensaver to activate after one or two minutes of inactivity. My sisters’ computers are like that, and it’s maddening as hell when I’m visiting and I want to show them some cool video I found on YouTube, and they end up missing key bits of the video because the screensaver keeps kicking in while the video is still playing (and of course, if I’ve blown the video up to full-screen, the screensaver kicks it back down to normal size).
For people that have no problems with maximizing their apps, I have to wonder: how big are your monitors? The whole point of a 24" monitor (or whatever) isn’t see to see a single program bigger, but to see more stuff on the screen.
I’ve often heard it said that people who “grew up” on Macs have no problems with multiple windows in the workspace, whereas people who grew up in Windows don’t know how to deal with the current, non-MDI-ness of Windows, and want to maximize everything.
You have it completely backwards. The larger monitor allows you to see all your email, large spreadsheets, high resolution pictures, all the map, etc. Alt-tab takes a second.
Actually, the whole point of large monitors is to see porn life-size.
Heh-heh. Seriously, though, the actual point of a larger monitor is to see more stuff, not the same stuff only bigger. And yes, one part of that is being able to see more of a spreadsheet or more of an image.
I think the point of higher resolution is to see more stuff on the desktop. The larger screen merely makes the resolution proportional, so fonts don’t end up too small to read.
I don’t find my 1680x1050 resolution allows enough space to comfortably put more things in view; there’s still a healthy amount of overlap amongst the windows, so not maximising achieves very little for my needs.
Alt-Tab (or Cmd-Tab) only really works if you have a couple of applications open at any one time. I typically have five to 10 applications or so at any one time, depending on what I’m doing. Cmd-Tab works exceptionally well when I’m going back and forth between two programs constantly, but when I have to introduce more applications into the workflow, it’s easier and quicker to select the window of the other application directly. At home (on the Mac), I’ve also introduced “spaces” into my workflow. It’s awesome, except I can’t get Cmd-Tab to work to my liking (oh, well).
Until recently (in relative terms), Mac screens had always been 72 dpi. Bigger screen meant more real estate; that was all. Sure, you could always purchase aftermarket gear that changed that, but the general rule of thumb was always 72 dpi. As I get older and my eyes are less capable of focusing, I still prefer to keep to 72 dpi or even 96 dpi (the previous Windows standard). My work laptop has a fancy, super-high resolution screen that frankly, just sucks. Non-native resolutions are blurry, and Windows still isn’t resolution independent. (again, oh, well).
Finally, there are some times when I’ll maximize an app, but I have to have a real need for it, such (as was mentioned upthread) as to look at a large spreadsheet.
I resisted using tabs in the browser for a long time. I use them now because my browser makes it easy, but I think they are much less efficient in some ways because you cannot ALT+TAB between them.
If anyone know a keyboard shortcut for switching between browser tabs, let me know. My fingers are yearning for one.
