Other people's annoying computer habits

In My Humble Opinion
81

I love it when they say there was an error message. What did it say? I dunno.:mad:

Or, when I’m walking them through a fix, they keep trying to jump ahead, or inject comments about what it did when we are in the resolution process. I end up having to tell them, “Just do exactly what I’m telling you to do. Nothing else.”

I like the ones that say ‘Help!’ with a message in the body along the lines of, “IT, I need help!”. I delete these. I’m really not qualified to give them the help they actually need unless it’s a 2x4 upside the head.

82

speaking of monitor resolutions, and especially those that NEED to have their 15" at 1600x1200… when surfing the web, there’s this wonderful thing called “text size” or “zoom”. Are you squinting to read the tiny ass text on your tiny ass monitor? Try CTRL “+” (CONTROL and the Plus (+) key), to increase your text size. No you don’t have to change your resolution, just change the freekin’ text size. Even without stupid resolution/monitor sizes, some websites just happen to use the smallest, hard to read text. Oh, and CTRL “-” (minus) makes text smaller.

83

I’ve thought of another one. Came to mind while reading the thread about Microsoft Office (Mac) 2008. It’s as much a Word thang as a stupid end-user thang, but damn it’s annoying:

JUST BECAUSE MICROSOFT WORD CAN PERFORM A SPECIFIED FUNCTION DOES NOT MEAN THAT WORD IS THE APPROPRIATE APPLICATION TO DO IT IN

and the corollary: Any feature or function that you can imagine doing in any program on any computer has probably been folded into Microsoft Word somewhere. Badly, inelegantly, some truly horrid implementation (which means it will fit right in with the rest of Word), but Word has always been the ultimate kitchen sink (and cesspool) of computer applications. Yes you can draw (badly, in primitive fashion) and you can paste image data from the clipboard or insert a downloaded JPEG. That does not make Word a graphic arts app. Yes you can create a table with rows and columns. That sure as hell doesn’t make Word a spreadsheet or, god forbid, a database. You can, in fact, make Word execute a web URL or an email address, but that does not qualify Word as a bookmark manager or a contact manager. And while you can position graphical elements and intersperse them amongst your text, and have your text arrayed in mutliple columns, Word is not a page layout program.

It’s a freaking word processor. Letter to grandma? Yeah. Term Paper for English Lit 401, Fall semester, with footnotes? Sure. Your new novel, complete with table of contents and chapter headings? Absolutely. (It might not be my choice of word processors, but that’s a different matter).

But please DON’T use Word for things that Excel, FileMaker, Eudora, Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, etc, should be used for instead!

Yeesh. Some people get shown Word the first time they sit down at a computer and they never learn anything else. If you really had to try to make one program do everything, guess what? A word processor isn’t the one to go with.

And as for Microsoft, no, folding in yet another array of stupid and inappropriate ancillary features is never going to turn this bloated turd into a word processor that is pleasant to use, or powerful and effective. Why don’t you rip out the stuff that has nothing to do with word processing and make a sleek lean fast stable program that doesn’t make everyone curse and hurl objects at the computer screen in frustration?

84

What annoys me the most is the fact that people don’t read what it says on their screen.

Them: Every time I try to do such and such I get an error.
Me: What does the error say?
Them: …

I swear every time someone sits down to a computer with a newly installed browser, when they try to use a search engine and get the alert warning them about sending information over the internet, they just hit the X in the corner, then hit search again. Repeatedly. Until finally they call someone over saying “I can’t get this search to go through”.

Or they just hit “Next”, “Next”, “Next”, “Next”… When installing something, then complain because it didn’t put icons where they wanted them, or installed something extra they didn’t want.

Why do they think all those letters are on their screen?

Besides that, a lot of people just seem have fundamental misunderstandings about how computers work, even if they’ve been using them for years.

The whole concept of files and folders is often lost on them. They actually think the music they listen to is in their media player software, or that their text document is in their word processor.

As mentioned earlier, they often confuse websites and programs. They’ll think a computer “doesn’t have” a website because there isn’t a shortcut to it where they expect to find it.

They confuse their browser and home page. As in:
Me: What browser do you use?
Them: Yahoo.
If you tell them to go to youtube.com, they’ll type it into the search form on their home page. What’s really annoying about this is since technically works that way (if they click on the first result), it’s impossible to convince them that that isn’t the right way to do it. And, every single time I try to switch someone to a different browser, they refuse to accept that it’s an equivalent product until I set the homepage to what it was on their old browser:
Them: I can’t use this Chrome-thing because it doesn’t have my email on it.

There are a lot other little things that annoy me, like for instance, people who think the correct and only way to find a product, or research a topic is to type it in their location bar and add .com to the end (thankfully, most people stopped doing that in the late 90s). Although these things really do annoy me (I can’t even watch other people use a computer), I don’t really hold them against people. That is, with the exception of people not reading what comes up on their screen. Because in that case it’s not ignorance, it actually seems more like arrogance. The designers and programmers take the time to put text into their software, I don’t know why people think it doesn’t applies to them.

85

  1. People who buy and use laptops when they should have bought PCs. You know what? Cheap laptops don’t make your architect’s office look any better and they are SLOWER and HARDER TO USE for your staff and for the poor IT people who have to fix them.

  2. People who can’t set up their own Outlook profiles. Person moves to a new desk, clicks Outlook, new profile wizard starts, they call IT. Every. Single. Time. IT’S A WIZARD PEOPLE, 3 simple questions and you’re done!!!

  3. Ref. not showing file extensions / Windows default is not to show them: Windows defaults are wrong for a lot of reasons, that’s why they’re customisable!

  4. My stupid boss who can’t do simple things like log on to the Terminal Server from home even though I sent him a 10 bullet point e-mail explaining exactly how to do it. And to add to this, idiots who want explanatory notes about any kind of IT issue then call anyway. WHY DID YOU WASTE MY TIME!!!???

86

Gah! My wife does this. “I don’t need to bookmark things, my bookmarks are already too disorganized. I’ll just go to google every time.” GAH.

87

Alt-tab works correctly for newer MDI apps (like, Office 2003 or later).

88

Along the lines of people misusing or misunderstanding terminology: file vs. folder. Unfortunately, office-type folks seem to think about “a bunch of documents in a file” instead of “a bunch of files in a folder,” which leads to much confusion.

I must confess, although I have neatly organized and structured bookmarks, I can pull up xkcd by typing xk-down arrow-enter, and that’s way faster than clicking on the “webcomics” button and then finding xkcd at the bottom of the list with a mouse. Most of my favorite websites pop up at the top of the list within two characters, or maybe three. In those cases, bookmarks are required only in case I forget the Web site.

89

No, no, I do it your way too. What I DON’T do is

  • go to my bookmarks to go to www.google.com
  • type a fragment of a URL into the search box
  • hit enter before any suggestions come up
  • manually go through the search results and click on the site I want
90

:eek: Really? She does that? :eek:

91

People using Windows.

92

Now that I got that out of my system…

People who use the mouse for EVERYTHING, who wouldn’t know a key combination command if it bit them in the face. Please, just a few? Command-A, C, X, V, W, Q at least? Please?

93

This happened where I work recently. I work at a hospital, and a meeting invite was accidentally sent to the ENTIRE hospital. So people Replied All to say they didn’t need to “be on this distribution list”. Then when that went on for awhile, still other people Replied All to tell people not to Reply All because NONE of us needed to get these e-mails. Which prompted still more people to Reply All that they, too, did not need to recieve these e-mails. Rinse, repeat, with the “please don’t Reply All” people getting progressively more agitated (and still not realizing they were also part of the problem). It was two weeks until if finally died down.

The “To” line in the meeting invite was clearly the distribution list for the entire hospital, too - it wasn’t like people could’ve thought they were replying to just a few people.

94

People who don’t understand the concept of Windows Explorer and refuse to learn. Until we had a major change in our file system recently, I was getting questions almost daily about why a certain PDF wasn’t opening.

“Are you trying to open it in Word?”

“I’m just trying to open it with the File – Open.”

“Yeah, I get that. But are you in Word?”

“I’m in Microsoft.”

sigh

And then people who refuse to try anything at all themselves when there’s a problem. They just freeze. Like when they can’t get the copier to copy and have no idea why. And then when I come to look, I notice the big glaring red light next to the “Printer” button that they didn’t bother to push. Or mention to me. Or even notice. And that when I push said “Printer” button, the machine gives me a nice, neat error message telling me that someone sent a network print job, but the machine is out of paper. Which the user could have solved in five seconds without my help.

95

Seen it with my own eyes. I’m so not kidding. :smack:

As a professional Linux administrator with almost a decade of experience, you can have my Vista machine when you pry it, the flight stick, and the game CD case from my cold, dead hands.

96

No kidding. The hoops I have to jump through to get games working on Linux…every time I have to struggle or fiddle with something to get even basic functionality, I think, “And this would just work in Windows.”

97

shorfilnamsthbugmejun.doc

Translation: Some people in my office learned to use computers a VERY long time ago, when there were more restrictions on file names. I’ve tried to tell them that you can use spaces, capital letters, etc., and that you have more characters to work with, so you can give your files names that do what names are supposed to do.

Doesn’t work. They’ll call me to their offices to help them find some file. Once we clear up the fact that no, they did not save it in their Word, or in their Microsoft, we can move on to trying to distinguish tomsmithletjunmom.doc from tomsmithletjulmom.doc.

Also, my boss who if, while typing a document, realizes she made a typo, will move the cursor to right before the error, then re-type the WHOLE THING, sort of editing what she’d previously typed, as she goes. By the time she’s done with a one-page document, there’s two pages of this weird stream-of-consciouness mishmash down at the bottom.

98

I have to say that this is largely the fault of the companies that write the media player software. They insist on importing all your media files into their “Library” or whatever, and thereafter never treat them as files, but rather selections in their software. This is no doubt done intentionally to confuse people into thinking that only this software is capable of playing that media. As if to say, You can’t copy these videos or songs, or use any other software to play them. The first time I used iTunes, I wanted to get at the actual file of the song that was playing, but iTunes really wasn’t about to let me do it. I had to do a separate filesystem search for it.

Ok, that’s pretty bad.

Gah!

99

Or you could’ve right-clicked on the song and told iTunes to show it in Finder or whatever the windows equivalent is called now.

100

I’m pretty sure I tried. This was very early iTunes. I’m telling you, the software really didn’t want to admit to me that it was an actual file.

I don’t use iTunes myself, so I can’t confirm how it works now.