This is what I was getting at. That, and they don’t have any curiosity about how to do things more efficiently or about how to do different things. My coworker was mystified when I told her to do a Crtl-V and a Crtl-C.
My mum’s 72. She is a world traveller - she has texted me from a disco in Moscow and she even has a WiFi connection at her home for the use of her guests. she quite able to keep up with technology however … she visited and wanted to use her laptop. She decides she’s going to have to go to an internet cafe. I have internet access at my home, but she in unconvinced that it will work for her. My system means you plug in a jack to the side of the computer which connects to an antenna on the roof. She doesn’t think her computer will connect to that. It does. But then that means I can’t be online at the same time … I don’t need to be. I could always get a splitter if this was a long term thing. She explains to me that my connection is through a phone line - it isn’t. I don’t have a landline phone. This doesn’t matter anyway, but she appears convinced that I’m lying. I try to connect her and can’t. I call the helpline and they explain the system is down for an hour or two. She is triumphant.
The next day she stalks off to an internet cafe then comes back complaining the service kept kicking out and it was really expensive. I pay good money for my service at home. I hand further connection attempts over to my daughter in the interests of my sanity. My daughter explains to her that we’ve captured the internet right here in this very room. We’ve been communicating with her using this system for YEARS. Five minutes later she’s online - but looking dubiously at the jack we’ve stuck in her laptop. Mum - we’re not raping your device! :dubious:
- Sometimes she says, I can get through to my hotmail. It doesn’t always happen though.
I notice in her choice of connections which now include ours, that there’s one for Australia.
- Oh, she sighs, that was the night I spent at your cousins, I told him it wasn’t going to work - he spent hours on it and finally I got on for about 5 minutes … is it going to affect my connection? I don’t want all these connections to interfere with the one I have at home because I have a very good connection at home.
- Well, you can set a default connection, I could delete your Australian connection, and this one for my house if you’d feel better.
- DELETE? she splutters, don’t want to delete anything.
- Well, you can use default settings, the computer will probably just pick them up when you get home. Actually I’m not seeing any UK connection option here.
- Look, she says with gritted teeth, I don’t use this laptop at home, it’s my travel laptop - I’m concerned that my computer connection at home won’t work because you and your cousin in Australia have been messing with my settings. :smack:
I overheard a couple of people the other day at the airport. The woman explained that they’d exchanged email addresses and so were going to be able to log on to each others computers and communicate in that way! These people were in their thirties.
People in their thirties at work refer to “My internet isn’t working” when they mean they can’t logon to their network account. Folks just don’t know the details of how things work sometimes. 
Submitted without comment.
I just finished training staff in the use of new software. Some people had eight hours training, some people who weren’t computer literate had 12 or more hours. The training for those people involved nothing more complicated than “To do X, click on the X button”. For twelve hours, I kid you not. One day I got a frantic call at home claiming they couldn’t do X because the X button was greyed out. OOOOOOKKKK…I figure out why it is wrong and talk them through the procedure for getting the X button to become available. Twenty minutes of frustration and slow explanation later, they tell me it’s still greyed out. I’m at a loss, until I realise that they are trying to click on some tabs instead of the X BUTTON. Did I mention the 12 hours of training?
I volunteer at a retirement center and I hate to be so cynical but a lot of these older people simply don’t WANT to understand things.
They have little old ladies that run to get the latest knitting and crotcheting magazines so they can make the most intricate designs and then say “I’m too old to understand computers,” when I try to show them.
If you can go through three pages of knitting instructions on how to make a very complex knitting/crochet stich and then measure everything out with math, you have the brain power to understand most computer things.
But people understand what they want to, and older people learn quick that if they feign stupidity people will let them get away with things.
And let’s face it did you ever try to tell an 80 year old person what to do? That don’t work, why 'cause “I’m 80 years old and I’ve lived long enough to do want I want.”
Would you like to play Kick the Can?
I support an old lady who has a nasty habit of randomly moving the mouse and clicking anywhere and everywhere, frequently and often. Once in a while, she hits something, but she doesn’t know what it was or what happened. And neither do I – she’s too fast.
It doesn’t occur to her that where or when you click is important. She sees me move the mouse and click, so she thinks that must be how it works.
Which has me screaming, “Stop! Stop! Don’t click until you know what you are clicking on!”
Are you me? I’m in the same position, in particular with one well experienced administrative assistant. She knows exactly who to call, what form to fill out, what account to debit a purchase, but she’s a typist. Meaning that she uses word in the same way she used the old IBM Selectric for years. She often calls me in to restore tool bars, turn on and off features, etc. She still has a hard time distinguishing between the browser window content (i.e. “The Internet”) and her desktop. She is getting better, but very slowly as she wrestles with the concepts of windows, Word with all the bells and whistles, and if she reads the prompts carefully, she won’t delete all her files. But that’s also part of it: she doesn’t even have some of the basics to know what the prompts mean or that there are functions and access to those functions that are common to most programs. I grew up with computers, and am comfortable with them. She didn’t, and has developed an uneasy relationship with them.
Vlad/Igor
She should be able to. The damn things should work like a typewriter, or a toaster. You put your bread in, cut or copy and paste, bingo, you’ve got toast.
Unfortunately, they don’t.
You didn’t have to know how the white out button worked on the IBM Selectric, you just knew that it did.
My 85 year old Dad gave up. I was just trying to teach him e-mail. His 88 year old brother kept sending him political glurgy shit and he didn’t like it. So he quit trying to learn the internet.
You should have seeen him trying to double-click! 
I printed out 15 pages of a Dope thread on Cash Cab, his favorite show. He said, “Some of those people are just nasty!”
My brother and sister in law changed their ISP recently. Their e-mail address had been XYZ@oldISP.com and they said they’d let us know what the new one was when they got it (XYZ@someobscureISP.com). I suggested getting a Gmail account, since they had to switch anyway.
“Oh, no, we can’t get Gmail where we live, we’re too far out.”
They’re in their 30’s, and she has some sort of degree in science. Crazy.
And there’s people who, like my mother, take notes with every little tiny detail but then don’t look them up.
I want a RTFM tshirt, another one that says “click is not right click,” one with “click is not double click” and one with “double click means without a meditation session in between.”
I count as the biggest personal triumps of my career the times I was able to get someone from “if I use the computer wrong, the factory might explode” to being able to create ads for puppies given away using Excel, send cropped screenshots of an error message using Paint, and extract reports from SAP without breaking into a nervous sweat.
Yeah, for many people, it’s sheer fear.
I ***AM ***your mom! Now go clean your room.
When my mother was in her 80s she decided to take a basic computer course. In the first class they learned to use the mouse, send and receive email, and create a Word document. When she got home she said “I never realized computers were that complicated, and you had to learn so many things.” She never went back.
My mom thought she coudn’t check her e-mail at my house because she’d turned off her computer at her house. I had a lot of fun telling her she hadn’t shut off the entire internet. And of course now, whenever the internet connection is running slow at my house, I call her up and make sure her computer is on.