Part of my job entails offering technical support to a small client base on a very broad range of computer-related issues. I’m used to dealing with people who are frigtened and bemused by the whole issue, but yesterday, I had one that took the biscuit.
I told the client to drag a file (that I had emailed) onto the desktop.
She said that she didn’t understand what I meant, so I explained that the desktop was the screen background that is visible when Windows starts - the thing with the icons on it.
She said that she still didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I explained that I wanted her to click and hold on the icon in the email message, then move the mouse so that it was over the top of a blank space on the background, then let go.
She said that she didn’t understand what I meant.
After quite a bit more banter, which only drove us both yet deeper into confusion, she asked whether, when I said ‘click’, I meant her to press down on the button on the mouse.
Yep, that was it; I was dealing with a client that was in charge of a computer, but simply didn’t understand the term ‘click’; this wasn’t just an isolated gap in her knowledge, but rather a general indication of her level of familiarity with the thing, yet still, she’s in charge of a computer - the computer that happens to run the stock, sales and accounting functions for the company where she works. Does this scare anyone else as much as it scared me?
I guess in the computer help area I am an Old fart now.
I use to have that conversation daily in the early 90’s.
I have actually had a user leave her space heater on overnight, aimed at her PC. A (486/66 Zeos) it partially melted. Same user really did get white out on the screen, allowing me to make the joke that she was so stupid, that she tried to correct the Word Perfect error with whteout. (It is possible she really did try this, she really was this dumb)
I really did field questions on the “ANY” key. I got so used to it, I would descibe the Tilde key to them and tell them that was the “ANY” key because of the Spanish Enyay letter. you know ~ over n. (ñ)
Remember PEBKAC: “Problem Exists Between the Keyboard And the Chair”
Ahh, the days of working at my campus computer help line:
“Oh, I need to plug the modem into a phone line in order to access the Internet?”
“My computer told me its going to update the clock for Daylight Savings Tim…should I click OK?”
“My disk won’t read…can you fix it?”… as he quite seriously holds out a floppy disk that has an obvious crease and cracks in the cover
And the best: we were closed for the weekend and some guy left 5 very nasty voicemails regarding an issue with is Internat access account (it required a password change, which if he had read the login screen he could have accomplished on his own.
I could have contacted him first thing on Monday morning, but he never, not once, in any of his tirades gave us any identifying info about who he was. I saved those messages and played them back for him when he showed up Monday afternoon pissed off that it still had not been addressed.
Taking things down to basics, my coworkers and I basically process paperwork and enter data using a computer database. We commonly surf the net during downtime and lunch break. One of the women I work with doesn’t have a computer at home; the only computer she uses is the one at work, so her knowledge is pretty limited. A few weeks ago, our superivisor showed us how to access the company’s online e-mail server.
Supervisor: “Go to webmail dot companyname dot com.”
Coworker: “What?”
S: “Webmail dot companyname dot com. It’s on the web.”
C: “The what?”
S: “The web. You’ve been on the web before.”
C: “No, I don’t think so.”
S: “Yes, you have.”
C: “No, I don’t…the web? What’s that?”
S: “The internet. I know you’ve…”
C: “Oh! The internet! I didn’t…oh!”
Once she finally got onto the e-mail site, she was apparently unaware of that she can bookmark it, as I’ve told her at least three times since what the URL is, so she could write it down on a Post-It.
My worst was a woman who called me up several hundred pages into printing a massive pdf that she had opened in Word for some reason (result: thousands of pages of garbage characters), and then, while I was trying to find the print job in one of our many disorganized print spools to kill it, tried to set the phone down for a minute because “the printer says it’s out of paper.”
:smack:
I just got into an argument with my manager and a cow-orker about the best time to upgrade our blackberry server. My position is we do it during normal business hours because there’s less reliance on Blackberry email - most people are in the office in front of their computers. My f***ing thick-skulled colleague said something to the effect of “Bob Vice-President-of-the-Company” is in meetings all day - he uses his blackberry all day. Our boss strokes his chin thoughtfully while listening to this neanderthal support monkey blather on. Idiots.
But end-users? Err. All I can say is I’m glad I’m the Great And Powerful Oz these days, and don’t have to deal with them. My favorite was a Salesman who was working from home & trying to print a document (to a printer in the office). Instead of calling support, he called his manager and reported “VPN is down”. Manager, of course, knee-jerked, escalated, I was called back to the office from lunch, and after approximately 2 hours, many phone calls to idiot salesman , his manager, and others in the chain of command, I determined that the salesman was trying to print to his default printer - in the office - and couldn’t understand why the paper wasn’t coming out of the printer sitting on his desk, at home, that he’d never even set up to use with his new work laptop. The truth is, I think he expected the printed document to somehow magically come out of his laptop, though he never would actually come right out and admit it. Ah, those salesfolks.
.
You know, some people will just never get computers.
My boss is fantastically ignorant of all computer things. He double clicks everything he wants to open, hasn’t the faintest idea of of how to copy and paste, and never uses the enter key to submit something (must drag the pointer to the enter button and click). Watching him do anything on the computer is very frustrating, especailly the one fingered typing. And he’s in front of the thing 8 hours a day. I fear that the word desktop is as foreign to him as the Russian language.
The CD doesn’t work when it has your kid’s candy stuck to it.
The UPS can’t be plugged into it’s self and run.
You can’t connect to the Internet when the modem is plugged back into the modem.
Stop turning the monitor brightness down before you leave, the next shift has to call your boss to tell him they can’t enter data. Time after time.
Backups of your files are for data only, don’t tell me you need two hundred and fifty disks to do your backup. The production supervisor asked for that many in front of one of the owners. We laughed out loud for a while and couldn’t stop. It turns out most of that was for porn backup. Some policies were made a bit more clear to him.
Do not remove the Ethernet cable while dusting your computer. The whole network goes down. The connector has a tag on each computer stating this. This happened often enough to be a major annoyance. I was so happy to get a LAN network. At this point it was someone else’s problem.
I had this happen twice.
I also had a good user wondering what he should do when his 5 year old UPS unit failed. I reminded him that he was now on a laptop and it has a “Built in Battery backup you know”. He was sheepish and we both laughed.
I just got off the phone with a person who didn’t understand what I mean by “close the program” and had no idea that you could type a URL into the address bar – or even what the address bar was (I assumed he didn’t know “URL,” either, – that’s a given – so I kept spelling out the exact URL for him). Or where it was. Or that anything existed that wasn’t on the web page he was accessing.
I literally had to tell him “Do you see the bar that says ‘<name of URL> – Netscape’?”
Now, do you see the words “File, Edit”?
Now do you see the bar that says <the name of the source URL>?
Type <URL> there.
No, not in the place that says “Search.” :rolleyes:
The next time it happens, look in a mirror. You’ll be 12 years younger. If you care to take a six-minute trip back to 1993, this page from the CBC’s archives has a wma file from a news broadcast on internet (rarely referred to as the internet).
This TV news item tells of the sophisticated new electronic bulletin-board system called Freenet. “I just discovered how to save a file to the hard disk, now we have Freenet.”
“it’s all free? Unbelievable.”
Other stuff like that, from radio and TV broadcasts, is here.
For whatever reason, the CBC servers are slow at the moment. But you might find the wait worth it for the trip down memory lane. Twelve years really is an eon.
It’s not economy to network multple printers and give all people access to most of them. Some are special label machines that cost you a buck a label. There’s always some idiot that keeps sending documents about fifty times, until you see them at a printer bitching that it doesn’t print. You then go to their computer and look to where the documents went. Then you tell them to go to so snd so’s office to get their fifty print outs.
Trying to talk somebody through installing something from a CD, over the phone:
Me: Okay, you’ve got the command prompt open. Type d:\setup and press enter.
User: It says, “Bad command or file name.”
Me: Okay, just type d: and press enter.
User: Same thing.
Me: Try it again (as I listen carefully…)
User: [tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap] Bad command or file name.
Me: How are you spelling “:”?
User: C-O-L-I-N, just like Colin Powell.
