Regarding the left-right hijack, as a kid I managed to crush a fingertip in a door. It’s still really wonky looking. My parents actually offered to pay for plastic surgery to get it looking normal again, but I refused- if it was normal, I’d lose my ability to subtly rub my fingertips together to check which hand is my right, and would have to resort to the much more visible ‘L’ trick…
I’m somewhat cross-dominant, incidentally. I tend to pick up juggling tricks a lot faster with my left, for a start.
I know how to address an envelope, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to do so. It’s probably been years. I could see a young adult never having had to do it.
Now, if I have to write out a physical check instead of pay online, I really have to think about how to do it. The whole thing is so archaic.
How do they navigate stores with all the sales: “Buy Two, Get Another Half Off!”*, and the sign I saw in a Goodwill: “All 30% Sales Items Now an Additional 20% Off!”
Just decide to buy 'em and see what the total comes to at the register? (Though I’d bet even if you asked a clerk they couldn’t explain…)
*NOT a great deal… (I knew you were wondering)
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Last time I did this (a year ago?) I narrated it to myself in a flabbergasted tone, as if to say “WHY am I finding a tiny sticker with a denomination on it, and LICKING it?”
In 2002 or thereabouts I worked for a humane society that ran animal control for a county of about 200,000 folks, and we hired a new dispatcher whose resume mentioned her computer experience. Great! I thought. I’ll just train her on our persnickety database, and we’ll be good to go.
I did train her on the database, using the five-page manual I’d created for it (the documentation provided by the vendor was…less than stellar). But before I trained her on the database, it turned out that I had to train her on a computer mouse. Specifically, she didn’t know what it was or how to use it. Her “computer experience” amounted to having run a cash register.
I succeeded, eventually, in teaching her how to use the mouse to move the cursor. I failed to teach her that she didn’t have to groan like a constipated raccoon every time she moved the mouse. Not for lack of trying.
My kids say “Nana sent me a card in code again. Can you read it for me?” Of course, Nana gets out her old fountain pen and it does indeed look like 1776…
…
I had a Beginning Computer Graphics student lift her mouse straight up, keeping it level, while she wondered why her cursor wasn’t moving upwards.
I hadn’t realized before how we all make that 90º turn in our minds automatically… “UP on screen equals AWAY from me!”
My 32+yo roommate, who is quite sharp albeit not book smart, doesn’t know how to write a check or a bank deposit or withdrawal slip. She blames it on being educated in Arkansas.
Some of them are confusing. My phone has a browser and can do email; but it doesn’t do apps. Is that a smart phone or isn’t it?
– I have had to explain to farm interns that yes, there is such a thing as poisonous plants. And not only are there plants that are poisonous to humans if you eat them, there are plants that can cause you problems even if all you did was touch them.
(They had apparently never even heard of poison ivy.)
There are however very likely things in their lives that they assume everyone knows about which I have no clue.
This.
I just hate spreadsheets. I don’t want to have to type things into box X in order to have them show up in box Y. I don’t want to have to figure out which of the three thousand things they can probably do is best done by picking which of forty-seven supposedly intuitive symbols none of which mean anything to me. Much easier to use the calculator.
Depends how much time one spends doing things now ordinarily done on spreadsheets, of course. If I had to do a lot of it, I suppose I’d have to learn to use the things.
To be fair: there are lots of people, at any given moment, who are using computers that aren’t plugged in.
If the stamp’s so old you need to lick it, it’s probably for way less money than the actual postage.
They’ve all been self-stick for quite a few years now. (At least in the USA. Don’t know about elsewhere.)
– The envelope flap, you may have to lick. Or maybe not. Some of them are self-stick, too.
I was utterly confounded once when a new operating system (Mac) decided, for some reason, that default was the other way around.
Turned out you could reset it. But why they thought it was more “natural” to have the default be the other way – when their own previous system didn’t use it – I do not know.
Definitely a smartphone, and definitely one that runs apps… just not Android/iOS apps. A browser is an app, and the defining feature of a smartphone is the presence of an operating system. You may remember that PDA/phone hybrids from the late 90’s (like the Nokia 9210) are smartphones and were marketed as such.
When I was a kid, my dad was watering the lawn and he asked me to go to the faucet and turn off the water. I ran over the faucet and yelled “which way is off?” He said “to the right.”
Now, I was old enough at the time to know the difference between right and left. But I looked at the knob on the faucet and saw that if the top of the knob went to the right, the bottom would be going to the left, so I still didn’t know which way to turn it.
I don’t know about the Airman in ROtB’s unit, but the idea that “right” and “left” mean the top of the dial may have been the source of his confusion.
I use spreadsheets for certain types of lists, because the table/dividing lines are conveniently already there. If I used Word or an equivalent, I would have to insert a table.
I knew an accounting woman from years ago that wrote letters and other documents in Lotus. It was her go to program for accounting, why not everything else?
The first company I worked for after college had a company wide policy to write every text document in fucking Page Maker. No, that’s not a word processor, and it was a pain in the ass and a nightmare. And it wasn’t a publishing house or a newspaper, but a technology company. Madness.
When giving directions, my mother used to look at her hand for the wedding ring. No idea what she did before she got married.
Mom was left-handed and was “changed” in grade school. As a southpaw myself I find this barbaric. She found her way around just fine, but the smart ones learned to just follow and not ask questions.