Seconded. :eek:
Like the OP, my dad goes to freeality.com and types his query into the Google search bar there when he wants to search something. He’s actually a pretty sharp guy with a long history in computers–he worked on computers before most people had ever thought of having one in their homes, and he’s directly related to one of the managers of the ENIAC project–but he can not be convinced that that’s exactly the same thing as going to google.com and typing in the query there. He has honestly believed for a handful of years that using freeality.com lets you use all of the search engines offered at once.
You’re in for a rude awakening.
This is connected to that thing about not wanting websites to show up in the history, isn’t it? 
It’d be even faster to hit <Windows Key>+E…
>I just want to say that that is freaking AWESOME
>Seconded.
I’m glad you liked it.
She just thought I was an idiot, and moved on.
I have a cow-orker who does something similar, but not for email. She uses Word as though it were Windows Explorer, doing all her file management through the File:Open dialog.
:smack: I tried this, only my computer is running reaaaaallllly slloooooollyyy, for some unknown reason. So it didn’t work. So I tried it again. Then I thought, well, maybe you have to hold it down until it comes up. So I tried it and held it for about 10 seconds, still nada.
Five minutes later, hundreds of “My Computer” windows came up. Maybe a thousand. I played Whack-A-Mole with them for a few minutes before I figured out I could Cntrl-Alt-Del my way to the Task Manager and End Task my way out of the Hitchcockian nightmare! 
I had to update a PowerPoint presentation once–it was a talk that my PI was giving. The previous coordinator had made it, and the data had changed, so I just wanted to go in and plug in new numbers. However, when I clicked on the first chart, which was a bar graph, something was missing. Something seemed really weird…
And then it dawned on me: the chart had been created, piece by piece, entirely out of Autoshapes. It looked exactly like a regular PowerPoint chart would look, as seen in something like the first picture here. It was as though the person who had made it had seen a picture of what PowerPoint does with chart data and tried very hard to approximate it using lines and shapes and numbers in text boxes. Now, I’ve done a lot of PowerPoint work, and getting everything to line up just perfectly would be a complete bitch, as things snap to a grid that doesn’t always allow for artistic license. It must have taken ten times longer to make than it should have.
Just about ALL of my coworkers do this very same thing. I’ve tried to spread the word about Windows Explorer, but with no success. Everyone thinks that going through Word is just fine. Until I get the inevitable, “Why isn’t this PDF opening properly” query once a week. :rolleyes:
More on topic, we used to have an elderly attorney in the office who had no computer experience prior to working here. Apparently, when he was instructed to “move the mouse on your screen,” he quite literally picked up the mouse and placed it against his computer monitor to move it around. And the ball on the mouse had just enough traction to move the pointer. I’m sort of glad I didn’t witness that personally, because I would never have been able to look him in the eye with a straight face.
It’s a little-known fact that Alfred Hitchcock released “The Windows” as a sequel to “The Crows”. Unfortunately, since GUIs hadn’t been invented yet, everybody thought it was just a particularly unimaginative sci-fi flick. Little did they know…
[QUOTE=Hostile Dialect]
You’re in for a rude awakening.
[quote]
Oh, I know it’s in the cache and if I type the first few letters I can get it from the history. But it’s not immediately obvious and it keeps the history neat. (yes, I’m a tiny bit OCD)
Considering my equipment… no.
Fair enough 
Just because you would push and I would pull doesn’t mean it’s all that different.
Is it evil that me first reaction was to laugh and laugh?
But then the “What have I done!” came out…
What’s a bookmark?
I use my mouse upsidedown.
I do pretty much the same thing. Unless I’m cutting and pasting a URL, I go through Google. I tend to transpose letters when I’m typing, and going through Google (and their spell check) is the best way to ensure I don’t have to reach for the brain bleach.
Oooh! Digressive tech support rant! Once, while working tech support, I was working with the problem employee. Well meaning, but completely clueless. If the company had just fired her, they could have let half the tech support staff go, too. But anyway.
She called up, complaining that the printer was printing “garbage”. I came over to see, and it was indeed, printing garbage. It was printing all the weird symbols that you get when you open up a .pdf in Word. And it was printing hundreds and hundreds of pages of them. I had to stop her in the middle of my explanation of what to do because she wanted to go put more paper in the printer. So it could print more garbage.
Anyway, I showed her how to open the file up (double click), and told her that she should look at what’s on her screen, because that’s what will get printed. I watched her hit print and waited to make sure all was well, then I went back to my office.
Got back from lunch to a dozen phone messages, all the way up to my boss’s boss, complaining that no one could print. I went right back over to her desk, next to the printer spewing out junk again.
“The printer’s broken again”, she said, her screen full of Word displaying raw pdf data.
“No, there’s nothing wrong with the printer.” I said, “you opened the file wrong again. Look, it’s junk on your screen, junk on the paper. You can’t open a pdf in Word.”
She gets defensive (and snotty): “This is how they told us to do it.”
I lose my cool. “Ok, first, no it isn’t. Second, it obviously doesn’t work this way. Third, I just told you how to do it right an hour ago, and it worked when you did it my way.”
GRrrrrr.
And, now, my serious contribution to the thread:
One of the speaker lines in my home theater setup was messed up, and it would occasionally ground, which caused the receiver to shut off. This was really annoying, and I couldn’t find the problem. Finally I discovered by accident that one of the hard rock/metal songs that’s on the Matrix soundtrack on high volume would provide the right baseline to knock it back into place. So every few weeks when the speaker line shorted out, I’d just watch two minutes of the Matrix, then go back to whatever I was doing. It took more time to explain this process to my movie guests than to actually fix it.
I did eventually find the short about a year later.
My mom prints out all her important work emails and files them into file cabinets. I tried to explain the concept of saving them to her computer in umm file folders … nada.
Ahhh, the method used by my 37 y/o wife. 
This isn’t about using technology, but rather mis-using it:
I was doing support at a big utility, and I noticed that when spell checking, one of the designers kept clicking “ignore” every time the utilities initials came up in a document (which was a lot.) I said that she should add the initials to the dictionary, and be done with it. She absolutely refused to do it, but wouldn’t tell me why. I finally just gave up…
The “other stuff” being parity blocks for error correction, as you no doubt deduced
I do this. I have a good memory, and I don’t forget URLs. And I can type incredibly fast. Much faster than clicking on a bookmark.