I don’t know anyone who doesn’t “do” computers, and if I did, I would laugh and point. Maybe not in person, but you know what I mean.
It’s like saying, “I don’t do transportation.”
The stuff is everywhere. I don’t assume that everyone out there thinks it’s fun to write SQL queries or play with a little UNIX, but jeez, people, even my 80-year-old great-aunt uses Facebook and orders from Amazon.
ETA: Then again, I don’t do telephones. I hate just chatting on the phone with most people. I’d rather text or Facebook or email. However, this makes me much like the young kids these days…
There’s a worse form, and much more common… people who are “competent” at using a computer but have no idea how to manage files. I have found people I long ago classified as “computer literate” doing things like opening Word files and resaving them somewhere else to accomplish a file move, sometimes to relocate dozens of files… and of *course *they were doing that, because how *else *do you put Word files somewhere else?
Half the office here saves EVERYTHING to their desktop. As a result they have a million things, can NEVER find anything, and since it’s not on the share drive, no one else can access it.
I’m straddling the line. On the one hand, I got my first computer (an original IBM PC) a third of a century ago (it will be exactly that in late August). It had the unnumbered DOS (later retronamed 1.0 when 1.05 came out) and I grew through all the DOS up to 6.something, then Win 95,98,XT,…,7 and learned it all. But…and it is a big but, the older I get, the harder all this new stuff is for me. I find Macs a mystery. No, it is not intuitive, not at all. I never used Word and doubtless never will (I use a good editor as input to the markup language TeX for typing math). I have a flip-top cell phone and, although it could be upgraded to allow texting, it still has only a telephone keypad. I’ve used that for my phone book, but it is a nuisance. I have an e-reader and I find it very hard to enter a password to connect to someone else’s Wi-Fi, although I have done it.
On the other side of the line, I had a colleague who died a year ago at age 91. Never touched a computer in his entire life. You could send him email; it was forwarded to a secretary in our department who printed it and put it in his mailbox. Any reply, he would handwrite and she would type it for him and send it. Curiously, he published in the late 1950s one of the very first papers ever written on theoretical computer science. But he would just never touch a computer. For the last ten years of his life we shared an office and I would occasionally look something up for him.
Finally, I have another colleague who actually does use a computer in his office, but for email only. He would not learn to google anything. He is doing some part-time teaching, so comes to his office 3 times a week. But he will not, absolutely will not, have a computer in his home. So he regularly calls me up to look something up for him, even a local phone number, to read an email (in Swedish yet) or answer it. It drives me nuts. He is around 85.
Then there is my 86 yo aunt. She got online through AOL about 20 years ago. She got Wi-Fi in her house at least 10 years ago and has kept it in her assisted living facility she is in now. But–and this my point here–she still pays to use AOL because that is familiar and comfortable.
So until you’re here, don’t discount the difficulty of teaching an old dog new tricks.
That’s just pitiful. Officially I’m not an IT person because I only support users with our online programs and internet/webinar related stuff, but I’m close. The oldest person I supported (who passed last year) was in his 80s and more tech savvy than that. I also work with multiple doctors in their 70s who say they’re “no good with computers” but are a lot more capable than that.
I do have a coworker in an unrelated department (so not my problem, yay) who must be like you describe, though. She’s only in her late 40s, has used a computer at work daily for at least 20 years, and ends up making several panicky calls to the institute’s IT person every week. I don’t understand how you can use a tool every day and be so inept with it.
We have lots of engineers who are involved with IC manufacturing stuff. Though they have given us (I mean forced upon us) PCs, most of our work is done on various sorts of UNIX systems.
It is very depressing to find that these quite intelligent and not very old engineers are scared of the command line, and some need help in things like installing software. (They are fine with spreadsheets and PowerPoint.) In fact certain requests I can answer by giving them a trivial find(1) command line. In fact I’m going to give a course on really basic shell commands that they can use.
The new PhD engineers we hire know this stuff at least. Or I wouldn’t hire them.
Oh man, the epidemic at my office is people who open a Word or Excel attachment directly from their email, modify it, and “Save” it rather than “Save As,” which of course saves it to the hidden “Temporary Internet Files/ZWJKIRYUN” folder, which becomes a colossal PITA to find as soon as they close the document in question.
I am a lot less patient than I used to be with people that can’t do their jobs because they don’t know how to use technology. Ten years ago, I didn’t mind that the people in their 60s at work didn’t know how to change a printer cartridge or couldn’t figure out how to find an email from a month ago. At this point, I am still helpful, but exasperated–before, people were on the downward slope of their working life when all this started coming in. I can understand not bothering–especially because things changed so rapidly. But if you are 60 today, you weren’t “old” when email became a thing.
Engineers are weird as hell. So I work for a not for profit, and we have a page online where you can sign up for your events, maintain your team, etc. These engineers who are making 5x my puny little salary and are extremely intelligent people cannot seem to figure this website out. I would say they are lazy but they really aren’t! I’ve talked to them and helped them through it and while they can probably design a brand new 747 they can’t seem to figure out how to add walkers to their team, or that everyone needs a distinct email address.
I feel that on this issue, I’m a glasshouse-dweller who would be ill-advised to throw stones. I’m about to turn 67, and am a dreadful technophobe especially about most things in the electronic ballpark – for instance, I simply cannot cope with mobile (cell) phones. Effectively, I never had to become at all proficient with computers for work (I’m now retired). It took several years of great puzzlement and frustration vis-a-vis computers, before I made a sort of breakthrough; and have found that I delight in what the Internet, and message boards, and use of e-mail, can do for me. However, there remain a million things which computers can accomplish, which are an utterly closed book to me.
I feel that I could just as easily have turned out as an elderly “computer non-do-er”; and while with some such folk, older or younger, there is the “misplaced pride” element, I like to think that it’s by no means always so – it’s simply that the “abstainers” have, in the present scheme of things, little or no need / desire for computers to be part of their lives. I’d wish to think that on that, “live and let live” may run both ways – will admit that it’s crappy behaviour for someone who is clueless with computers, to be forever pestering computer-savvy friends / relatives / colleagues to do the work for them.
My ex, who is a little older than me, rather fits the descriptions above; except that she certainly does not act all superior for not being a computer person. In the later decades of her working life, she manfully adapted to, and learnt to cope with, computers; but she was very much not a “natural” therewith – it was a hard struggle, and she basically found the devices hateful. Both while working, and in retirement, the very last thing she has ever wanted, is to have one of the bastard things in her own home – on rare occasions of needing to use one, she goes to the public library. She’s just so made that the kind of stuff for which one can use a computer for pleasure – which I happen to have found fun and absorbing – is not stuff which enthrals her; she’s busy with other things.
Losing documents is a huge problem with novice users. They save it and have no idea where it is. So next time they download it again and edit it again.
Another problem I’ve seen is saving a new document with the same name as an existing document, and thinking the new document contents will be added to the existing document. Dangerous.
In the legal business, there exist a fair number of lawyers (who are older, but not thatold, maybe in their sixties) who make a point of not using computers at all
They’ll give their secretaries access to their email accounts, and their secretaries will print out emails for them, and they will hand-write a response, and the secretary will then respond to their emails.
For other stuff, like conflict checking and billing and expenses and so on, again, they’ll turn it all over to their secretaries.
For them, it’s a point of pride, and a status thing. They’re like medieval rulers who thought that knowing how to read and write was beneath them. That’s what clerks were for, after all.
The firm I’m at now strongly discourages this kind of behavior, but at my last firm there were enough of them that it was, in my opinion, a serious problem.
Wow. My divorce attorney (a young, female barrister) asked at our first meeting if I would be OK with email correspondence. I told her that was my preference; it was hers as well.
She told me I was in the minority! With her charging by the millisecond, there was substantial savings realized.
My son-in-law is an attorney who is also an excellent web designer. When he had his own office he got a good number of clients by demonstrating that he actually understood their tech issues.
But there seem to be a lot of things like back-up requirements you don’t have in a normal business, so maybe some lawyers shouldn’t be trusted with computers.
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
Oh man, the epidemic at my office is people who open a Word or Excel attachment directly from their email, modify it, and “Save” it rather than “Save As,” which of course saves it to the hidden “Temporary Internet Files/ZWJKIRYUN” folder, which becomes a colossal PITA to find as soon as they close the document in question.
[/QUOTE]
My father reportedly worked at one time with a guy who’d save each and every one of his reports as “MyDocument.doc”. This was before Windows/Office automagically created parallel duplicates.
Ayup : he overwrote every. Single. Time. Then put the company in the shit every time it needed historical data.
Some people make you feel there oughta be a computer driving licence.
I dunno. A lot of the time I feel like having a computer is limiting my world just as much.
I’ve missed out on day trips to the countryside, enjoying my hobbies, adventures in the outside world, conversations with real people, heck, probably entire relationships and careers, because I’ve been sitting here surfing porn and playing games all day instead.
Computers and the internet make my life a lot better, absolutely. But it seems like they’re making it worse in equal measure. Sometimes I wish someone would at least restrict my access to my computer, to, say, a couple of days a week at most. My life would be better. And I don’t seem to have the will power to do it myself.
Maybe one day I’ll choose to simply not own a computer, since I can’t really use one responsibly. At least for a while, to see how it goes. I can certainly see why someone would do that.
When you’re about to die, and you’re thinking about your regrets in life, do you think you’ll be saying to yourself: “Oh, man, I wish I had spent more time in front of my computer”?
