Do you sometimes lose your patience when dealing with a co worker or friend who is barely capable of using a computer or smart phone?
IT tech here, lack of knowledge/skill does not bother me, lack of will to learn does.
Some people have this incredibly annoying habit of seeing anything remotely tech related as magic and they switch off their brain, assuming that they could never understand it.
Them: "My computer is broken"
Me:"Whats the issue?"
Them: "i dont know, i tried to open my email and its got some error message and wont open"
Me:" what does the error message say?"
Them:"err, cannot open email during update, please wait until update is complete"
Me:"is your email app updating?"
Them:"yes.
Me:"wait for it to finish and try again..."
(Obviously tbats not a real scenario, but im not good at examples and just wanted to get the general gist across)
My mother tried to print but got an error message. Instead of reading it, she called me. The printer told her it was out of paper 😐
That was something I got tired of saying, about error messages, “what do the words on the screen say?”
Yep, but it does give me job security though...
I had something so similar happen recently where a link on our external site was down. This person calls me and it literally went:
Them: "this link is broken. Can you tell them fix it?"
Me: "there's a banner at the top of the page that says they're trying to fix it. Here's an alternative link."
Them: "well that's from last week so they should've fixed it by now"
Me: "must be real broken then"
Them: "well can you find their email so we can email them to tell them to fix it"
Me: "no, they're fixing it"
Them: "well you're IT can you email them to ask them how long it will be and tell me when it's fixed"
No that's not my fuckin job bud. Here's their general contact page if you're dying for this very non urgent thing.
And they get mad at you when you are trying to help.
I'll say too often interfaces are written for devs and not users.
helping people with their problems is quite fun when they are interested
the only time I get annoyed or frustrated is when they don't read whatever pop up they get and immediately press "ok" or "continue" and it borks everything
Sometimes it's just a dialog with a single "Ok" button, and they stare at me and ask "now what?". Like, you literally have only one option, what do you think?
From my exp, it's asking for validation that what's happening is expected. Also, sometimes the next step is not to click OK as another process may need to happen first.
I'm all good with people asking questions like that. They don't have any intuition about what you're showing them, so they're hesitant to make assumptions and that's ok.
This reminds me! At work we often send emails to customers through our ticket system so they are recorded. A new guy got a pop-up asking if he wanted to send the email. He looks at me and says "What do I do?" I say "Well you have 2 options: Yes to send the email or Cancel." He clicks Cancel and is then confused the email never sent. He quit a few days later which honestly was better for all of us.
Ooh, can I share a sweet story instead, because this made it pop into my head and it's a memory of a wonderful person that I wish everyone could have known?
I used to work at this small business when I was younger, and one of the employees was an older guy in his 80s who had retired and worked a few hours a week just to keep busy. He loved us teens and twenty somethings and we adored and respected him.
As time went on, the assistant manager left and I ended up being promoted to assistant manager. And eventually daylight savings happened and the clock changed. This employee came in for his first shift after the time change and looked half dejected and half embarrassed and he quietly explained to me that he didn't know how to change the time on his watch, that the previous assistant manager had always done it for him, so now he was trying to deal with his watch being an hour off. I happily changed the time for him, and after that I changed it for him every time change. Even after he retired for good he would come in during my shift and give me his watch and I'd set it forward or back the hour so it could be right and he'd be thrilled every time.
That's a great story
That's very sweet. One of the things that got me interested in wanting to work in IT support was that I worked at a breakfast diner where mostly older folks would eat. My regulars would always ask for help to try to fix silly things on their phone and would always be so happy when I could help.
Things are different now, but once in a while you find someone overly grateful for doing something so simple and it's always a very nice feeling.
This one here is for your co-worker only! Not for you, not for anyone else, just for him:
Hmm, I sometimes do this, when tackling a particular problem, along with some notes. It is often nonlinear and branching. I use it to construct a problem-solving script in the end. And it's markdown file.
Are we OK? ;)
Wow.
Maybe you can show him history > out.txt and blow his mind?
Employer doesn’t know what he does, he does less work in the same amount of time.
This makes me want to rip my eyeballs just thinking about it. Jesus.
I'm imagining when they type, it is at a speed of approximately 100 words per week.
history | grep
<word>
and ! would blow his mind.Good lord, you can even ctrl-r to search your command history so even searchability is not a reason to copy into a text file.
I do the same, kind of but I paste them in word and format them nicely, based on my mood. Today I made a very nice initial of my npm publish command, it looks really nice.
I had a coworker who is actually quite competent and intelligent. We're still really good friends. But I think he only less than 10 keystrokes in vi: up, down, left, right arrows. x (delete char), i (insert mode) and whatever key sequence he used to save and exit. I use :wq! but he may be a ZZ type of person.
I'm losing my patience with three people. In none of the cases it's tech illiteracy, it's something interacting with it:
I'm not even a "computer guy" dammit. I don't work with programming, IT, or related.
I worked at a Verizon store and had a few customer's passwords memorized because they were in with problems weekly.
I get #1 from my family rather often. And I set them up with password managers. SIGH
At this rate I don't even know what to do:
What concerns me the most is that, if I didn't do this for him, someone else would. And some people give no fucks about the others' privacy. Like, I'm grateful that he trusts me, but he shouldn't be relying on trust on first place!
Only when they ignore or argue with the person theyve asked for help.
If you're going to do that, you can flail on your own.
I have a saying "I wasn't asking you to do that, I was telling you to do it". If they don't respect it, they don't get help.
That's an excellent point. Not technology, but people ask me for tips on playing golf. I tell them what I think they need to correct and how to do it. And they start arguing with me. And I'm like I don't care if you play like shit, you ASKED ME for help.
I'm mostly patient with my parents or friends as long as they try to understand. But I'm a software engineer and when my very well paid coworkers don't understand how to operate their IDE for the fifth time that day I have a hard time not to bite them in the neck.
There are so many other reasons to lose patience with some of my coworkers, tech illiteracy is nowhere near the top of the list. If anything, I like helping people with tech.
I get annoyed when they want to do things but don't want to learn how. they want someone else to do it as opposed to show them how they can do it.
Mum writes all passwords down...in random notebooks and on scraps of paper.
Want to set up Netflix on new device? Time to guess which email was used and hope we find the password for it so we can reset the Netflix password again.
Absolutely nightmarish.
My mum's an academic so she's been using computers all her life, she's not exactly "techy" but I am eternally grateful I was able to get her set up with bitwarden as a password manager.
Yea mainly when I was trying to teach my friend how to get pirated games. It is crazy that people can just keep using computers with surface level understanding. I accidentally yelled him a few times now I try to be more patient because I ubderstand what's second nature to me is unfamillar to him
When using computers became more mainstream in the late 90s I thought “phew, finally people will learn to use them and not act like it’s some arcane and nerdy thing they couldn’t possibly understand! They’ll have to figure it out for work and the average person will finally understand the basics like file system hierarchies, right click menus, switching between windows and…” nope. We entered the period of “monthly_report.pdf.exe” instead and then, mobile phones which have enabled people to use computers without learning anything about how they work at all.
I suppose the bright side is that it means that IT work will always be available to those of us that know how to program a VCR and a Betamax
Oh yes indeed!
I was a hardware tech at a cell phone, tablet and computer shop. For a while the boss hired this lady around 22 years old to work up front. Now this chick couldn't cut a piece of plastic to save her life!
See, there's different size SIM cards out there, and sometimes when upgrading a phone you gotta physically cut the SIM card to a smaller size. We actually had all the proper punchout tools, but somehow she couldn't even manage to put the card in the indented area the right way.
She'd sometimes put the card in upside down or backwards, cutting the SIM card all wrong and destroying it. And even when she did manage to cut the card the right way, the card might have slight burrs on the edges.
Now of course that's not her fault, that's an imperfection of the punchout tool. But she didn't even have the common sense to pull the fingernail file from her own purse, or come ask a tech in the back for a file, to remove the burrs.
So not only did she destroy many SIM cards, but she even destroyed many SIM slots in the phone by forcing a card with burrs into it.
Well, one day it's just me and her working. Coincidentally, we had like five iPhone 5s come in all back to back. 2 busted screens, 2 bad charger ports, and a bad speaker I think. Keep in mind I'm the only tech that day.
As these phones came in, everyone asks about how long should it take? She tells them all the typical 20 minutes!
Like WTF? Does this dumb chick not realize that I can't fix them all simultaneously?! All these customers are gonna come back mad at me because I didn't finish in the ridiculous timeframe she quoted them.
20+20+20+20+20, duh! Common sense should have told her it's gonna be a while.
Anyways, I wanted to punch her to be perfectly honest, but I decided to go out back and punch a brick wall instead.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
I didn’t lose my patience but it did make me think of a tale. I was once asked by a coworker to see if they were visible in a zoom event they were attending (goofy concern to begin with since they had left their desk to come to me to ask). Upon return to their cube, with the meeting still ongoing I pointed out that no, they weren’t visible or audible in the meeting because they didn’t have a webcam. This was during the “return to office” phase of the pandemic and our in-office stuff was decidedly pre-pandemic so none of the workstations were equipped with videoconferencing equipment.
I’m not even IT staff.
I used to work help desk, so I've had lots of practice with patience of this sort, but I have come close a fair number of occasions. My company hires retired folk for some part-time positions, and I was helping one of them reset their password. I was on this call for 45 minutes because he couldn't type the default password correctly, eventually his manager came by and helped him type it in and make a new one (against corporate security policy, but I was so done by then that I didn't argue).
One thing I learned while working there is that most people, regardless of age or anything else, know exactly enough about computers to perform their job role, and as soon as they encounter anything slightly outside of their knowledge, it's freakout time.
I've been spending my week trying to train someone barely capable of anything why feeling bad for her because it's not her fault and life is complicated for her.
There are only two people who ever ask me for tech help. One is my father, who is decently tech-litterate for his age, helping him usually revolves around media piracy. I very occasionally lose patience with him because sometimes I'll tell him to check something, he'll say he did it, and I keep trying to figure out his issue only for him to realize half an hour later he didn't actually check what I told him to.
The other is an older lady who used to be my neighbour, we became friends and still keep in touch since she moved. I absolutely adore helping her out, since it's usually something silly that takes literally less than 30 seconds to figure out/fix. She's always immensely appreciative and acts like I'm the smartest person in the goddamn world. It's honestly a welcomed ego boost, plus it makes me feel great to see how genuinely thankful she is.
I think, especially with older generations, you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here. My old neighbour didn't have electricity or running water growing up, and now we expect her to understand GUIs, OSes, settings, accounts, networks...
I get much more upset when I see people around my age (late twenties to early thirties) who can't understand the basic functions of a desktop operating system. I understand that not all of my generation were tech-obsessed kids/teens like myself, spending their free time figuring out stuff like upgrading from Vista to XP or partitioning the hard drive on the family PC to dual boot Linux distros, but you'd think they'd at least understand the basics of a filesystem and how to change settings.
My father has been using computers for 50 years and hasn’t seemed to really learn anything. His work had one of the first personal conouters, an Altair, and we had C64s and early DOS machines when I was a kid. He could do excel, word, general word processing, had spreadsheets back in the early days of Lotus… at this point he gets confused and frustrated by like, the CVS website. Doesn’t ask for help though, just keeps doing his knows what and getting angry about it, then when I try to help (like, “oh, your credit card number is entered wrong”) he just gets angry and says “this is a SIMPLE THING! I DONT NEED HELP!” Like, okay, you’ve been overlooking this error message on a website and acting pissed for 15 minutes, but whatever.
you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here
We all tend to think that the existing technology when we grew up was the benchmark and always existed. Many people are alive today that went to college before computers even existed. Back then the closest thing to a computer filled a room and worked with punch cards. On the smartphone side, how many even remember those pink pads that were used to write down phone messages. Or dial up internet over a phone line with those strange noises as the connection was made.
Its a me problem but I get a little frustrated when helping team members (we're 100% remote so this is generally via a shared session) and they don't click right where I want them to. I don't lose my patience though.
well I have been rendered speechless on several occasions. The most recent is when I told an employee at a high level in our organization who was setting a password not to use his name, old passwords, or anything sequential like abc123. I spent the next half hour trying to figure out why it wasn't accepting his password until I had him tell me one of the rejected ones. hisname123456789. He told me it's not abc123. This man has multiple degrees and uses a computer every day. How is he this tech illiterate and just plain illiterate
This man has multiple degrees
Maybe that's it. I've done hospital tech support and some of the doctors I've assisted have such unique combinations of high-level degrees that there may be only a few dozen people worldwide that can match them. Each and every one of them is hyper-focused on their specialty, sometimes to the point that they've missed picking up ordinary man-on-the-street knowledge.
No, but I think this is only because I’m the ‘tech guy’ in my family and I’ve had years of helping my grandparents in their misadventures in using Windows, and I know it’s not their fault that they don’t understand, so I’m naturally patient with them
I work with phones and you might think nobody would struggle with 150 year old technology, but alas many do.
I don't get frustrated though, everyone has different skills and someone not sharing my skillset doesn't make them less capable.
Only sometimes?
No, most definitely not. Mostly considering I'm on help desk to help those that need IT assistance.
It's maddening.
Although, I started to theorize that since computers work with magnetic fields, and humans can affect those fields, perhaps some people just break shit being around it.
I started thinking this when, one day, a friend of mine who just had a shit time with computers came over and needed to do something on my computer. I told him exactly what to do, and he did it. Shit didn't work. Huh? I watch him do it again, exactly as I told him. Doesn't work. WTF? Lemme try. Do the same exact thing but this time it works.
Shit, man, I guess it just doesn't like you. 🤷🏻♂️
Lol I do it all for them. It's just easier.
I have a boomer boss and he has a hard time with email. He also didn't know how to zoom in when taking a picture.
So completely forget excel.
Not with friends, but co-workers? I work in IT so you bet I fucking do.
No. Computers are hard. Especially if they aren't built for you.
No, but I work in IT. I’m surrounded by stupid every day. Either you learn to live with it or you find a different career
It's not annoying when they can't do it. It's aggravating when they refuse to learn to do it and just want you to do the whole thing for them every single time.
And then they say "you never show me how to do anything!"
Or, they act like they understand when you do show them, but go strait to the boss the next time and complain that you refuse to show them..
I always verbally walk them through it. That helps them memorize the steps and if they insist I do it I can tell them to fuck off with a clean conscience. If they don't wanna help themselves then I won't either. I don't usually have a problem with this method.
My managers do this to their department leaders. They can't even work the cameras.