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 was a cashier at Walmart, once upon a time. The new guy i had to train refused to look at the corner of the screen to read the totals back to the customers. When I pointed it out that he should get in the habit of doing so his response was “I don’t feel that i should have to do that.”
I just… Walked away and got the supervisor to assign him a different trainer. I refuse to train someone above the age of 25 with that attitude.
What did he do instead? Just stare at them wordlessly until they produced currency?
Something like “you can swipe your card now,” or similar.
A minimalist approach.
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.
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.
I work in software engineering/development. There’s a guy on my team who manually copy/pastes every Linux command he runs, into a fucking text file. He does this so he has a record of which commands he ran. As a result, he has a 12,000 line text file, full of garbage. With few exceptions, Linux stores every command you run, chronologically, with a configurable limit. He knows this, but insists on saving all of them to a Fucking. Text. File.
Watching him work makes me want to rip my eyeballs out.
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? ;)
Sounds like you’re taking a structured approach to problem solving. Not wasting time capturing information that’s already there.
We cool.
Wow.
Maybe you can show him
history > out.txtand blow his mind?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.
Yeah. He’s a pretty old guy and has the single-finger old man typing style.
history | grep <word> and ! would blow his mind.
CTRL + r is even better
Employer doesn’t know what he does, he does less work in the same amount of time.
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’ve shown him reverse history search several times. But he just won’t use it.
With all the time you save by not copying your commands into a file for your reference, maybe you can invent a machine that will give your superior mental capacity to everyone else.
This was not meant to be a gloating post. I’m simply explaining someone’s terrible and infuriating workflow.
I’m slowly learning not to look into any of my coworkers’ workflows
Sometimes I get tasked to help him fix his problems. I usually just end up checking out his branch and fixing it myself.
I saw someone, instead of opening a folder in VS Code, have a separate Explorer window that they’d navigate through and then right click --> Open in VS Code whichever file they wanted to edit
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:
- Friend who calls me every 2~3 months because he forgot his Facebook password. It reached a point that I annotated his password in my machine, but I don’t need it because I memorised it.
- Neighbour who sends a 10min audio file, full of contextually irrelevant stuff, to ask a simple “how do I do X?”. No, 10min is not an exaggeration.
- Mum. Asking her any relevant piece of info means asking the same question up to five times in a row, because: she didn’t hear it, didn’t pay attention to it, answered something “random”, assigned it a name that only her knows.
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.
Ouch.
How many of those were Karens expecting this to be your job? Just curious, it’s one thing to help clueless people, another to help clueless and entitled ones. (At least the friend that I mentioned is a bro. A dumbarse when it comes to this stuff, but still a bro.)
There were plenty of Karens, but I only went the extra mile of setting things up for friendly people.
Just a heads up, if seemingly simple things can only be fixed by going away and calling someone else, there’s a good chance you could have been nicer.
Of course, sometimes that is the only way.
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:
- 2FA - he struggles with it, so I had to turn it off
- writing his password in a piece of paper, telling him to store it - he lost it
- making an easy to remember password for him - he’s still forgetting it
- telling him “I don’t remember” - he’ll come here and ask me to reset it
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!
Yeah, I might get to the point with him where I say, " if you can’t manage your password, it’s not really safe for you to be using Facebook. There are too many bad actors who try to take advantage of people online."
Either he should have enough wit about him to remember where he has stored his password (sticky note under keyboard?) or he probably shouldn’t be sharing things online. He is going to get scammed.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
