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The Impact of Technophobes

Posted by michael on from the sourced-solely-from-wwwac-email-list dept.

fsharp writes "Most of us have experience with average folks requesting technical support. I have friends and family members that would be lost without my support. I opt for a sliding scale payment plan, usually dinner. At any rate, The New York Times has a nice piece on the impact of technophobes on the Internet (vis-a-vis MyDoom and other email-borne viruses) and their technologically adept friends and family."

1 of 802 comments (clear)

  1. What about dumbass tech support? by Cinematique · · Score: 0, Troll

    My brother and I attend the same university and a few months ago, he needed a connector for his Powerbook. He was in a class where he needed to run a PowerPoint presentation from his laptop to an LCD projector... but the projector only had a VGA input on it, whereas his laptop only has a DVI port.

    When he went to our school's tech support guys for the proper adapter cable, and they either told him that his computer, a 667mhz PowerBook G4, was "obsolete," or they'd hand him a VGA-VGA extension cable and tell him that "it would work."

    So there's several scenarios here:

    1) The support kids were completely clueless; possibly intimidated by the fact that it was a Powerbook and not an Inspiron or Vaio.

    2) The kids purposely wanted to be a jackasses and didn't want to help my brother, knowing full well that the port was in-fact a DVI port and that they're hired and PAID to help other students.

    3) They were too busy with "more important things."