Slashdot Mirror
Computer Stupidities
Stephen R. van den Berg writes "Yet another BOFH [?] -relief site:
stories about Computer
Stupidities compiled by
RinkWorks.
"What do you mean, other tape?
When it said second volume, I just hit
enter again.". "
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
try http://www.idzap.com
"And those salescritters who advertise products that claim "You don't have to learn a bunch of stuff to get on the Internet" Correct. Go to a computer store, read a couple of computer ads read a couple of computer books. You'll notice an awful lot that say "no experience required"(or variations on that theme). It's almost as if lack of knowledge is a good thing. While with a straight face we boast about our educational system and our technological lead. Something doesn't "compute".
Well interesting rant, and the're some good points in it. The flip side is that people need to be taught how to think. No I don't mean a particular way *of* thinking, but *how* to think deductive reasoning for example. We're getting away from that, as a society encouraging intellectual lazyness. Debate is being cut from schools. Philosophy isn't even offered in some colleges. The point of the above as well as what your saying is that the solution to the problem isn't blaming it all on one or the other, but that there needs to be correction on both sides, user and tool.
Yeah! Greek and Latin have been used for more than 2000 years now, so people who can't speak them are idiots. Can you, PD ? (by the way, you know the meaning of PD in French, I presume ?) ;)
Sometimes its sad what these people do and nobody teaches them whats going on. I am a salesman and I make it a point to explain things properly to people who don't understand...I probably spend more time doing tech support than I do selling the things I sell. But sometimes you just have to laugh...Just tonight a customer bought a printer, couldnt get it to work so I determined he hadn't pulled the tape off the ink cartriges. He brings the printer back a little while later to exchange it because it still won't work so I give him a new one and show him how to set it up. After he left I opened up the one he brought back to find that he had completed ripped off the copper contacts!
cough.. gag... my Windows 3.1 days. One of my friends deleted progman.exe and didn't realize it. However, they knew how to undelete through DOS... how's this.... frogman.exe :)
Some tom fool blocked this site at our firewall. Anyone have any not-so-popular web anonymizer sites? I'd really like to have a look at it before I take a long trip home :-).
NOT
Pah. I've seen this done with Windows 3.1 Damn confusing at the time. My mouse suddenly took on a mind of its own.....
These tech support guys are as bad as their customers. Why do they say "CPU" when they talk about the computer {tower,box,cabinet} in almost all those stories? If tech support had asked me to "press the button on the front of the CPU" I wouldn't have bothered continuing the discussion..
TA
The honest mistakes aren't all that funny, but some of them are so bizarre (not plugging equipment in and complaining loudly to tech support) that I really don't feel guilty at all for laughing.
Computer stupidities on Rinkworks has been around for a long time, well over a year (I know, I've been a regular reader that long). Why the hell did it just make it to Slashdot?
I like to set up a busy desktop, make a screen capture, and use the result for my wallpaper. It's fun to catch interlopers on my computer clicking around on the "Memorex" widgets on the wallpaper.
Scotty goes up to a Macintosh and starts barking instructions to the mouse. Thats when we realize how arcane our "advanced" computers are.
What if non-qualified users use NC...
If a software breaks, the administrator just have to correct it once on the server and the user wouldn't see the problem.
If the NC breaks, just change it. No more HD data the save. And NC are cheaper than PC.
Of course this mean large bandwith connection for each Nc but for me it' seems easier than non-bugged software...
Mongolito404
Reminds me of when I was 7 and was shopping in a department store with parents and typed 'DRAW CAR' and was disappointed when nothing happened.
For making machines so hard to use. It has gotten much better in the past couple of decades.
I've worked for/with three different PC manufacturers who rejected remote troubleshooting due to liability fears. If users can't be trusted to get coffee from a drive-through window without injuring themselves, imagine the lawsuits that are filed after every April 14 (easily the WORST day of the year for tech support. EVERYONE calls in because the tax software that they bought an hour earlier has "destroyed" their OS.). Of course, at my last networking job, we installed Remotely Possible on every machine in one remote office building, and used it to surreptitiously resolve all non-hardware issues for 3 months. The day that we "went public," the helpdesk received dozens of calls claiming that we had "deleted their files" and similar nonsense. Log files and CYA are necessary when you try remote t-shooting.
There's a different angle to this:
/dev/nulled.
<RANT MODE="PHILOSOPHICAL">
Most people like telling other people "what they mean" and the notion that "what they mean" may hold only weak relation to "what they say" is just beyond them. Personally, I still haven't been able to decide if they really lack the sense or if there is some hidden intent to not let the notion and all its consequences into their cosy little realm.
The "do what I mean" approach of course doesn't work with a computer, which can (at most) only hear what you say(*). But it is not limited to only computers, computers just make this phenomenon (painfully) visible. The principle applies to many things technical.
(*) I guess this is why so many people buy into "The Grand Promise of Artificial Intelligence." It's the sad grand illusion that they'd be able to get away with comandeering things all over the place without actually having to be clueful about what they're doing.
I guess that many people have a really hard time in making the "thought switch" between what-I-mean to what-I-say.
<RANT MODE="MILDLY AGITATED">
What happens all the time to many techies, is that some what-I-mean person thinks "Hey, I can make this guy make it work for me!" and tries to get the techie to "perform".
Often what-I-mean will get as abusive as it takes and sees no moral issue with that, because the tech guy has already been identified with the incooperative and obstructive dead matter anyway and is now an ideal target to vent heaped up frustrations on.
Poor tech guy tries to interface between what-I-mean and what-I-say, because he thinks that will resolve the situation the soonest, just be reasonable. Aren't we all?
Bad luck, because what-I-mean isn't reasonable in the first place. He (or she) will attempt to get their way by means of emotional bluff, extortion and lying, often beyond abuse. If what-I-mean would approach things reasonably, he'd be able to cope with things (sic.) himself.
The worst abusers are often your friends, family and neighbours. This might seem odd, because they are so close to you, but they are also the ones that have the best hooks for relational blackmail and emotional extortion on you.
<RANT MODE="WARMING UP ALREADY">
The problem with close relatives and acquaintances is that they won't let you get away with not helping them out "a little, since you know so much alreay and it would really help out, I'm really stuck with this bloody thing you know." Deadlines and (children's) school papers are also brought into battle pretty quickly.
Whenever I have someone approach me with that all too familiar "Hey, you're a real computer guy aren't you" rap, I get cold sweat and visions of hours, afternoons, days
It starts with running scandisk/defrag, hoping that's be all. Of course not! That's what makes all the shit surface: corrupt blocks, disappeared dll's, viruses all over the place, Word installed 7 times, misconfigured drivers, generally stuff not configured at all.
And you're lost from the start, because when you run scandisk and at least fix some basics of their filesystem, they'll say: "uhh, is it bad?" and start looking at you as if you caused it. This will only progress aversely; the more you fix, the more they blame you for stuff not working.
This is how what-I-mean gets his way: by being more unreasonable, he gets more of what he wants! Now you have some wicked feedback loop, who is going to revert them back to "sane" reason?
<RANT MODE="FACE RED ALL OVER">
Meanwhile, you're reinstalling windows for the umpteenth time. Of course they threw away all the driver disks for the obscure and crappy they had pushed onto them at the PC discounter. Of course when you finally manage to get on the net to download the drivers, installing it causes windows to crash instantly - making a reinstall necessary.
You've given them half of a computer course, putting some real effort in it, hoping that some proficiency will make the self-sustaining. Unfortunately it's all in vain, they just wanted to keep you on the line while you do more of their stuff for them.
So then finally, you got it working like it should. For the first time, what-I-mean has his equipment in an actually workable state. Windows is installed, completely, and configured, completely - including all the device drivers (Yeay!) That took a couple of iterations down the well-trodden reinstall road (forget The Road Ahead, with Windows you get to walk the same stretch of the road al the time.)
You setup their internet connection and installed Internet Exploder - whoops! suddenly everything starts crashing; "Now where did I put that Windows CDROM again?" Okay, so it takes a little more time, but there you have it: a computer system to be proud of, if you didn't know any better about computers and operating systems that is.
But let's not be a priss, for what-I-mean this is a great system, it's just what it takes. If only he realized - but then of course, he couldn't let you know, because that would give you an edge on him. He needs to stay in control, you know.
<RANT MODE="PROGRESSIVELY BOILING">
So you've reinstalled their favorite apps that they've been cherishing since 1983 and are absolutely critical to their general sense of wellbeing, although they still haven't figured out how to operate the other 99% of the program. No, they don't have the manual or the disks; "disks? what disks, it's always been on my computer."
Lucky you, you wisely preempted disaster by not formatting their entire harddisk, even though you know that this means you'll have to reinstall windows twice as often, because every other time a reinstall doesn't solve the totally obstruse convulsions Windows has gotten into - again.
Oh and while they still don't know how the app works - but they're learning from you as you're trying to figure it out - because if you don't configure it superdeluxe to their wishes, it's your goddamn fault that you broke it - of course it never worked at all before, which they'll never admit. You'll hear the most incredible and blatant lies of your life. Even a 4-year old dares not be so rudely openly illogical in your face.
<RANT MODE="FUMING OUT OF EARS">
Maybe I should skip the part where you try to cope with the fact that half of their documents has a virus, or maybe they aren't up to speed with the latest technology yet and it's just the app executables that are infested with annoying viruses dating back to pre-MSDOS-3.22 times.
Let's skip to the part where good isn't enough, it has to be better. So they try to dupe you into installing the latest and greatest software suite they saw in a four color ad or heard a colleague boast about.
And when you tell them that you're not into warez, they look weary at you. Evidently, that's just such a lame excuse you're making up just to skip them a favor: "I mean, everybody at work has it too."
Nevermind that that piece of bug-infested (don't even think about installing it until at least Servi^H^H^H^H^Hbug-fix pack 2 is released) bloatware crap wouldn't fit on their harddisk (they look at you as if it's solely due to your incompetence) or that they would need a 3-generation processor upgrade and 8 times the amount of RAM ("huh? wassatgudfer?") they now have.
And don't you dare speak bad of what's being passed as a `productivity app' (ughh), because that nice colleague "who knows aaaall about computers" spoke such kind words of it. Yeah right. So why isn't that colleague helping them install their warez?
<RANT MODE="FOAMING AT MOUTH">
[several very very bitter observations and comments snipped in order to minimize future embarrasment when rereading publicly posted article.]
Why don't these people get a FSCKING TYPEWRITER if they don't care about knowing how to operate a computer? They would be doing themselves a huge favor, not to mention countless others being abused on helplines, or even completely unpaid (thank you Bill Gates for getting rich over my back) while coping with these terrified people's coping with stuff they don't understand at the very conceptual fundament.
This sounds exacty like the tech support from Tampa Road Runner
Apparently someone who isn't comfortable in their job assignment.
Man, Indeed this site is great, remembers me of the times I worked as a technician at a computer shop and the things I went through... (Like the time someone unchecked the hide hidden files option in the file browser and suddenly found himself some files called io.sys and msdos.sys in the root. Sure as he was, that he didn't create those files, he deleted them and ended up at my desk..) Speaking of unlitterate users in computerland. I'm a computer geek (nerd? ;-)) and altough my mother doesn't think women should be involved doing technical things around the house (even not replacing a light bulb, like I last time had to do..) or understanding how to fix a flat tyre and altough she never used a computer in her life, she does seem to understand what's a rip off, when concerning computer adds in the paper and even tells me that the 8mb memory mentioned in the add couldn't be enough for running Windows 95 and that the 540mb harddrive also couldn't be sufficient... All that knowledge she can only have gained out of the questions about computers she asked me and the daily life stories I tell her.. Guess I must have done something wrong.... Cheers, Manuel
Someone once told me that there is a race between programmers coding smarter programs & ppl getting stupider, and the programmers are losing. Though I have to admit outside of computers I constantly see examples of stupidity. Mocking of ppl is a common thing yet you ppl don't make a big fuss about those other times. It's just a laugh & I'm sure it's all in good fun. I bet that doctor would have a good laugh if saw me try to wield a scapel. :)
Look through all the stories and ask yourself how many of the incidents wouldn't have happen if tech support could have remotely logged into the machine, and not only gotten the answers they needed but solved the problem as well? Note:any OS that makes that possible?
I still learning the ropes in Linux/Unix, but have since made wonderful progress. I was weaned on Apple IIs and DOS machines, first introduced to Windows (3.11) in 1993 (I'm 19 now, and probably have at least seven solid years of experience under my belt) and introduced to Macs around 1995. (Mac O.S. is now my prefered environment, though my Mac is setup as a dualboot, I also prefer YellowDog Linux over LinuxPPC, as I find its more robust and stable) Well, before we bought (my family) our first PC (IBM PS/2, 486 66 mhz, 8 megs RAM) I only used DOS on a client basis in a networked environment in school, and never was shown the command-line before - just ugly colored dialog boxes :-) I thought, and perfectly logicly so (something I find is a blessing using Linux/Unix), that doing as you described before, typing in a long pathnames thinking that it should work, and when it didn't was instantly frustrated. I was later told I had to 'inch' my way to my desired folder, directory by directory - something I still find highly annoying. My learning Windows took no time, though Win 95 proved a slight challenge at first, because of the radically redesigned interface. To me it just looked like the Mac O.S. on crack, extremely simular but just rearranged. Using 'Start' to navigate applications took me by suprise, and the grouping of the drives in 'My Computer' left me to wonder. We all make mistakes in our journy to computer nerdom, and I was just recently taught that I needed to configue X-Windows before I can use it (before it didn't really fit the screen, I had to move the pointer to the extrematies to view the whole of the desktop), something I felt was done before when the installer asked about my video configuration, and of course reminded me of one thing - never take things on assumptions, esp when dealing with a new O.S. :-) As for teaching newbies, I still think the Mac O.S. is easier for newbies - and I, regardless of stability issues and such, still prefer - because its layout seems more logical. File management feels physical, to move files from a zip disk to your HD you must select, drag, and drop - as opposed to the mess that is My Computer or File Manager. I like that, as do most newbies I show it to. Theres other areas to, but I for one cannot wait for Mac O.S. X :-)
True story from the days of 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes:
...
Me: Okay, now put the floppy in the drive.
Luser: Okay; it's in.
Me (not hearing the click): Now shut the door.
Luser: Okay
... (foot steps, slam)
Luser: It's shut.
Me: You didn't shut the door to the room did you?
Luser: Yes.
I love stupid luser stories because they have prepared me to deal with the same situations when they happen to me in "real" life. There's been a couple of times when the call resembled a clasic story, and by having the luser check the (not so) obvious, I saved myself a trip to their office, and really looked like a guru to them. Still, my favorite dumb questions was when a client was having us make a 14 inch long Adobe Illustrator picture file, and she asked "how does something that long fit on a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk?" I replied that because a disk is round, the file can be rolled up like for a mailing tube, then I quickly left the room....
If you can dig a hole, you are an expert at shovels, I would think.
"The amount of cluelessness involved in releasing that document with Dell's name on it is easily an order of magnitude larger than anything in it."
With PC margins as thin as they are these days, it's hard to make money selling computers to users who think CD-ROM drives are cupholders. A few dozen calls to a toll-free tech-support line, and that's all she wrote. Dell knew what they were doing when they released that list, all right.
Thought I'd share one from personal experience
When I was about 9 and had a XZ Spectrum 16K I was just learning the rom basic, but since I plugged both the 'ear' and 'mike' leads into the tape recorder at once I had very little success saving my lovingly crafted creations.
I would sometimes spend the whole day at school scribbling elaborate programs using only INPUT, IF, THEN, GOTO and PRINT, and then punch them in when I got home (which took ages - the thing had like 5 different shifted states for each key, so LOAD was 'SYMBOL-SHIFT j' or something similar).
When the thing actually ran I would get extremely protective and forbid anyone to use the TV (it used the TV as a monitor) or even come within a meter of the thing sometimes for days until the thing would eventually overheat and bomb.
Whether it's true that computers are the biggest new development in history or not, it certainly is true that never before have so many people had so much new technology thrust upon them, most of the time against their will. These people, not you, are the intended audience of the Dummies Books. People who want to spend their day thinking about their work, not about their software, hardware or OS. They don't want to devote their lives to mastering the machine. (If they did, they'd be us.) They don't think they should have to. The genius of the Dummies Books is not so much in giving their readers the absolute minimum information they need to be functional. It's not even in presenting it in a digestible (pre-digested?) form. The genius is in telling people what they can safely ignore.
It seems the person writing the anecdote thinks they are so cluefull, but really both of the parties don't quite understand what they are talking about.
Slashdot isn't run by almighty and alknowing entities, it relies on users to find most of its content. Apparently no one had submitted it until now.
Or Linux could take the cream of the crop desktop users and leave the "damaged goods" to windows.
Are you implying that users *can't* get under the hood of Win 9x? It's easy! Go to a DOS prompt, and you can do whatever you want. What's the difficulty here?
When I first saw the list on Rinkworks, my first response was, 'Yeah, but it's not always the user's fault.' I mean, in my tech support days, the funniest thing that happened to me was when a student came in to the university helpdesk and asked me to 'download the internet onto a floppy' for her to take home. But she wasn't stupid - a prof had more than likely told her that she needed access to the internet, and that she should go to the helpdesk with a floppy. So I was indignant about the Rinkworks site until I saw their little disclaimer about 'And yet, amidst the vast, surging quantities of stupidity are perfectly excusable technological mishaps -- but that are amusing nonetheless.' I think that covers more of the site than the compilers would like to admit, but I'm still glad they said it.
Plus, some of them really are like the tech support call I was on where a woman wanted me to teach her how to use Windows 3.1 and absolutely refused to let me go, but continuously told me that she knew what she was doing, that what she wanted to do was possible, and that the methods i suggested were impossible. After dealing with a few of those, a little 'Will I have to have my computer delivered before we can do this?' is nice.
There are some things that take more than unfamiliarity with strange technology to explain
I fielded a tech support call that took about 45 mins from a 'computer science' teacher who claimed that she couldn't create users with the web frontend to the servers we install. After stepping through the process I could find nothing amiss, so I asked exactly what was going wrong. She said that when they typed the username and the password when logging it just hung. There was a lengthy pause after I asked if they had pressed the 'login' button (the only other component on the screen). They had been trying to log in for two days.
That crisis solved I then pressed on to describe how to change a user's password from the command line. After spelling out the command over the phone (and occasionally describing where to find the keys) she got the thing typed.
'Ok, now enter the user's password twice and it should work'
It didn't so I tried to talk her through the troubleshooting the problem. After telling her to press enter to execute the command, she became distraught and said that it was asking her to type the password again (she hadn't pressed enter when typing the password the first time and had just figured that it would know when she was done).
She then became convinced that she had broken the whole system (despite my efforts to assure her that nothing was damaged) and handwrote all the text she could see on the screen and faxed it to me along with several other documents she felt were relevant (14 pages)
I do not feel compassion for these type of people when they hold positions like computer science teachers. I will laugh at them.
Keep your hands on the keyboard and let your feet do the pointing and clicking :-)
>After reading through a whole bunch of these, did
>anyone else have the idea that Intel marketed the
>term "Pentium" WAY TOO MUCH?!?!?
Oh, but the Pentium is great!!!!! Don't you know that getting a Pentium will increase the speed of your Internet connection????? =)
what if u had the combination of an ignorant tech support and an inexperienced, newbie customer?... hmmm... it should be happening quite often.... wonder what the conclusion is like
Its their lack of ordinary common sense. I see it all the time. I do ONSITE tech support, and find myself bending over plugging the machine in the AC outlet. Hand them the $75 bill, and listen to them wail on about how silly they were for not checking the power cord. Oy..
Thanks felllas, but I have to go through a proxy so I can't use proxymate, and anonymizer.com is already blocked. Any others?
Sun Tzu... Sun Tzu... is it you? ~~ G
What's ironic is that a good deal of the time, the computer illiterate people are the ones working in the tech support departments.
Hmm two years gets you sainthood. What does 3-1/2 get you?
Build something even and idiot can use and only an idiot will use it. (cant remeber source)
People who spout garbage like this deserve to be mocked also.
I have a good friend who is a doctor. However, he has trouble with his computer all of the time. Why?
Not because of any stupidity.
Because he spent his life learning how to do something else! Slashdot readers often seem to miss this point. He's NOT stupid. He just doesn't know computers.
But if I were in an accident, I would rather have him be the first on the scene than one of the slashdot readers who call people who haven't spent a lifetime learning computers stupid.
That's the same way with cars. That's why everybody's not a mechanic. There's no REASON for them to learn everything. That's why we pay mechanics/tech support people. I couldn't care less about my engine. I get in my car, I step on the gas, and it goes. Anything else is superfluous. Users just need to know the interface. If they want to get "under the hood" it's VERY easy for them to do. But most shouldn't.
proof positive that windows and microsoft ruined the minds of a generation of (l)users that are otherwise competent people...but these kinda stories make me laugh and wince at the same time b/c of the pure silliness
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
Is this one supposed to be funny or is the person who submitted it an idiot? Me: "I can't seem to connect to the Internet. Any problems there?" Tech Support: "What lights on your modem are on?" Me: "'Power' and 'Network'." Tech Support: "Okthen, it's something with your system. Do you use Netscape?" Me: "My Linux server doesn't get a temporary IP address, and there's no PPP0 connection." Tech Support: "We only support Netscape." Me: "A web browser wouldn't work. I can't even do a ping to you or somewhere else outside my network." Tech Support: "A ping? Are you sure you use Netscape? We only support Netscape." Me: "As a matter of fact, my Windows 98 machine runs Internet Explorer, but it always worked fine. I really think something else is wrong. A ping is a signal send to see how the connection between two machines is. I can't seem to get a connection between you and me." Tech Support: "You really should install Netscape. It's on the install disk which came with your modem." Me: "Ok, never mind."
Would the following ever happen?:
Tech Support: GM Tech Support, may I help you?
...
Customer: Hello? My car is not working?
Tech Support: Well what's it doing?
Customer: When I step on the gas, nothing happens. It just whirrs.
Tech Support: Make sure the car is in 'D' and the parking brake is off.
Customer: I did and it is.
Tech Support: Okay, open the hood and check the transmission fluid dipstick. Is it at the 'full mark'?
Customer: Yeah.
Tech Support: Okay, let's make sure the driveshaft is connected to the differential.
Of course, this is rediculous. No one would expect average consumers to follow such diagnostic procedures. Cars are complicated. Computers and software are complicated too (as much if not more so than cars). Why should the latter offer such intricate level tech support and not the former?
By your own admission, your doctor friend is unskilled (inept) at troubleshooting computers. The solution is to simply have someone who is skilled come and fix his computer. If I have a broken leg, and call your doctor to have him talk me through resetting the bone and making a splint to hold the leg immobilized, and I, being unskilled do not do things right, ignore some of his instructions, do other stuff that actually makes things worse and then yell at your doctor for not supporting me and he gets mad and yells back, who's fault is this? Mine? The doctors? No. The fault is is offering phone support for something that should've been an on-site repair done in the flesh by a real person, skilled in his craft, to begin with. Will this be more expensive? Yes! Will fewer people buy computers as a result? Yes! Unskilled people should not be using computers just like people who cannot learn to drive a car shouldn't be buying cars. If your doctor friend won't pay someone to keep his computer running when it breaks, then he shouldn't have a computer. But he'd better not expect a tech-support person to walk him through complex repair tasks anymore than I would expect him to talk me through removing someone's appendix over the phone.
Nerds (at least the nerds I know) don't mock non-nerds. We're not snobs. What they're mocking here are folks who are so astonishingly and preventably ignorant that it's just plain funny. I don't view people who refer to speakers as "the computer's brain" or who place orders for "60 nanoseconds of RAM" as idiots, all I see is a remark that is funny from a more knowledgable perspective. I'm sure mechanics pass around similar lists of boneheaded remarks nerds make about their cars, for example.
Gads. If that's the one I think it is, I am the person who provided that trick to the author of Stupid Mac Tricks. I'll have to go dig out my copy.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Okay, so it's not the best analogy in the world :-P I was just trying to keep the car thing going (I drive a standard, so... Next slashdot poll idea, I guess.)
Anyway, the idea is the same - you still have to know *something* about driving, about how the spedometer works, about what the '1' and '2' are on the Automatic transmission, as opposed to 'D' (I still haven't figured that out...), etc. If you don't know how to drive, automatic transmission isn't going to help that much.
As someone noted earlier, the idea that "they will just be able to use the software" is saying "they will just be able to drive the car (without learning anything about it)". The problem is one of perception, and average logical literacy.
/.'ers, 'easy to the average user' means 'something that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole because it's too graphical, but I guess it's fine for the people who've never seen something like this before', when said application has years (decade's in Unix's case) of evolution behind it, which the programmer can't get out of his mind. The problem is the perception of the problem.
Perception, in the sense that MS & Co. have been trying like hard to hammer home the fact that thier software is *easy* to use, and doesn't require any thought, and that Apple with thier iMac has been trying to make the 'un-thinking' PC a reality. Imagine someone trying to market a car that you don't have to learn how to drive, it's so easy to use! Absurd. But we see that as the holy grail of software design nowadays - that the user shouldn't have to think at all in order to do anything.
Logical literacy, in the sense that computers are very, very logical machines, and human minds aren't. In order to effectively use a computer, your expectations of what is and isn't possible have to conform (roughly) to the rules of logic (i.e. you can't do word processing without a word processor, no matter how much you think you can). This really should be addressed by increased standards for Math and Science testing, but with the way things are going in our society (cutting school budgets, the whole evolution mess in Kansas), I don't see that happening. I am not saying users are stupid - generally, users are very good at what they do in life. It's just that thier minds (very literally) don't work the same as a programmer's mind. Something that very few programmers (and technical people in general) realize.
Logical reasoning is not something fundamental to human thought or behaviour. It has to be learned, just like everything else.
However, the danger in trying to make things easier is doing it wrong. I'm sure we're all familiar with the results of this process *coughcoughWordcoughcough*.
To some techies and
The typical UI-solving exersize is 'make it look pretty and have simple, easy to navigate options'. This is generally the approach taken by Windows, GNOME, KDE, etc. The problem with this, is that for anything more complex than a trivial application, the logic of the program can become pretty, well, non-trivial, and communicating the logical structure to the user can be a bit of a chore. So, the programmer just assumes that the user is going to know to look in 'Options' for changing his user information, but in 'Preferences' to change his start page, or 'Page Setup' to change how the thing is going to print, etc, etc. And that's a simple case. Do Tools->Options in Word to see a horrible case (to turn off auto spell check, you have to go to Tools->Options->Spelling & Grammar, but to turn off AutoCorrection, you have to go to Tools->AutoCorrect->AutoReplaceAsYouType, even though those are two extremely related functions). The average complexity of the typical application, which may be cool for someone who got 90's in Math in high school, becomes an insurmountable obstacle for the person who has trouble with logical reasoning.
And that's really where the difficulty lies - the root of the problem is that many, many people aren't very logically literate - yet we constantly heap very complex logical tasks upon them daily, and get exasparated because they don't know that you go to 'Page Setup' to set up your margins, and not 'Internet Options'.
To solve this, really, we need to think through not just OS or UI design in general, but application design as a whole. Not just to create a consistent-across-the-board interface methodology, but also a simple, logical, and potentially universal way to interact with the computer. Until you address that problem - that programmers think in a highly logical manner, and most people don't - the glut of clueless users is just going to get larger.
Two years you lasted at this place? You must be a saint. I hope and pray (in no particular direction) to work with people at patient and well-mannered as you.
However, every once in a while, a good tech explosion serves to bring a PHB back to earth. One PHB that I worked with had to endure 12 years of self-inflicted failures and embarassment in front of customers before he finally got a clue about being technically responsible when in the business of selling technology. What turned the tide? His only long-standing code guru finally snapped, gave him a dose of honesty that singed his eyebrows, resigned on the spot, and started his own immediately-successful company. Now if his accountant would snap, he'd have it made.
There's hope. But generally not enough for everyone.
I think not...(*poof*)
I am amused to see how we are coming up with the car as a metaphor to talk about how people use and understand computers.
I have a personal metaphor that I use in a similar way to explain to people why tech support is so difficult.
Imagine that every car that came off an assembly line was different from every other car off the assembly line. Of course that is the case today, green Honda Accords vs. black Honda Accords. The thing is, the color doesn't make any difference in performance, but in this hypothetical situation, it makes a big difference. Your car will act very differently if you get the CD Player in it or the accessory wheels. Because of this, no two cars react the same way off the assembly line.
Worse, when a person brings them home, they add other stuff to the cars to personalize them. Not unusual for a person to drill in a hole to make a sunroof, or put strips on the side. Each of these minor modifications make a huge difference in how the car performs and most of the time they are being done by amateurs, people who have no mechanical background. That's not to say it is not being done right, but there are a lot of times where it is being done...strangely.
Then comes "car support." There are two types of questions in car support. One is the "my car won't start" variety. Answer: "you are not putting the key in the ignition, or you don't have gasoline." The other question is "whenever I am driving the car on a Thursday with the air conditioning on, and shift from 3rd gear to 4th gear, my radio station changes to the 5th preset. Why does that happen?" Answer:"get a new car."
First of all, as somebody already pointed out, we nerds / geeks are usually mocked by the "normal" people, so it's perfectly legitimate to take revenge in the field we're experts in. But I'll leave that subject to Jon Katz.
As for tech. support stories, people who are ignorant are not the problem; the problem are the people who are ignorant, arrogant and plainly abusive. Have you read the story of the girl who tried to install Word when she didn't have one of the disks and, when told so, started insulting the tech? Or the person who calls threatening lawsuit because he had to throw out a "broken" computer, when in fact it had a "Non system disk error"?
As someone working in the field, I don't have a problem if a customer calls me asking for our DNS servers. But if someone calls me telling me that I don't know what I'm doing when it's actually their fault, fuck them, I say.
Automatic gear makes you a sufficiently skilled driver. Yeah right...
Of course you're going to be all alone on the road, no other cars or any obstacles. Forget about traffic lights and traffic signs in general. That's just for the "advanced" driver, normal people don't have to fuzz with all that, they just wanna get from A to B. Yeah right...
On the north pole, you could probably get away with this actually.
People have also been using logical thought and reasoning for umpteen thousand years.
And you apparently still cannot cope.
Hey, there's probably a lot of truth to that comment about those 80s homecomputers.
I used to have a Commodore 64 and I remember spelling the Reference Guide, which listed everything up to the functional block design and registers of the IC's inside. I found it fascinating, even though I was only 12 at the time.
Mind you, I also had friends who'd only copy warez and play games all the time and couldn't care less about even writing a BASIC program.
Sometimes I wonder if I should consider myself gifted by time to have been able to play with computers that were so transparent from the conceptual level to the implementation.
As far as the "unwilling users" are concerned: most really don't want to lear, _especially_ if there's a techie around who can be bothered to do the stuff for them.
Most unwilling users are people who have exactly that sort of mindset that they like to manipulate other people into doing their work. They are subsequently left out of computer knowledge, for which others are comfortably to blame. So they have an excuse for themselves to manipulate more.
Well, maybe that's a bit extreme and grimly put.
Still though, I've given my father several books about various computer topics, ranging from a comic, explaining basic computer topics, to Word for Dummies. He has Windows95 and it came with a "getting started" booklet. But he refuses to even attempt to read those!
He just bluntly tells me: "I don't want to have to learn about it, I just want to use it;" and I'm not making this up. Mind you, the guy has a University degree too.
I gave my mother my old Performa and went with her to CompUSA to pick out a printer. We were cornered by a salesman who insisted that:
- All Macintoshes only use USB printers
- USB is only for Macs
I thanked him politely and edged away only to have him get angry at me when I tried to buy a "Windows printer" against his advice.What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
>Subject: Fw: viral warning :) ".
>Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 10:28:22 -0400
>
>
>This came from our IT department, so it must be legitimate!
>
>Arlene
>
> > >>> >Dear All,
> > >>> >
> > >>> >This is VERY, VERY SERIOUS!! Please forward it to everyone you
> > >>> >know..they will be grateful
> > >>> >
> > >>> > Important
> > >>> >
> > >>> > There is a virus out now being sent to people via email...it is
> > >>> >called the A.I.D.S. VIRUS. It will destroy your memory, sound card and
> > >>> >speakers, drive and it will infect your mouse or pointing device..as well
> > >>> >as your keyboards (possibly motherboards) making what you type not able to
> > >>> >register on the screen. It self terminates only after it eats 5MB
> > >>> >harddrive space & will delete all programs.
> > >>> >
> > >>> > It will come via E-mail called "OPEN: VERY COOL!
> > >>> >
> > >>> > DELETE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! immediately!! It will basically render
> > >>> >your computer useless. Please pass this on to everyone you know!
> > >>> >
> > >>> >
> > >>> >
> > >>> > PASS IT ON QUICKLY & TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE
> > >>> >
> > >>>
> > >>
> > >
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
My two co-workers are completely useless
support gun control: take guns from cops
"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects." -- Will Rogers
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I had to stop reading after a couple of pages so that I could stop laughing long enough to catch my breath but I wonder what those who seem so contemptuous of users who haven't spent their every waking moment learning about computers to the exclusion of all else are really angry about.
I enjoy doing "tech-support" type work. It feels good to take what I've worked hard to learn and make it easier for someone else to learn by my being smart enough or clever enough to see the problem through their eyes (so as to understand what it is that's confusing or misleading them) even though their area of expertise is terra incognita to me.
Just because I don't hold them in contempt for not being 'leet doesn't mean those stories aren't hilarious, though.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's about like if I decided to change my camshaft and bore out the engine in my car, only to find that the engine was welded together. Sure, most drivers don't have the desire to do this, but if they do get a hankering, it can be done.
Plus, most people don't call up GM when they try to install an aftermarket stereo and end up botching up their electrical system, and then complain loudly when GM refuses to help them out of their quandry.
It's like giving a 16-year old a Corvette or Viper or something, handing them the keys, and saying "You don't have to know anything to get on the freeway. Why don't you go pick up an aftermarket stereo and some rims and install them? It's so EASY!", except it's not nearly as deadly with a computer.
When PC's first came out I was a univ "helper" and had to help a person who had got a abort/retry error on a disk write. They placed their only backup in the drive and pressed retry. In Dos1 days, there was no media change check so the FAT of the bad now was copied to the good. Total loss of a year of research for that person. Computers are difficult to use, what may be perceived as stupidity is often lack of knowledge. I think things are getting better, GUI's have helped people by reducing the machine-human barrier somewhat.
The personal computer is 24 years old now. It is the most important technology of the 20th century.
People who do not know about computers after all this time DESERVE to be mocked.
At least, that is an opinion that I heard a couple days ago.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The African storyteller is the daughter of Carmen Electra? Wow! I didn't know that she was African. You learn something new every day. (or maybe not).
[Folks, go read www.snopes.com]
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I believe you that you heard the story first hand from an African Storyteller.
But, I have to believe that the African Storyteller was just --- [are you ready for this?] --- telling you a story!
The reason is that the glitter story is an old and well-known urban legend. Usually in the story the doctor doesn't laugh and run out of the room though. The comment is usually "My you look fancy today" or something similar, and the person discovers later on at home that they glitter all over their pudenda.
Carmen Electra told the exact story on the Conan O'Brien show just a couple months ago, but she claimed that it happened to her! Last I checked, she was an actress, which is a sort of a storyteller.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Oh this brings back a good one that my buddy did. He was working at one of those quick change oil places and he did the lights and windshield wiper check on a lady's car. When she saw that her blinker light was out she asked him if he could change it for her. Of course he could, and that was his job to do that. But instead he told her that she was out of blinker fluid and she had to go to the dealership to get the right fluid for her car.
Ho ho! It still makes me laugh.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I've come to the conclusion that user-friendliness is not and should not be the holy grail of computing.
;-)
Why should computers be so easy to understand that anyone can turn them on and instantly be proficient?
The only reason for that is improper training of the potential users.
Really, face it: We have to learn a lot of very complicated things in order to be able to function properly in our society.
Reading and writing are complicated tasks. Don't underestimate how difficult writing is, let alone proper spelling!
Driving a car is complicated, especially when there's a lot of other traffic on the road.
If you want your computer to do anything more sophicistated than what a PlayStation can do, then need to sit down and _learn_ how to operate the machine, and you have to get some basic understanding of how the machine works. That is more than knowing what icons to click to open MS-Word: If you know a bit more about the basic principles behind the operation of the computer, a smart person can infer a lot of those details from his/her background knowledge.
Of course, training might have to start at a rather early age, so that all this becomes part of a persons 'native' background knowledge, just like reading/writing is automatic for most people nowadays.
Over time, this will happen and the 'stupid luser' syndrom will disappear.
However, what I just said doesn't mean that I think all talk about user-friendliness is utter crap: Things like a consistent user-interface across a range of programs is a very good thing, imho. Not identical, but at least consistent. Not all cars have identical dashboard, but at least there's a huge amount of consistency across models. Inconsistencies in the various pieces of M$ software are a nightmare imho.
But the 'dumbing down' of users is not desirable and is not really what 'user friendliness' is all about, I think.
Instead of 'dumbing down' the users they should be educated.
If you design your computer in such a way that fools can use them, you will end up with even more foolish people and your computer needs to be redesigned for even more foolish people!
'Tech' and 'User Friendly' need to meet each other in the middle where you don't have to go in and wire up the computer manually, but where full control over the system and complete insight in it's working is still available.
Somebody gave the example of a car with a locked-up engine: Car designers don't do that. When something goes wrong with the car, a techie can come in, take everything apart, fix the problem and put the whole lot back together.
They DON'T replace your car and they DON'T replace your whole engine when something like a carburator needs cleaning! All the parts are accessible and serviceable to the knowledgeable engineer. The complexities of a car are hidden away behind the controls, but a car is not 'dumbed down' to the degree an OS from M$ is...
(Okay, I managed to get in my opinions on computer-use and I managed to get in some anti-M$ advocacy as well
--Tim
The fact is that the people are at fault for their own ignorance. Computers have existed for 25 years now.
25 years??? Yeah, whatever. So much for Von Neumann and other pioneers, so much for the ENIAC etc. Sheesh, talk about putting a foot in one's mouth...
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Hiawatha, you picked the WRONG crowd to cop this attitude with.
>>...I don't care for the idea of nerds mocking ordinary folks.
We're not talking about "Ordinary folks" here hiawatha. We're talking about the sort of absolute morons who think that the mouse is a foot pedal and that a computer works like a sewing machine.
Ordinary people take the time to learn what they want and need. I work in retail so I have experiences _first hand_ some of the types of stories that were posted on that site.
Here is a sample conversation(no exaggeration, but some sentances re-phrased.)
ME: Hello (my employer's name) how can I help you.
IDIOT: I need to get my computer upgraded to run AOL 4.0, I have 5 RAMS and I need more.
ME: What kind of computer do you have?
IDIOT: What do you mean?
ME: Do you know if it's a Mac or a PC?
IDIOT: OH, it's a Mac.
ME: What model Mac is it?
IDIOT: It's a performa.
ME: There are some numbers too, I need to find out the EXACT number so I can tell what type of memory you need to upGRADE it.
IDIOT: Oh, It's a system 7.5.
ME: No, that's not it. On the front of your computer...
IDIOT: There's just an apple below the screen, there are no numbers.
ME: No, that's your MONITOR, you need to look at the front of the COMPUTER.
IDIOT: Oh, you mean the hard drive?
ME: No, I mean the computer, the hard drive is something INSIDE of the computer.
IDIOT: Ok, it's a Performa 575.
ME: Well it's $X to max out the ram on that model.
IDIOT: Ok, So that'll let me run AOL 4.0, right?
ME: If that's what the AOL people told you, you need, then yes. I personally don't know. I don't use or support AOL.
IDIOT: Alright, when can I bring this in.
ME: Our hours are (insert hours here).
IDIOT: What? How am I supposed to get there? You guys don't make it easy for the working people.
ME: Well, WE ARE working people too.
IDIOT: I guess I'll have to try to make it in on your late day.
>In many cases, they really shouldn't have to understand the intricacies of a system; if the system were better designed, it'd be self-explanatory.
Even though you don't need to know how to build a clock, you should at least be able to tell time WITHOUT a digital watch. The average user doesn't need to understand why certain chipsets handle file I/O better than others, but they should know the 8.3 rules of the DOS filesystem.
>The fact that so many ordinary folks are mystified by computers speaks not to their stupidity, but the crudity of the technology and the limitations of the designers.
It speaks volumes about their stupidity. You don't deal with these morons EVERY FSCKING DAY, many of us do. Please haiwatha, do us all a favor and drop the "I'm not a geek like YOU" attitude.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Ah. How cute. Make fun of the people who aren't technically-inclined enough to grok all of the idiosyncracies and otherwise non-sense-making aspects of a computing device. I don't know if anybody has noticed lately, but computers generally don't make a tremendous amount of sense, nor are they particularly intuitive. While I can occasionally find joy in poking fun at people as they make seemingly foolish mistakes, I can also recognize self-serving mockery when it arises. I'm not impressed...
D
...to many of the users in these stories. I'm not a computer idiot...I'm a CS major and pretty good (although inexperienced...and it shows) at programming. However, a few years ago, I hadn't a clue. Not because I was stupid...but because I just didn't know. A couple examples:
1) My first computer (like many people my age...I'm 21) was an Apple IIe...which, of course, had no hard drive. When my grandparents got a used 386 running DOS, they asked me to help them use it. They had the game Wolfensteind, and my first goal was to figure out how to play it. I knew nothing about DOS, so, to play it, I stuck the floppy into the floppy drive (even though it was already installed). I reinstalled the bloody thing every time I wanted to play it, until I figured out how to use DOS.
2) I first learned UNIX from a book. When I read about the 'ls' command, I thought it was '1s' (note the number 'one' instead of the letter 'l').
The people in these stories may now be sysadmins, programmers, etc., for all we know. They aren't necessarily stupid, they just don't know.
The stories are pretty darn funny, however. But, then again, I can also laugh at myself.
We're not making fun of end users, we're laughing at the things people say and do. Can't you just relax and laugh?
I personally laugh all the time at things my users do... some of the things have absolutely nothing to do with the PCs really.
Once, for instance, I was called to our warehouse to fix a printer, and when I got there, I died laughing. The printer was indeed broken. It did not help the printer that someone had crashed one of our golf carts through the wall and smashed the thing to bits.
Sometimes, people do goofy things, and we're not laughing at them, we're laughing at the goofy things people do.
Off Topic Example:
An African storyteller once told me the story of her mother. Her mother had recently moved to the united states at the age of around 60 I believe and wasn't all too familair with United States customs. Sooner or later she went to the Gynecologist to have a PAP test done (a gynecological exam to test for cervical cancer) and was very nervous about having to have a man look at her in that area, even if it was a doctor.
Well, she didn't want to embarass herself, so she made special effort to clean the area, and even sprayed deoderant on the pubic hair, just to make sure it didn't stink.
When she got to the Ob/Gyn office, she sripped and laid back on the table just like the nurse had told her to. The doctor came in, took one look under the sheet and burst out laughing and ran out of the room. Horribly embarrased, the old woman got dressed real fast and ran outside crying.
Her daughter asked her, what was the matter?
She explained what had happened, including the part about spraying deoderant on to make sure it didn't stink.
"Mother, we don't have any spray deoderant. You used my daughters 'Green Glitter' hair spray."
: Okay, so maybe it looses a bit without the accent...
The big list from Dell isn't really from Dell. I contributed a couple to that list, and I've never worked for Dell. :)
i got a bit aggravated after reading about half of these. people are soooo stupid.
but because of the format of the page...and me wanting to read ALL of em, i found out that win95 using ie5 can handle 45 browser windows open (with some disk cacheing of course) at once!
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
Bah to you.
>The fact that so many ordinary folks are mystified by computers speaks not to their stupidity, but the crudity of the technology and the limitations of the designers.
No, it speaks to their unwillingness to learn. Using a computer is no more difficult than driving a car. Fixing a computer is a lot harder, but people can drive cars and not be able to fix them either.
It's like anything else. "Don't blame the people, blame the technology" is rubbish. The fact is that the people are at fault for their own ignorance. Computers have existed for 25 years now. Plenty of time to hop on the bandwagon.
No big deal though, the newest generation is growing up in an internet-enabled society. My 6-year old cousin knows more about computers than his parents do.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
After reading through a whole bunch of these, did anyone else have the idea that Intel marketed the term "Pentium" WAY TOO MUCH?!?!?
"Customer: "I just got your software in the mail...when are you sending the computer?"
"Tech Support: "You don't have a computer?"
Customer: "Nope. But I have the software -- just send me the computer, and you've got a new member."
Isn't this actually the business model for some companies now?
A. Michael Froomkin
U. Miami School of Law,POB 248087
Coral Gables, FL 33124,USA
I have a blog.
I completely agree with what you are saying - and can relate an episode that I watched about a year ago when I took my car in for an oil change - this lady had a new car and had no idea what the RPM guage was for. She thought it was a clock and brought her car in to have the clock fixed because the needle was jumping all over.
One of the other posts here says that they don't consider this stuff funny anymore. I am in the same boat. I hang out on one of the help channels on IRC and oh my some idiots come in there. Then I get to deal with the same shit for brain types all day at work.
It all makes me sad.
I think it goes to show how our educational system is running when people can not even program a VCR, set a digital watch, or turn on a computer.
Maybe I should just move to an island and get away from the morons of the world.
Mister programmer
I got my hammer
Gonna smash my smash my radio
But there *are* certain things people should learn about their computer to keep it running properly instead of running to someone else for help. I know that when the fuel gauge in my car says "E", then I have to go to a gas station and put in more gas. Lots of the anecdotes on the webpage in question are like people running out of gas, sitting in the middle of traffic, and expecting their car dealer to do something about it.
-Chris
My point was that the learning curve can be flattened (learning to drive an automatic Tranny is way easier than a standard) with good design. Learning is not taken out of the equation just shifted...I can learn to drive a car but never know how to fix it or even do basic maintenance. By the same token, I can learn to use a well designed peice of software with out getting too deep into how a computer works ("My modems a Pentium"). More people are using computers and were getting more of these questions. Now are we just going to laugh at them and call them stupid (which may make us all feel better for the treatment we got from most of these same people in High school) or are going to listen to them...if they are having problems with our products, then that should say something about our design. If you don't respond, somebody else will...and then you'll be out of a job.(or out of business).
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
- How does one click? There are over a hundred things in front of the user that go click when you push them, and only one of them is the correct one - the left-hand button of that soap-bar-looking thing.
- How does the user know that that little picture of a window with Start written next to it is a "button"? Could the raw newbie not be excused for searching the keyboard and case for a physical button labeled "Start"?
And on the other hand, if you've never seen a car before, how would you know that the rightmost squarish thing underneath the driver's seat is what you push to make the car go, or that you first have to stick your key in the slot on the side of that round thing in front of you and turn it?The problem is that people who've never seen a car before aren't expecting to be able to drive without learning a bit about it first, whereas we've got people who've never seen a computer before but nevertheless expect to go roaring away on the Internet.
What response is there to "I don't want to have to learn a bunch of stuff, I just want it to work" but "When we come up with a computer that can read your mind, we'll let you know"?
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Cars only seem intuitive because we get taught how to drive them. Computer stores ought to be encouraged to offer a how-to-use-a-computer course whenever they sell a computer. And those salescritters who advertise products that claim "You don't have to learn a bunch of stuff to get on the Internet" should be drug out into the street and shot. :-)
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Some of these are just too painful to read.
It worries me that some people who are supposed to be teaching others how to use computes are no better than this (not all obviously). At least it reminds me to make certain that anyone who asks me for advice doesn't walk away from me misunderstanding something i told them, and then repeating their mixed up interpretation to others.
Huh? I doubt many hackers call around looking for folks who have set their software up to answer when somebody calls.
15 years ago, this is *exactly* what people did to find machines to hack. There were a ton of programs called "war dialers" for the Atari 800, Commodore 64, etc. that would dial through a large range of phone numbers and flag those that had a modem at the other end.
Here's my two favorite stupid tech stories:
1) Microsoft's Novell client does not operate to spec (surprise). If you do a Novell "capture" to file and start printing, you are fine. If you stop sending data for 45 seconds the file pointer (apparently) resets to the beginning of the file so subsequent data overwrites existing data. I proved this by writing a qbasic program that demonstrated the effect and then called Microsoft. I explained the whole issue and mentioned my qbasic demo. His response: "Windows 95 doesn't come with QBasic." He literally wouldn't let me go any further with the call at that point. I asked to speak with his supervisor and he said "OK, it'll take 2 business days", but the guy never called.
2) This one happened to a coworker. Gateway computer with a hard drive that shows several bad sectors. Still under warranty so he calls tech support to get a replacement. Techs answer: "Bad sectors are usually caused by software, so do a full reinstall of everything and it should be fine. In any case, we don't replace drives until they are 50% bad sectors." Uh-huh, is there anyone with a brain I can speak with?
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I got a call once from a high-ranking manager in our building. I logged a trouble call and walked down to her desk.
When I got there, the first thing I did was took the coffee cup off the CD-ROM drive and closed it. I then took the floppies off the side of her file cabinet where they had been stuck with magnets. I pulled the case off the machine and dumped out the diskettes that had piled up inside, and for good measure I pulled the CD-ROM out of the 5.25" floppy drive. After doing all of this, the computer still wouldn't work, so I picked up the keyboard and dumped out the coffee that was spilled in it. The manager walked up while I was doing this and told me "The first level tech said I'd need a copy of my startup disk, so here it is." She handed me a photocopy of a diskette.
I picked her mouse up off the floor and put it on her desk where it belonged. The machine started up just fine, but when I checked the disk it only had 5 megabytes left on a 4.3 gigabyte hard drive. Looking around, I found that the C:\WINDOWS\TEMP directory was filled with porn. I asked her what she was doing when it stopped working, so she showed me: she sat down at her desk, leaned over to pick up the phone, and her breasts bumped the keyboard. I told her she was too stupid to own a computer.
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
Some of these hurt. I felt the tech support's pain...but I also know what it's like to be that stupid customer...
I put together my computer with a friend's help. Set jumpers, put drives in their mounts, everything from the case up. I got the system home and my monitor instantly died. No matter, just drive 40 miles round trip back to his house to get his spare monitor. Then I got home...
IO Conflict 3f8
Press DEL to enter SETUP
I knew what that meant. I punched DEL angrily to wrestle with the BIOS again.
No response.
I tromped to Radio Shack and two other computer places in town to get some help--diagnosis of everything from a bad BIOS battery to bad motherboard. I bought a new battery. I jumper-cleared the CMOS. I checked and rechecked connections. I took out cards one at a time and booted to see what the problem was. I racked my brain for days.
Then I decided to put the keyboard connector where I'd had the mouse plugged in, and vice versa.
I laughed so hard I hyperventilated.
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
1. A removable core, where the computer acts more like a laptop (without the screen) in a docking station. So that the central components can be as easily removed as say a toner cartidge (weird analogy but it works, and yes there are some people who can't change their toner cartidges), and the core can be taken in for repair. This has the major drawback of not being nearly as user servicable.
Hrm, I'm not sure if that's really necisary, computers don't really *phisicaly* break down very often, if they do it's usualy just the power supply or, god forbid the hard drive, but this is very rare.
2. Self diagnostic, user correcting, polymorphic, self evolving programs, that fix any problems themselves. HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.. sorry good laugh. Its a good idea, but still ahead of our time.
not really, I think microsoft has this idea, but the thing is, why not just make software that just dosn't break? I mean most computer problems are ether bugs that effect everyone (In witch case nothing can be done.) or User error.
Give someone a linux box with quality, and have them a 'suped up' acount that's not root, but can run things like adduser and such, give them a cute little esay to use shell, and you'll probably never have any problems (you'd give them the root password as well, but you'd tell them that its only for fixing problems and such)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
actualy, bad sectors *are* caused by software, I once had about 20% of my hard drive marked bad beacuse I had a bios-setting misset, and scandisk couldn't access the rest of the disk....
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It's not 'The' pentium, it's just "pentium" the correct use of the terms is like this: "I got pentium, so the internet will be faster now". and don't forget the pentium III, it makes the internet imersive
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It needs more floppyramk
I always come across these tech support nightmare stories and am happy that I don't have their job, but it really points out whose problem this really all is.
Computers are the most complicated machines ever to be used by this large a section of the world's population, and we will not begin to see the proper productivity increases that these machines were supposed to bring until we find a way to tame this complexity.
A writer shouldn't have to know about 7 different types of recordable media in order to write her book. Same goes for anyone that uses a machine to get something done.
In time our industry will mature and we will get past most of these problems, especially as good solutions to the most common problems (those problems solved by the office type suite of programs for example) head into their 10th revision.
I need a shovel to dig a hole, not to become an expert at shovels.
Basically, the oncall admin for the network was redoing the entire network. Me? I'm basically the "computer guy" when he's not around (most of the time - but I work office hours by rule [other duties than just maintaining the computers]).
So he resetup all the computers, and a number were having a problem with outlook (NT network) starting up slow on some machines, but not others (say, taking 5 minutes to startup on a PII is pretty unreasonable, especially when the POS computer I got starts it up in 1 minute).
He found the problem - NIC drivers installed bad version of TCP/IP. Fix: reinstall TCP/IP.
So I proceeded to do so on the 5 or so computers he missed. 4 done, now wait till guy goes to lunch. He leaves. I go to work. Discover no CD-ROM drive. Fine, I'll use the shared server CD-ROM drive. OK, Network Neighbourhood, Properties, Protocols, TCP/IP, Remove. Reboot. D'OH! Duh, no network (TCP/IP only network, but NetBEUI runs on the server, too), therefore no CD. Tried copying files to a floppy, but naturally I didn't know of the blasted file NT needs to recognize it as an "NT install CD".
In the end, I got it to work - luckily we had a zip drive external floating around. Copied NT i386 dir to zip. install zip driver. done.
D'OH! It's pretty funny on reflection. It's the excuse I use if I goof up.
Category " sex" is blocked
[huge faceless corporation] logs and audits all Internet usage
They got that one too. Now some suit has me on their list...
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Press the any key... where's the any key... there's esk, sitrol, and pigup... where's the any key... whew, all this hacking is making me thirsty...
Pork is not a verb
Not a good example. I have a real problem with getting left and right confused and could easily have made the same mistake. (I also get really mixed up over the little icons on my cooker knobs that tell me which ring is going to light up.)
:-)
Most people who know me would agree that I am not stupid, although if you saw me struggling to follow directions or boil an egg you could be forgiven for coming to that conclusion.
>Ordinary folks who don't understand computers
>don't deserve to be mocked. Ordinary people who
>want to use their computers but refuse to learn
>anything about them do.
It's probably easier for those of us who grew up on the home computers of the 80s where all we had was the ROM BASIC and a cassette recorder. We had to learn what was going on to get anything out of the machines, and it wasn't too difficult. Subsequent developments in computing have been incremental changes that we have been able to take in our stride.
For new users of the late 90s, computers must seem overwhelmingly complicated. I completely understand a reluctance to learn how it all works.
As well as the users who are unwilling to learn, part of the problem must be the techies who are unwilling to teach. I'm sure most of us have been asked to fix a problem on a friend's computer, and have proceeded to zoom through countless dialogs at the speed of light, fiddling with options as we go, and simultaneously typing obscure commands into a terminal window. With the problem fixed we go away, feeling superior, only to be asked to fix the same problem again the next week. A better approach, in my opinion, is to let the user make the changes themselves, explaining each setting as we come to it, and why it needs to be changed. As long as I make an effort not to sound too patronising the users seem to appreciate the help, and get the satisfaction of feeling that they've fixed the problem themselves. With a bit of luck they'll be able to fix the same problem should it occur again, and may even have the confidence to tackle a whole load of similar problems in the future. It may take a little bit longer the first time but in the long run, everybody gains.
ObTrueStory(tm):
:-)*
:-)* ).
Lemme guess, you used to hang around on alt.hackers. I used to hang out there too, I was surprised to not see 31337 k-rad alt.2600 people there at first. The ObHack requirement was quite a nice touch. I remember when it got to food hacks
As for computers sold on television, I remember laughing at the shopping channel ones. There's now a commercial played way too often up here in Canada now by "denny computers."
It's hilarious/infuriating. A family of really bad actors pass by a number of good computers with ok speakers (Labtec). They get to the last computer, which is so obviously put together with the cheapest no-name parts possible. That includes those crappy 7W speakers that all the stores pass off as 80W. The family goes nuts over it, pointing, touching, oohing, aahing. It even looks plain uglier than the other ones, and the family only has looks to go on.
3.2GB HD, 40X CDROM, 64MB RAM, Win '98. No other specs like video card, sound card, or who made those parts (though they probably don't know either
"The only computer that comes with everything you need!"
Rrrright.
I keep resisting the urge to call them up:
"So, your computer is the only computer with everything I need, right?"
"Yes it is."
"Ok, well, I need 100MB ethernet, 3-piece speakers that actually have some bass response, an RDBMS, UNIX, a laser printer, 17-inch monitor (I can't stand anything smaller), Matrox G400... That is what I need, and you appear to be the only company that can provide these things. You also charge only CAN$999 for it all!"
"Um... we can't give you those things."
"But your computer is the only one that comes with everything I need."
"We only sell that one configuration."
"So, are you telling me that your advertisement is making false claims."
"Well we don't mean it like that."
"But you led me to believe so. That's false advertising, isn't it?"
...and so on. Until I hang up and open up my phone book to the number for reporting false advertising.
Then I realise that the whole thing would only be worth my time if I would get a free computer out of it. That's extremely unlikely, so I go off to read some more Slashdot, which, incidentally, is also unlikely to provide me with a free computer, but I feel much less insulted.
Classic example from a class I once taught: "Move your cursor to the Apple in the upper left hand corner of your screen"
The person I was standing next to proceeded to move their arrow to the upper right corner. Is this a computer problem? Nope - this is a person problem.
err..my computer *does* have 6 gigs of memory. its also got 192 processors (origin 2000).
yes, it's sad..
and I know another, not as funny, example:
just because they don't understand how to use a calendar program that they want.. the computer is suddenly "stupid" and all associated programs contained therein are "stupid." and now it's a piece of junk. but the funny part comes when, as i've asked them what program it is that they're used to running (i.e., what calendar program it is that they used [at their school] and were accustomed to) they replied "it isn't a program."
like hell it isn't...
well, sorry about that, but, seriously.. come on people!
Insert mind here.
So you would put the PC above the airplane, the car, the TV, the radio and the phone? I don't know the exact year these were initially invented, but I do know that not until this last century did they have a significant global influence.
What global impact does the PC have? Outside Europe, the Americas, and some areas of Asia I would assume the PC has very little impact on people's lives. I know there are pockets very highly developed outside these areas, but these examples are just for simplicity.
Nobody "deserves to be mocked" unless they are themselves mocking others, and especially not because of their ignorance. If you don't know about something you may not know that you don't know, so how would you know?
It seems pretty clear to me that in several of these stories it's the tech support guy who is too stupid to realise that the customer is having fun with them.
Below is my favorite.. and It sound like TCI @home.
I called my cable modem service about a problem involving a series of constant disconnections and lock ups.
Tech Support: "Oh, you need to empty your browser's cache."
Me: "Well, that's a different program."
Tech Support: "Do you use Internet Explorer or Netscape?"
Me: "Internet Explorer."
Tech Support: "Ok, click on View/Properties/Internet Options."
Me: "I'm sorry but cache files from an entirely different program couldn't possibly be causing this."
Tech Support: "Hmm, let me refer you to advanced technical support."
The advanced technician knew exactly what the problem was and solved it. A month later it happened again.
Tech Support: "When was the last time you cleaned your browser's cache?"
Yet again I was forwarded to advanced tech support, and my problem was solved. A while later, it happened a third time.
Tech Support: "Oh, it's the cable line in your area. We'll get a truck rolling on it right away."
Me: "If it's the cable line, how am I able to connect at all?"
Tech Support: "There could be a short in one of the lines, and that could be causing it."
The next day the cable repairman arrived and checked the lines in my area, but my service was again working flawlessly even before he arrived. When he left, I
turned on the TV and noticed the cable was out.
made this the startup screen for a computer in my high school's computer lab.
The next day an "out of order" sign was taped to the monitor. The lab attendants usually wrote the reason on the bottom edge of the paper, so I leaned in to read what had been written there. It said, "Will self-destruct." "
Oh lord, this site is *too good*! Can you imagine???? (well, yes, I can, I've been there too!)
Hmm, as long as we are laughing at the expense of other (hey I think it's funny too) I thought I would throw in my own stories.
:-)
When I was programming in BASIC on an old IBM PC (12 years ago) I knew how to save files to the floppy, but I didn't know how to delete them. I heard that if you opened the drive when the light was on you could lose all your files, so I tried that. It didn't work. I heard that if you put a magnet on the disk it would erase the files. It didn't affect it at all. 360K floppies have never gone bad on me.
Same time period, I once accidentally erased or corrupted the STARTREK.EXE game. I called the adult who had set up the computer for me. He had made a backup of everything into a c:\arc directory. So he managed to navigate me to the c:\arc\games directory and told me to "copy startrek dot exe space backslash games star dot exe" so I typed to STAR.EXE instead of *.EXE (which in a DOS copy means use the same name as the first file). STAR seemed likely since it was Star Trek after all.
Then there was a time I thought I had a virus because the computer screen background was completely red all the time instead of black. Turned out the video cable was loose.
Here's another hillarious computer site, Techtales.com. It's so fun to laugh at the computer illiterate : )
I have done tech support for a computer company, an ISP, and a software company. I have heard ALL of the dumb people and their questions. This site is great. Somewhere i have a web page just like it too.
-
Several years ago there was a contest in U magazine for the Jerky Boys. all you had to do was submit a crank call idea. The one I submitted, not thinking it would win anything, would be for someone calling a comptuer tech support line saying their "foot pedal" doesn't work.
- Roughly a week later I received a phone call, being told I was one of the runners-up. They gave me a Jerky Boys tshirt(to promote their godawful movie) and a hundred bucks.
Forgot to add. Did anyone see that SNL skit starring Tom Hanks and one of the other regular members?(cant remember his name, he was after Dennis MIller for the news). This was around '86, and Tom calls tech support in a total frenzy. The skit was 100% accurate as to what can really happen on the workplace.
...especially about the terminology we use. "Select" means click once with that doo-hickey that makes a pointer that moves across the screen. The old typewriter hard return is now "Enter." And if you want to just put your friend Bob's name in your list of names and addresses, you have to type it in something called a "field."
Sure, some of the comments from the uninitiated *are* funny. And frankly, I'm bookmarking the site for future comic relief. And I even have plans and the material for a similar site that is dedicated to my particular corner of the computing industry. But we sometimes just don't realize how foreign this little world of ours is.
I just got through attempting to train the 76 year old owner of my company on how to send and receive email, write letters in Word and print out what he writes. My eyes were opened. We use a language all our own. And as for my boss...he is one very frustrated man. A former fighter pilot, beaten by a little grey box that he thought was nothing more than a glorified electric typewriter. This man knows his own business -- like anyone in any specialized industry, he can speak a lingo that few others would recognize. Do you know what it means to "roll cylinders," "dry trap," "make-ready?" No? You'd sound silly to my boss.
So...the site was funny, yeah. But I look around carefully to make sure no one catches me laughing too hard.
Consigned to flames of woe.
I do technical support for a medium sized ISP in Canada and the problem quite often is a lack of communication between the technical support staff and the customer. But, often, it is the customers' stupidity. The is a big difference between not knowing something and being stupid. The stupid ones are the ones who think they know what they're doing and refuse to listen. You tell then to go to point x and they go to point m. They then try to guess what you are saying because they're screen does not correspond to your directions. Also, there are quite a few people who do not know the alphabet. I believe Illiad said it best in a recent User Friendly comic strip.
:)
tech: Now please enter your password sir. Type "C" as in "Charlie"
customer: Uhh..don't you mean "C" as in "Computer?"
tech: ???...
tech: No NO, You need to use the "C" as in "Charlie" or it won't work.
customer: Jeepers, these computer things sure are tricky.
THIS HAPPENDS
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
I can remember back in the early 80s in one of my first computer classes (using Apple ][s) there were 2 people for each computer. I sat with my partner who took the seat in front of the computer. The screen was blank so he looked down at the keyboard and typed:
TURN TV ON
I fell out of my chair laughing so hard.
I don't get the same impression of smugness from the site you seem to. I find BOFH much more guilty of that, though still very funny. Some of the stories are about his father and wife for example, so I really don't think he's *trying* to be derogatory. There is also a section for dumb tech support reps so he's even aware it works both ways.
A few stories may come off as smug, I won't argue, but given the amount of abuse tech support reps take over the phone, some return venting is fair maybe?
Fact is newbies in any field mess up, often hilariously. The sanest will laugh right along with you anyway.
"It has a 8 Gigabytes hard drive to make your computer go faster...."
:)
Funny now. Not funny at all 20 years ago
Ugh. That is a sad story indeed. But I think he meant a CMOS password, not a Windows password... of course, the sane thing to do would be to set the jumper on the mainboard that's designed to clear it...
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
1) Trying to type in my first C "Hello World" program on terminals where '#' defaulted to kill. (I didn't get far, as you can imagine.)
/long/set/of/directories".)
2) It was months before I figured out why I couldn't use complex pathnames with cd under DOS, like I had been able to under Unix. (circa 1985)
(I was typing "cd
Anyone else want to fess up?
The cake is a pie
Actually, it seemed to me that a lot of the stories on that site had been submitted by female support engineers.
I have a feeling this might partly be because customers faced with a woman on the line are more likely not to believe she's competent. I've known women who complain about this ... Admittedly that doesn't make much difference when the customer is actually stupid, but it would help explain some of the ones where the customer wrongly assumes the tech is stupid.
Then again, I could be wrong; maybe it's just that the ones submitted by women had a higher tendency to mention that, whereas those submitted by men didn't feel the need to state their gender? *shrug*
> There's no REASON for them to learn everything.
.. most newbies wouldn't know where to go even if they wanted to. Why not teach them where the hood is, and make it clear in the system's interface?
... we don't teach them that this "hood" even exists, and consequently they don't even know when they are under it. I'm not bashing any particular OS/Education model ... every OS is guilty of this problem in some fasion. Not to mention of course that a well defined hood on an OS is a simplification of the issue, and that there is no such thing as the "ideal" abstraction between interface and OS. (Note OS in this case is the Operating System, not the GUI .. with Windows of course, you're forced to use the factory shipped GUI that comes with the OS, so there's little hope in fixing this abstraction in Windows unless Microsoft drastically switches religions.)
Who are you to claim there's no reason for them to learn everything? This is the very attitude that makes certain OSes so frusterating. Don't decide for me. If I know where the hood is, I can decide myself. This is the typical technocrat's elitist attitude.
>That's why we pay mechanics/tech support
Not everyone has the money for this. Another elitist point.
Again though, you miss the point. The existance of low level access itself is useless unless there is a well defined "hood". I'm saying this "hood" is hidden from computer users
For that matter, it can be argued that this is also why people unintentionally fry their file systems/OSes/etc
Besides, when you take your car to a mechanic, do you say "it's broken"? No, you say "my brakes don't work" or "it doesn't accelerate properly". Computers are far more complex than cars in the number of problems/issues possible, but newbies are not taught what a computer actually does (only what comes up on the screen when you press such and such a button), so there is a far bigger communication gap between the newbie and the techie when it comes time to describe problems. Even more so when the techie doesn't have access to the computer in question.
I'm saying we should abandon this elitist "they don't need to know" attitude. Clearly they do. This is exactly the attitude responsible for at least some of the "funny stories" outlined in the link above.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I heard Fox was going to aire "Worlds Stupidest Computer Users" but there wasn't enough violence and sex to justify it.
Actually, I concurr with the idea that there's really no point in publishing these types of stories. We've heard them many times before, they get old quick, and they just help to furthur intimidate non-geeks. I don't think it's appropriate to mock people who are making a geniune attept to use complex devices most of us have been using for 10+ years. We take the intuitiveness of computers for granted - in reality, computers are still one of the most unintuitive, lingo-heavy subjects around. We know words like "folders" and "mount" are symbolic terms to represent various actions and information structures. You can't blame other people for mis interpreting a language we've been using for years.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Newbie Windows 9X users are rarely encouraged to use the DOS command prompt and often not even taught that it's there. Nor is there any DOS documentation that comes with Windows. Nevermind that Microsoft has been trying to dissuade people that Windows is NOT DOS with a pretty front end.
/interface/ and the education newbies are given in the first place that cripples their abilities to understand whats actually going on.
At any rate, you missed the main point. It's not that you *can't* but that the interface does not make it clear that DOS is where to get low level access in the first place.
The abstraction in Linux is nicer - first you have your Kernel, then your shell, then X server, then window manager. Having to configure/set/choose these things youself at least illutrates a clearer hierarchy of control, even if it still isn't perfect.
It's not so much the OSes themselves but rather the
"Old man yells at systemd"
From the site:
> Co-Worker: "Does a firewall need an operating system?"
Haha, what a stupid question! Or is it? It's a perfectly valid question. Did the contributor of this "funny line" think there can't be a firewall running directly on the hardware?
Enternet comes to mind. I'm sure there are others.
No...first of all it's theraputic to the people in the industry....besides..I don't know cars for shit..but if it were better designed I would. It's a complicated machine, just like a computer, but I still know jack about it. At least compared to a Mechanic. These sites are Rad. Add to it, I love to hear that people all over the world are having problems with their computers..it's keeps me with a job.
I agree that users shouldn't be made fun of, because I'm sure we're all ignorant of some subject.
... well, I just have to shake my head.
However, when it's your job to know the terms and products
Rewind (1988/1989), I was looking for a new system to upgrade from my dual-floppy 5.25" XT. I asked "does it a hard drive", the poor sales person showed me a 3.5" floppy and says "yes it uses these!"
Just a year ago, I was channel surfer and landed on TSC (The Shopping Channel) where this guy was explaining the features of this Pentium system. "It has 16 megabits of bytes of RAM." My brother and I laugh SO hard we nearing fell to the floor. We still watch TSC when they're selling computers, because it's funnier than the Comedy Network.
"It comes with SDRAM... that's the fastest, most expensive RAM you can buy!!!"
"It has a 8 Gigabytes hard drive to make your computer go faster...."
ObTrueStory(tm):
I once saw a guy with a 5.25" sloffy -- faced with a computer with only a 3.5" drive -- tried to put it into the drive by folding the floppy in half!!
God has given you the world's greatest computer
service support troll.
Tech: "How much memory does your machine have?"
You: "Six Gigabytes."
Tech: "No, that's your disk drive, how much memory? Go to the File Manager..."
And so on.
Tech: "That sounds funny. Do you know if you have more than one processor?"
You: "Yes, 192 of them."
Tech: "..."
Perception, in the sense that MS & Co. have been trying like hard to hammer home the fact that thier software is *easy* to use, and doesn't require any thought, and that Apple with thier iMac has been trying to make the 'un-thinking' PC a reality. Imagine someone trying to market a car that you don't have to learn how to drive, it's so easy to use! Absurd.
:-)
Ever heard of automatic transmission? I'd have to *think* about driving with manual..
Cars are complex things. Why do auto makers not lock the engine from the driver? Because if the driver /wants/ to look at it and know whats going on, s/he can. And yet, people who don't know anything about engines just don't touch theirs, and refer to experts when it comes time to fix it. But at least they can see it, and chose to learn about it and fiddle with it if they want to.
You're forgetting about the distinction between hardware and software. I can open my PC, swap some jumpers, move cards around, add a new CPU etc. Likewise I can open the hood, check fluids, make sure the spark plugs are okay. That's all hardware.
But what about software? So you can't crack open win95 to see how it works.. when's the last time you looked at the innards of your car's computer? Cars have had software in them for a long time. And it's hardly accessible to the average joe.
http://www.anonymizer.com/3.0/index.shtml for those that can't cut and paste.
The way I see it, there are many problems in why most people have difficulties in using computers.
1. Adults aren't used to being confused. Children are used to not understanding things, adults aren't used to learning, or being in new and unusual situations.
2. Applications are written by programmers, who have a very different experience with computers to users. programmers try to make stuff that's cool rather than solve the usability problems. The number of options for doing `this, that and the other' is bewildering to all except the development team. More and more `features' are added, but the inherent problem isn't solved. The number of things we've had to make an option on my current project is ridiculous, all due to the fact that we have no access to actual end users!
3. Punters get screwed by salesman with bleached teeth and gelled hair. They are told that this machine will do everything and anything. Most people aren't interested in how a PC works, they expect it to be similar to a TV or video.
Most people have no concept of the difference between software/hardware/etc.
When I did PC support a few years ago I had a call from someone who wanted a Fax machine and was sold a PC! Support people do what they can, but it's an unbelievably frustrating job.
The typical phone call would start with:
customer: My computer doesn't work!
me: What happens?
customer: It just doesn't work, send someone around to repair it.
Most of the time it was 'The grey bar with the start button has disappeared'(get them to drag it back up) or 'my sound card is faulty!' (change the leads around). Admittedly, putting a laptop under a running tap to get rid of the spilt coffee, wasn't one of the brightest moves I heard, but then I had a friend who was advising users to place a plant (preferably a cactus) next to the keyboard to solve dodgy ps/2 port problems! There was even a company who were using win95, had no backups of their accounts, and had literally lost everything. They were out for blood but they had never read their Microsoft Licence Agreement.
IMHO, PCs aren't what the majority of people want.
Most people want to type an email, surf a bit and play games. There are others who need to do much more, but then learning stuff usually goes with the job. There have been many discussions about Linux vs. Windows and basically it boils down is that most people take the path of least resistance. If their neigbour has Windows installed, and knows how to write a basic Word document, then that neighbour knows all about computers, pure and simple.
anyway, enough ranting.
Vad
Heh heh heh.
I just love sites like this.
like "My computer has 6 gigs of memory"
i hear that every day
1. Don't ever bitch about nerds mocking ordinary folks -- we're just making up for our formative years.
2. The lion's share of stories on this site are either about people with extremely humorous misunderstandings or people who have very basic problems following directions. In the former's case, I'm fairly certain that all professions have similar lore (picture a a bunch of chemists laughing because someone asked about the valence shells of trichloroethelyne and you'll get my drift).
The latter, the people who can't follow directions, are the really aggrivating ones. People who can't master pressing the "a" key or for whom the concept of clicking on the "Start" button seems horribly complicated. There are a lot of users who call for help and follow directions well; the others deserve to be laughed at -- imagine if you were teaching someone to drive and they couldn't find the steering wheel; you can't help but laugh, can you?
There is a third class as well: people who get themselves so worked up that they call tech support to vent and ignore the help that could so easily fix their problem. The reason they're funny is self-explanitory: if techs didn't laugh, they'd go postal. These calls are probably the most destructive possible influence on a support organization's morale; fortunately the company I used to work phone support for let me hang up on customers who got abusive (which is a good thing, since I would have anyhow).
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Interestingly, one of the largest lists of these stories I ever saw came from Dell's tech help dept. Customer service indeed. The amount of cluelessness involved in releasing that document with Dell's name on it is easily an order of magnitude larger than anything in it.
I think you have more of a problem with badly set up abstractions, not with the concept of abstractions in general.
Take your example of shortcuts. Ideally, a user shouldn't have to know how a shortcut is done low-level, the user should just know it's a shortcut that points to the actual file. OS/2 implements this properly. When you move a file, the shortcut points to the new location automatically. The only reason win95 shortcuts are bad is because they're implemented as simple textfiles that contain the directory/filename of another file. Same problem with UNIX symlinks.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The test is, IMHO, can you laugh at yourself, for all the mistakes YOU made, whilst climbing the learning curve? Not shaming, not belittling, but laughing. If you can't laugh with yourself for your errors, how can you laugh with others?
The stories regarding tech support people and admins are, perhaps, the funniest. Not because these people are "bad" or "stupid", but because they have claimed greater expertise than they have. They may know a lot about a great many things, but like the Emperor's New Clothes, their technical skills reveal something other than what is intended.
Laughter is good, and healthy. This site is packed with good laughs. Shame and blame can take a long walk off a short plank, and the label of "Stupid" deserves a life-long GPF. Boot them out, and enjoy watching people be people.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Before Windows 95 existed, Microsoft was working on an operating system called Chicago. But, it was way to buggy, so they scrapped it and then re-released it as Windows 95." (This one has the most truth in it of all of them)
"After Microsoft introduced Windows 95, they created an operating system called Windows NT. The NT means that it is a network server." (What about NT 3.51?)
"After you get done using the internet, you need to disconnect your phone line from your modem to make sure nobody hacks into your computer and puts a virus on it." (Huh? I doubt many hackers call around looking for folks who have set their software up to answer when somebody calls.)
"If you double click on an icon and it tells you that it can't find it, it means the icon isn't there . . ." (How do you double click on something that isn't there?)
(After a blue screen "fatal exception OE"): "That computer must have some kind of virus. I'll have the computer guy (me) check it out after class."
And, my personal favorite:
"One day, you might turn on your computer and discover that someone has put it a logon password and you don't know it. Has anybody ever had this happen? Yeah . . . what you can do is turn off the computer, and take the case off. There are usually screws in the back to do this. Y'all come up here and watch this. (Begins disassembling the case, much to my consternation -- but, I listened, just to see what was going to happen.) Y'all see this shiny thing here? This is the CMOS battery. It keeps that logon password. All of the hard drives have them. All you need to do is remove this battery for about 15 seconds and it will clear out that logon password." (Ummm . . . is it really wise to tell folks who can't figure out how to double click to open up their case and mess around with the internals?)
It really makes me somewhat angry that these folks still let this guy teach even after I've notified folks that he doesn't know what he's talking about sometimes. Usually, I just get "Well, he's taught computer stuff for 4 years, so he must know about some things that you don't." HELLO? TAKING OUT A CMOS BATTERY HAS *NEVER* CLEARED A WINDOWS LOGON PASSWORD, NOR WILL IT EVER (that I can imagine) DO SO!!!
I love these sorts of stories myself, but I don't care for the idea of nerds mocking ordinary folks. People who don't spend their lives learning the ins and outs of computers are not stupid; they just don't know. In many cases, they really shouldn't have to understand the intricacies of a system; if the system were better designed, it'd be self-explanatory. The fact that so many ordinary folks are mystified by computers speaks not to their stupidity, but the crudity of the technology and the limitations of the designers.
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
Perhaps that is why 'Math' may still be a good primer to computing - mathematics is nothing but abstraction.
These "Dumb User" articles aren't funny anymore. I feel my stress level rise just reading them. Some of these stories go beyond "I am new to computers", and into the realm of "I am just plain stupid, but I expect you to make up for that fact anyway."
--
"All that is visible must grow and extend itself into the realm of the invisible."
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
I've worked on-and-off in tech support for about ten years now, and I've got to say that 'clueless user' stories tend to piss me off. Not that they're false -- I personally had a photocopy of a diskette faxed to me -- but the inherent smugness involved in telling these stories annoys me in a major way.
Guess what? Computers aren't easy to use. If a secretary puts the mouse on the floor and tries using it with her foot, it's because she's used to steno equipment that looks remarkably similar. Once the mouse is expained, there's no more problem.
Yes, there are a lot of morons out there who refuse to learn, and ten explanations later are still typing in their real name to log on to the computer. But the vast majority of problems are due to unfamiliarity, and are the fault of employers.
Sorry about the rant, but I've spent years grumbling on this very subject.
I was in the market for a new printer. Running OS/2 at the time, I wanted to make sure that drivers were available. I called up Hewlett Packard, and asked for technical support (knowing I wouldn't get help from sales).
Me: I trying to find out if there are HP692c drivers available for OS/2 Warp 4.
Tech support: I'm sorry sir, but our inkjet printers won't work on the Mac.
(I eventually found the OS/2 drivers, and Mac drivers along the way)
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The fault is is offering phone support for something that should've been an on-site repair done in the flesh by a real person, skilled in his craft, to begin with.
That is a very good point, we as techs need to come up with a solution. The idea of remote administration has been around for a long time, but is riddled with security problems. Even if the system is secure people are not comfortable with allowing someone whom they've never meet to peer around in their personal computers. So enters the idea of computer shops where you take your computer to get fixed. The only problem with this is that most people (even me) find it annoying to unconnect and move their computer somewhere to have it fixed for a minor problem. The only 2 solutions I see to this problem would be,
1. A removable core, where the computer acts more like a laptop (without the screen) in a docking station. So that the central components can be as easily removed as say a toner cartidge (weird analogy but it works, and yes there are some people who can't change their toner cartidges), and the core can be taken in for repair. This has the major drawback of not being nearly as user servicable.
2. Self diagnostic, user correcting, polymorphic, self evolving programs, that fix any problems themselves. HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.. sorry good laugh. Its a good idea, but still ahead of our time.
That didn't make me laugh. It made me mad. Of course, I'm also mad because I've been on hold with Sun for the last 3 hours, and someone tried to run me over on the way to work, but that's not the point.
:( Computers for people with at least half a brain. And if they have half a brain but just don't know anything about computers, they should read a book or twelve before bothering me.
Users who can't read piss me off. "It says it is NOT safe to turn off my computer" (Windows 95). "No, it says it is NOW safe to turn off your computer."
Users who have no idea what they're talking about also piss me off. Yes, I'm high and mighty, but it doesn't take that long to figure out that there's both RAM and a HDD in your computer, and that referring to both as `memory' doesn't help the rest of us.
I used to do tech support, so I can identify with a lot of the stuff on that site. I didn't think it was funny then, and I don't think it's funny now. It was, and is, frustrating. Computers for the masses? Please no!
I don't recall seeing "handholding a bunch of idiots" in my job description, or in any of your job descriptions, either.
I'm rather simpathetic to the newbie user who doesn't know much about computers. Heck i remember zooming in on the page of my step fathers performa thinking that would make the text bigger when i printed. The people who really piss me off are those who act like they know all about computers but then fail drastically. Like a columist in my local newspaper who answers tech support type questions. He told a user once that there was no way to get sound off of her CD rom and that in order to save sound files on her computer she needed a CD-R. That guy should be fired, but drastically he's still out there giving other advice to poor folks.
And my school computer techer who doesn't even know to access differnet computers across the LAN, i had to show her. It seems like just anyone can become a computer authority now because they know how to type.
I spent a frustrating two years or so trying to help a company I won't name into being an Internet Service Provider, with explicit permission and encouragement to do so. Unfortunately, the president of the company decided that he was going to be the sole and only salesman for the services; he knew little or nothing about the Internet and displayed no willingness or ability to learn about it, preferring to operate on the assumption that whatever he wished to be true about the business would magically become the case, and blaming any failure of reality to mold itself that way on his subordinates.
The result was the predictable disaster. He was told that because not all customers would be using the proposed 250 dialin connections at once, statistically the 250 connections could support perhaps as many as 2000 users. This caused him to jump to the conclusion that all 2000 could dial in at the same time, 8 customers using each a modem and ordinary phone line simultaenously, and therefore only 32 modems would be needed to support 2000 customers by the statistical rule. Then I was presented with 4 analog dialin lines and modems, and a statement that they should be able to support 250 users, which we would start the business off with.
Upon reality being presented, along with the original provisioning documents, the idea of selling dialin lines was suddenly dropped, and reselling T1 service from our connection was declared to be our new Internet business; also it was proposed that we would be selling web sites, though already web farms with much higher bandwidth were coming into use.
Then everything seemed to - oscillate. One week, it would be declared that we were going to put websites up, a couple of weeks later we were going to go full bore selling bandwidth. No details were ever available of the "plans".
Eventually this climaxed in an angry, out-of-the-blue mobile phone call demanding "Yes or no - do we have a clear T1 channel to the Internet?" and escalating fury as I tried to explain that that was a trick question; we had a T1 to a backbone ISP, but no guarantee there was 1.544mbps to each and every server on the net, et cetra. Upon being told I would be fired if I did not simply answer the question with a "Yes" or "No", I said "Yes", true in the sense we had a "clear channel" DS1 line and not a Frame Relay connection. Nothing more happened for a while, then I was called into the president's office and was told he had sold some T1 connections - and that he decided, and had told the companies involved, that they did not have to actually purchase a point-to-point connection to us, or any CSU/DSU or router; because we already had the T1 & et cetra, we would just sell them "part of ours". Magically wishing the bits from our networks into the customers'. The response he was given, which as it had to be was that the president/salesman had been given specific lists of the required equipment down to part numbers and itimized costs, was not well accepted - I was told, in effect, that he was too important a person to be required to read such trivia as what subordinates put into his "In" box.
Probably I should have known things were not going to work out well when the principal involved proposed early on that we could save much money by buying an AOL account or two to resell to our high-bandwidth customers. Sigh. At least they finally learned to use email, but it was rather a relief to leave that place.
However, after spending a good afternoon reading these stories, I note that many of them involve a user who assumes that he knows more than the tech support person or a tech support person who won't consider the obvious.
When a user calls up, claims to be an "Apple Tech," and then proceeds to ask how to do something simple the techie tells him to do, he rightfully should be mocked. When the user refuses to take the advice of a knowledgeable tech and then threatens some sort of recourse because "the tech doesn't know anything," they rightfully should be mocked.
The problem with many computer users is that they get proficient with using MS Word, figure out how to drag and drop, and install a program or two while surfing the web using AOL and they decide that they're an instant A+ certified MSCE know-it-all. I've got friends like this. One of my (least) favorites thinks he knows all about designing web pages. He's decent at Photoshop and knows a bit about WordPerfect. One day, he applied for a job where I work, and told the folks that he had a "vast knowledge of computers." The next day he called me wanting to know how to put in a CD-ROM drive.
I'm often reminded of the "General Motors Tech Support" joke that was circulating about two years ago, where a user calls up tech support because his car won't start. When the support guy tries to get the user to check things out, he is met with replies like: "What's a steering wheel? What's a dashboard? Fuel Gauge? What's That?" Finally, the exasperated user exclaims "I'm not a technical person! I just want to go places with my car!"
Although it seems ludicrous that we would allow someone with such limited knowledge to pilot an automobile, we do the same thing with computers every day. I'm not saying that people who don't know computers shouldn't be allowed to use them -- I'm saying that most people realize that a certain amount of knowledge is necessary to drive a car on our highways. Computers users need to realize that despite the fact that they might want to do something useful with their new toy, they are going to have to take some time to master some concepts.
Incidentally, I'll go the other way in terms of blaming why computers are so hard to use - it's the level abstraction set up between the user and whats really going on.
/wants/ to look at it and know whats going on, s/he can. And yet, people who don't know anything about engines just don't touch theirs, and refer to experts when it comes time to fix it. But at least they can see it, and chose to learn about it and fiddle with it if they want to. If a proper interface was set up bewteen the low-level and the high-level in an OS, the user should recognize properly what not to touch, or conversly, what to touch when they want to fiddle and learn. Barring this low level from the user (such as in most Windows 9X componants' interfaces) makes them live on another plane of reality from whats really going on, and leaves them clueless when its time to fix things of describe whats going on to tech support.
For example, I'll propose that the newbie Windows 95 user hasn't a clue what a "Shortcut" is with respect to the idea that its an actual file on the disk with a special file type. They're just told it's a "Shortcut" and how to work it. These types of abstractions only serve to convuse new users as when it comes to problems, they havn't the faintest idea what they're actually supposed to be fixing, nevermind how to. How are they supposed to know when a problem is because of the shortcut, or the actual file it points to? Similar abstractions (wizards, "dumbed down explainations") may serve to help the uninitiated get off the ground faster, but makes it all the more difficult for the user to make an emergency landing when it comes time.
Cars are complex things. Why do auto makers not lock the engine from the driver? Because if the driver
"Old man yells at systemd"