LOL Computer illiterate or what?

I know this is old but it made me chuckle this morning.

http://themetapicture.com/i-wish-i-worked-with-this-man-this-is-perfect/

 

If only it was possible to tell customers like that the truth, but anyone who ever worked in support will know that would be counted as gross misconduct and you'd be told to leave the building without a scene and the p45 will be in the post.

 

Ugh.
I used to do support once - during this time I came to the horrible realisation that most people don't actually use their brains to think with and the experience left me questioning the future of our species.

Particularly one episode comes to mind:

*phone rings*
"Hello this is [my name] speaking, how may I help you?"
"Yes, hello. This is [callers name - female]. I'm having trouble installing Office."
"Okay, have you gone through the instructions?"
"Yes I have, but it still will not install."
"Okay, so, let me talk you through it..."

*Proceeding to do so it quickly becomes apparent that the woman had, in fact, not read the instructions (that I had made by the way) which explained in excrutiating detail how to proceed to install the software. It included screenshots of every step accompanied by short snippets of text to explain what should be done and what will happen. There were no big words or overly technical jargon included in the instructions. It was, in fact, written specifically so that a 16-year old would understand and be able to follow it.*

Finally, after guiding the caller through the step-by-step instructions and spoonfeeding her the necessary information, the software installs perfectly. The caller concludes our conversation:

"So, if I had read the instructions I would have managed to do this by myself?"
"... yes ... yes you would. Have a good day now."

I weep for our species...

 

"Print screen" some people just don't get it

 

I defence I do remember getting my first computer and which had 3.1 installed then I got another with 98 which I updated to XP but it was all such a mystery to me. Much of it still is but I came to computing relatively late 45< I am now almost 61, and I have been playing catch up ever since though I do get quite a bit of satisfaction when I sort out the supposedly computer or rather gadget literate younger colleagues kit.

 

Much respect though Glenn, so many people of your generation and above have just dismissed personal computing as a 'kids thing', when in fact it would open up a whole new world to them in their retirement. I think that's a real shame.

I suspect a lot of my fellow 30 and 40-something forumites grew up on a diet of trying to work & game on DOS based PCs, so we immediately had an advantage over kids nowadays in that we had to learn the command line just to be able to read a document, view an image or play a game. I avoided the early versions of Windows at all costs as a kid, because the performance overheads were not worth the ease of a GUI-based operating system.

Every time MS released a new version of DOS it was like Christmas had come early

 

When phone-droning for apple i recall a guy in his 40s phoning up about his PC and iPhone not liking each other... he then put his 70-odd year old mother on the phone as she knew more about PCs than he did...

 

Lol, great story.

 

Yes. This. I still marvel at people my age who think that doing things on the command line is some form of witchcraft! I also remember editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making my father cross. Plus, this still brings a smile to my face:

Code:

@ECHO OFF
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T2

Don't even get me started on MSCDEX, MOUSE, SMARTDRV,...

 

DOSKEY, never forget your doskey.

 

True. On many occasions pressing the up key to recover the last command I found myself cursing the lack of DOSKEY!

 

Whilst that kind of stuff was 'before my time', i do recall having to manually set IRQs and **** for the sound-card for certain games otherwise you got no sound...

Also recall having to play one game without sound as whilst i'd set the setting for the sound card it insisted on playing the game sounds through the motherboard's on-board speaker...


I do however have fond memories of this:

Code:

LOAD ""

 

You and me both!

 

Don't make me feel old...

Check out the first couple of minutes to spark those memories...



THAT'S HOW YOU LOAD A GAME!

 

The choice of installing Windows 3.1 on a 40MB HDD..... or installing games?

That was never a difficult decision!

 

I had a spectrum so this was 'the noise'

 

I think my tinnitus can be traced back to owning a spectrum and a BBC B...

 

You guys do realise you've just distributed those games?
The sound is the game data!

 

I was talking to a friend in Hungary a while back and one of the things that used to happen over there was that Radio stations would broadcast games, you just had to record the audio to a tape.

 

Someone else has mentioned that in the past - that's ingenious and wide-spread piracy right there