IT Professionals Share WORST Cases Of COMPUTER ILLITERACY

IT professionals what's the worst case of computer illiteracy that you've experienced I have explained what a regular American power outlet looks like to people over the phone a power outlet ma'am I need you to plug the computer in into the power outlet it's just a regular power outlet like you would plug anything into well I don't know like a desk lamp or a hairdryer or a vacuum cleaner deep and defeated sigh there are two vertical kind of rectangular holes and then a round hole beneath that should be lots of them in your office look on the walls low near the floor begins to weep quietly yes we can send out a field tag we'll have someone there tomorrow afternoon friends dad offered me $100 to come fix his computer no questions asked I said I couldn't promise anything but I'll take a look he showed me that when he opens Internet Explorer nothing comes up so his internet must be broken I looked at the address bar it said W W point M s endpoint com somehow his home page got set to w w point M s endpoint com I told him he didn't have to pay me but he insisted saying he doesn't go back on his word in other words I got paid $100 for typing and W typing a W free typing a W in the right place $100 I support the electronic medical record at a hospital this was an actual conversation I had with a physician me okay doctor I just need your IP address so I can remote in and take a look at the issue doctor I will not give that to you you do not need to know where I live me no doctor that's not what an IP addresses doctor I am not telling you where I live me okay then let's just try to walk through this over the phone then sighs when the head of IT at my former job thought he could combine two Excel documents by saving them both with the same name this is actually a pretty inspiring story you don't actually need to work hard or no staff to get places in life they promoted into where he could do the least damage I wish I was that ignorant of my own incompetence I wish I kept the picture because this was pure gold but it was lost in an office move so [ __ ] happens it went something like this user hallo forget nuts I seem to be have a problem with my PC it keeps flashing up an app error me okay can you tell me what application you are in and send me a screenshot user sure I'll get onto that right away considering it would normally take a fair amount of time to get her off the phone I was pleasantly surprised how cool she was anyway fast forward three days haven't heard anything and I get a letter in our internal mail with the word screenshot in big bold writing why should you not she had taken a picture of the computer screen had it developed and sent over to my office working as a tech in the military get a call from the hello shop that one of the computers won't turn on I show up and sure enough the thing won't power on open up the case and a flood of grease pours out apparently the fan was making too much noise so the user decided to spray half a can of wd-40 into it possibly the only thing wd-40 can't fix my first real job after leaving university was to train a company's engineering department how to use a new CAD computer plus software they had recently purchased this was 18 years ago so not everyone was as familiar with computers as these days but still it was a bit of a struggle as some of the members of staff were approaching retirement age but there was this one lady she just couldn't grasp even the concept of a computer after two 30-minute lessons she couldn't figure out the connection between the little plastic clicky thing Mouse and the arrow thing cursor on the screen and then I had an epiphany I drew a cursor arrow on some card and carefully cut it out with scissors then when she arrived for lesson number three I stuck this arrow to the back of her hand it worked push the little hand arrow upwards the one on the screen does the same pull it downwards and look screen arrow copies left right - marvelous sadly clicking selecting dragging and dropping would beyond her so suffice to say she's not a CAD user she was a tracer and eventually the entire office moved on to electronic methods from this century and they had to let her go I failed sorry Joyce a co-worker of mine once told me a story while he was working helpdesk that a user was having an issue copying files to his new computer he went to see what the problem was and the guy showed him what he was doing he had the mouse plugged into his old computer right click copy then he would unplug his mouse plug it into the new computer and was trying to right click paste that's actually really resourceful just using a completely wrong mental model you know the standard power plug receptacle on the back of every PC tower since they were first created did you know that a USB cable will fit directly in between the positive and negative metal prongs I had a woman hook her printer to her tower that way no other cables were connected to either device when she was shown how to connect the USB cable to the USB port she said oh I thought the printer was wireless I had a lady call to say her printer wouldn't print yellow it would print green and orange but not yellow while troubleshooting this odd issue she tells me it only happens when she tries to print out flash for her daughter's birthday party which is on yellow paper on deployment the radio shop calls over to the help desk every time I put a CD in the tray and close it the CD falls off ok what type of computer do you have it's a d4 WTF 84 yes ok well I'll head over there the tower is upside down I didn't understand d4 until I looked down at my own computer HP I can't find my document ok where did you save it in Word I understand you saved it in Word but where did you save the file in word listen I save it in word where does the rest newbie handle this I'm going to hurt a wall with my head this happens more often than I'd like to think was possible a friend called me to find out why her printer was printing really faded documents I explained that it was probably just out of ink she said Geir I got the pop-up and bought more ink it still doesn't work I asked if she checked the cartridge and she had no idea what I was talking about she thought ink would download through the internet to her printer she's a nurse now three that come to mind immediately USB keyboard plugged into USB port on the set keyboard 3.5 floppy inserted into CD drawer Mouse literally pressed against the monitor when asked to hover over an icon USB keyboard plugged into USB port on the set keyboard infinite keyboard oh god I hit backspace and the whole thing disappeared I'm an IT professional now but this happened back at university so it was the very first lab session on the very first year of computer science at a prestigious university in the UK the lab was very simple more of an introduction to the Uni systems you had to do the following find some text on an intranet site copy the text into an auto pod file use the terminal program to log on to the department UNIX server put the file onto your UNIX fellow sure nice and easy huh I completed it in about five minutes because you know I've seen computers before however the poor chap next to me was not so fortunate after wrestling with Netscape for about 15 minutes he found the information required he then pulled out a large paper not a pod and copied word-for-word the entire six paragraph text he then closed netscape back to desktop opened not a pod and then typed everything back in from his notes saved closed and then tried to follow the explicit written instructions on how to log in and put the file after 20 minutes of this I broke down and helped him with that bit stunned though I don't recall seeing him in the cs classes after the first year I'm not an IT professional but my boss once asked me for my help to log out of mail she was in Excel I was a righty support professional but am now working in a hotel as a change of pace I had a guest call down and talked to me my internet won't connect okay connect to whiffy name and then start your browser of choice then browse the page in the site will take you to a splash page where you will enter your last name and room number silence what do you mean a web browser oh you mean the little e on the screen this lady wasn't able to remotely access her computer she had done it without issue the night before and she was entering all the information correctly into the client so I was confused about what might be going wrong on a hunch I asked her is the remote computer turned on she replies oh no it's unplugged and sitting in the hallway why to which I had to say something like you have to turn on the computer before you can use it kind of sad but with a happy ending it was October 2014 and I told the maintenance guy for my office to Google a part number for an a/c unit our maintenance guy is one of the most mechanically inclined people I have ever met somewhere between Tony Stark and Matt gu ever as far being able to jerry-rig machines until the new parts come in but when I said Google he got this panicked look on his face how do you do that I didn't know what to say to him so I took him over to the PC and said just click on the Chrome browser icon which one is that I pointed out for him and he looks at the keyboard and mouse he puts his hand on the mouse using his pinky and ring finger to control the mouse buttons okay cool everyone uses the mouse differently it took him almost a minute to figure out that the cursor was in the top right corner he then began to drag it towards the chrome icon he let the cursor hover over it for about 10 seconds and then click once nothing happened deeper tamaco so at this point I asked him have you never used a computer maintenance guy he hung his head in shame literally his head dropped in shame hey maintenance guy it's fine let me show you double-click it I say again dumbfounded look so I put my hand on his hand like some real Patrick's wise ghost pottery-making action and show him the double-click oh it worked he basically had the same reaction as when he was able to make two he'd press work by using a paperclip to fix one of the senses after about five more minutes of babying him he had the part number in the search bar and hit enter Google did its magic and his eyes went wide with Wonder you mean if I have a part number one can type it in here and Google will find prices for me he asks what yeah I mean sometimes you have to be creative with how you type in what you're searching for but basically that's what Google is for I could see the wheels turning the eyes glazing over while plans concocted in the back of his head I had awoken a monster now anytime I run into him he's telling me about how he found this all that part but won't buy it from such-and-such a site because it's Chinese [ __ ] and will break before it's installed I was to train local government employees on a specific software for three days prior to the training I asked for computer literate participants well what I got were old people who weren't computer literate March don't forget to save your projects excuse me sir how do I save my project god dammit saving [ __ ] is universal click project then save sir where do I save it you can save it anywhere just save it on your desktop later on sir I can't find my files this is kind of like graphic design mixed with slash are slash talis from tech support but I'll give it a go I'm a motion graphic designer slash video editor for a corporation this basically means I'm the youngest slash youngish person in the office surrounded by a lot of corporate drones who somehow work in Microsoft Excel 8 hours a day but don't know when to double click or single click to save their lives a particularly dense co-worker visits my desk one day just pops in which is kind of annoying to begin with make a calendar appointment fall and asks me if I have a peg picture of someone can you make it smaller of course I respond shor now 90% of us know that there are a few ways to do this so I asked her do you want it smaller in size or smaller in file size or possibly both she wanted the file size to be smaller for posting it to a site she then proceeded to ask me if I could turn it into a cartoon now being a graphic designer that is also within the range of my capability but also not a very common request for this corporate environment again I responded sure is there a specific project you're completing that needs a picture of this person turned into a caricature at this point I'm thinking maybe she needs it for some joke or corporate of site event or a retirement card or what have you well she responds completely seriously I figured that if you took it and made it into a cartoon then that would make it smaller she was completely flat-out serious she believed that somehow through me getting out my Wacom tablet and drawing this method occur that we could then proceed forward with a smaller in file size each peg instead of mine just converting the picture to a smaller size now whenever we need something in the video department to be smaller we say turn it into a cartoon when I was an intern in an hospital we would handle the computers for all the medical staff there was one call that stuck with me this doctor call in the department and submit a ticket my computer vibrate every two minutes precisely the guy doesn't have a laptop he's saying his desktop PC is vibrating every two minutes we are curious so we dropped what we are doing and we go and check everything seems fine with the PC so we don't really know what's going on two minutes goes by since we got there I just couldn't believe the dude had put his pager on the computer and he was receiving call / reminder every two minutes so it was vibrating on top of his computer the guy had no clue it was not part of the PC and that he was supposed to keep it on him for emergency purpose so for him it was a moving piece of the PC and it kept vibrating and it was annoying we had a Simic splaining to do local IT for a small consulting firm the owners are like 70 anyways one day the owners wife comes to me Dre the screen isn't working okay did you hit the power button to turn it on that was the fix the last time she had an issue yes that was the first thing I checked perfect let's take a look I walk into the room and giggle the screen sure enough was a bright orange that was not showing anything on the display I wave my hand over it and the screen shows in my shadow it was the glare from the window all along this is rainbow doggo comment stay safe rainbow dog go and you will have the best day of your life

Channel: TZ Entertainment

Views: 343,984

Rating: 4.87813 out of 5

Keywords: r/askreddit, askreddit, reddit, tz reddit, it professionals, computer, tech support, boomer

Id: kURTkwTxF74

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019