Worst Computer Noob Moments You've Seen

what is the most unbelievable instance of computer illiteracy you've ever witnessed [Music] 1995-96 we a small consultancy got a call from an accountant who told us that his new pc systems hdd was reporting as full and he felt that was unlikely i was sent to investigate and found that his hdd was indeed returning errors i asked him what software he used and he said ms-dos i rephrased and asked what software he used for his accounting he said again ms-dos i asked him to show me and he began straightforwardly enough at the time by navigating to a working subdirectory he then proceeded to create file after file after file it turned out he was using dos as a filing system creating individual records by creating corresponding files he wrote nothing in the file all his information was contained in his choice of file names and extensions it all worked it did what he wanted but it had put him at the limit of what a dos file system could handle at the time that's like learning how to walk on your hands because you can't figure out feet it was me a long time ago before webcams were common i ended up at this webpage where it said something like there was a new technology where the screen would take your picture and then show it to you so i went and brushed my hair changed my shirt and came back to get my picture i smiled and pressed the button it made like a flash and then said to wait up to five minutes for the result i waited patiently as i saw the picture slowly loading only to finally reveal a picture of an orangutan my first case of being trolled by the internet that's an absolutely brilliant post d i work with a guy who for two months and countless visits from our it guy claimed that his computer was still going slow so the it guy set a dead computer tower which isn't even plugged into anything next to the one that he was using and now my co-worker says it goes twice as fast it's called the pc bow effect a co-worker of mine an older gentleman knew how to use excel but nothing else when he needed to type up a document instead of opening up a word processor he would open up excel and just type his document into one cell that he enlarged to the size of an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper well at least he's resourceful and able to problem solve my uncle has step-by-step instructions for accessing his email which is the only thing he does on his computer anytime he makes a mistake he shuts down the computer and starts over he also moves the mouse into position takes his hand off completely then pokes the button very carefully komahi also moves the mouse into position takes his hand off completely then pokes the button very carefully this is awesome i've seen older people do this the first email my dad sent me when i went away to college and the first email he ever wrote didn't have any spaces in it it was just one long word dotted with occasional punctuation he didn't know what the space bar was and thought the computer would just add the spaces automatically it was hilariously adorable and every time i think about it i get a little sad i didn't print out and frame that email the only way to teach an old person to type is to tell them the keys are almost exactly like a typewriter but you don't have to press as hard i work as tech support at a university so computer illiteracy keeps me employed there's one professor i've had to teach to right click on multiple occasions also just last week a woman corporate client called about a strange message on her computer outlook had detected she moved time zones and asked if she wanted her laptop to change times to reflect her new location it's just asking if you want to adjust your email to your new time zone since you're an hour earlier here so i'll get my emails an hour earlier some people really think computers are magic back in the days of ms-dos and the good old windows 3.1 my uncle picked up a new pc a powerhouse of the time but he never had a pc he'd been a commodore 64 guy for a long time though anyway i visited my grandparents where he also lived and he showed me his computer i was in awe it was so good compared to my own i played a game of strife and after went out to play later that day i'm asked by my grandmother what did you do to your uncle's computer i don't know what she's talking about and go to talk to him he's mad the thing won't boot and i broke it get it to boot and check out the hdd it's in shambles i ask what were you doing when it stopped working deleting files you put on there i don't need your garbage on my machine he deleted random files from the os until it stopped working long story short uh in one day i reinstalled dos and windows on that thing six times yes he kept doing it and wouldn't listen when i told him he couldn't just do that i never touched his pc again afterwards he still brings up the time i broke his new computer that would be met with no you broke your computer six times and i fixed it for you for free every time it came up public shaming is the only viable tool there i worked in tech support in the mid 90s at a company where computers for admins and sales were a relatively new thing so i have a million stories got a call from an employee insisting her new tested mouse wasn't working went through all the questions is it plugged and do you see the arrow on the screen and could hear her clicking so i knew she was at least doing something i finally went to her desk and saw that she was using her mouse up against the monitor trying to click on things right on the screen instead of understanding the mouse pad on the desk cursor on the screen set up that's absolutely precious my mom seriously thinks she can only access email from the computer on which it was set up that she has created a new email address for each new computer she got i'm a graphic designer and i once had a client sitting to next to me whilst designing her a logo i zoomed into the logo on screen and she said oh no not that big i explained it wasn't going to be that big and i was just making it bigger on the screen so it's easier to edit thought she understood until i zoomed out a few minutes later and she said oh yes that's a better size i once caught my little brother then around age 10 holding a ruler against the screen to measure the size of the pictures of a collage he was planning to print he's going into graphic design now sure come a long way work in i.t for a large corporation and i had a senior lawyer mid-thirties at my company complained that the wi-fi wasn't working when she left the building needless to say i was staggered by the ineptitude took a physics course from a professor who got their phd in biomechanical physics i.e how fast the cell moves or at what rate does the mitochondrial proteins work complicated science stuff one day the professor was using powerpoint for a lecture the adobe update icon popped up and they had no idea how to resolve it they restarted the computer and within five minutes it popped up again the entire class watched in amazement as this professor struggled with the adobe update icon the professor cancelled class 4it to come fix the issue it's always amazing watching professors with years of training and knowledge in a specific field struggle with the simplest of problems co-worker asked me to turn the clicking sound off on her keyboard she thought that the sound keys make when you type on the computer keyboard was a sound effect similar to when you type on a cell phone nope it was her long fake nails making the keys clack she refused to believe me so i told her to call tech support no idea how they handled it lol unplug it then have her type in recent memory i can recall an instance where my mom had a recipe open in chrome and i wanted to show her a youtube video i opened another tab in the browser and she got mad at me because she thought i deleted the recipe one time i heard my dad cursing at his computer in the basement it started with single word shoots and dammits and slowly progressed itself into a rage finally with a tone of desperation he called for my help i walked in i was working and then i just disappeared and i can't get it back he explained his hands moving wildly from me to the screen to the sky it's gone as he went on i stooped over with the mouse and dragged up the window that apparently had been moved and was peeking just above the tusk bar he faster palmed and gave me a light jab on the shoulder in appreciation what would i do without you i love my dad but i fear for him now that i live on my own slowly progressed itself into a rage what would i do without you rage against the machine not an instance but an ongoing series of what the frick is wrong with you mid 90s early days of using the web to interface data with outside entities i developed a process at work to interface our mainframe with an external print service it requires the user to download the mainframe files sign on to the remote site and upload the files the process takes place seven or eight times a year i documented it step by step i explained it to my manager and the user's manager they agreed the process is logical and straightforward i showed the end users how to do it they seemed to understand three years later and i was still changing the documentation to account for all the ways the users found to not follow the step-by-step documentation nearly every billing run was screwed up because they found new and interesting ways to frick up click with the left button no not the right why are you double clicking why are you double clicking so slow why are you double right clicking mashing the mouse button does not make the computer understand what you meant to do try not to move the mouse halfway across the screen when you click oh that last one should have been an acceptable defense for justifiable homicide all these issues result in bizarre web form behavior and that was just the clicking if they got the clicking right it was what they were clicking inside and outside the browser window that screwed it all up btw the process takes place in the middle of the night and they would either call me read wake so i could walk them through it bad or not call me and our billing would be delayed worse because the billing data was dated guess who had to do damage control on the data to fix the issue 20 years later and one of the users still calls me to walk him through it at least now the process takes place during the work day and i can be on hand to help in the battle of making idiot proof software the idiots will always win i love my dad but it still boggles my mind how computer illiterate he can be of all the situations i'd say this one takes a cake his laptop needed to be fixed for some reason so he was using my sister's laptop at the time he calls me up to tell me he can't find his files confused i asked him to explain what he means he says that he always keeps all of his folders files on his desktop but that none of them are there i say to him you're using your daughter's computer how would you have access to files on your computer there's a brief moment of silence until he says to me but the files are on my desktop shouldn't i be able to access them now suffice to say i had to explain a few things to him then most of which just went in one ear and out the other i don't know if this fits but a young lady in the office complained her computer would randomly lose power while she was working after a lot of effort to solve the problem including changing out the computer the problem was determined to be her height since she was short she used the power strip to prop her feet and kept accidentally pushing the power button happens to me all the time not necessarily computer illiteracy but i have an old man come by my work once a week and has me unlock his iphone he doesn't have a password just needs to swipe right to unlock the screen don't even know what he does with it afterwards i used to work as the tech guy in a high school one day the head teachers secretary called me to reception because the fax machine wasn't working i had a look at it and it seemed to work fine so i asked her to show me what she was doing when the fault occurred so she put the document in the slot typed in the number the machine word up and the document popped out the other side as normal you see she said no not really what's the problem she looked at me like i was a complete and utter snatched up the document and started waving it at me saying it's still here and that's why i had to explain to a grown woman that a fax machine isn't a teleportation device somewhere someone was getting the same thing faxed a lot i sincerely hope my wife does not have a secret reddit account or for that matter does not know my reddit account if she does find this out i'll probably not be alive whenever we had internet issues she would yank out the rj45 from the cable modem blow air into it 10 times and place it back into the modem i never understood this ritual until one day i took up the courage to ask why the response i got was that since she was accessing too many sites there could be a blockage in the modem i did ask her the same question several times over the course of the next few years i once convinced a person that the reason they needed a new ethernet cable was that the cable had been squashed and all the zeros had jammed the wire because it was too narrow now and only the ones would fit through retired co-worker which would forget all her passwords about three times a week also her phone had a bunch of memory cleaner and battery saver apps which actually slowed it down and made the battery discharge faster my dad has a bunch of those apps on his phone and i'm unconvinced they don't do exactly what you said he believes them so my co-worker doesn't know how to create a pdf directly on the computer so she prints things out then scans them to create a pdf a lady at my work couldn't figure out how to take a screenshot of a web page so she printed it out and scanned it and then sent it as an all staff message my grandfather bless him in his late 70s just learning how to use a computer and he would enjoy spending an hour or so in the evenings getting creative using the paint app on his laptop i was talking to him about replacing the ink in his printer as it was running low then a look of horror came over him and he leaned in closely and said and i've been using the paint app on my computer how much ink have i been wasting he thought using the paint on his computer without printing it was using up his expensive ink bless him that still makes me laugh my nana asked my mother where the film went into her mobile phone when taking a photo i work in recruiting and i will often ask people to email me over their resume not only will many people not know how to do that some will try and fail miserably i had one guy he was older tell me multiple times that he has his resume saved in his email and that i can go log on to his email and go get it i said no that's not how email works you have to send it to where you want it to go he proceeded to tell me his email address and say again that i can just log on and get it wasn't worth trying to explain anymore another woman told me that she can't email her resume to me because her email address is at yahoo.com and ours is at companyname.com and they are different i explained to her that oh the domain name doesn't matter you can email to any domain names that you want they are just different companies and will still receive the email she tried to argue with me saying that she has yahoo and only can sent another yahoo i again tried to explain and told her how just like calling people with different area codes it's just a way to classify and you can send an email to any email address she wasn't getting it we never got her resume as a college student nearing graduation it calms my nerves that there are people this clueless in the workforce end user thought she could reboot her machine by turning the monitor off on i got curious when it only took two seconds for her to restart so i had to walk to her cube to see for myself i hate it when people do that they always get so defensive of it too i have a co-worker who made a powerpoint presentation by taking pictures of her computer screen with her smartphone emailing them to herself and then putting them in the presentation instead of using print screen or snipping tool it was both hilarious and embarrassing at the place i work at this older woman that doesn't understand the concept of tabs will literally use multiple computers in our computer lab for each window she opens i've explained to her what tabs are probably like five times and she still refuses to understand be careful what you wish for i recently discovered that my mother had literally like 1 000 tabs open in safari on the ipad it was so bogged down she almost bought a new one my mom came to me and told me that a window had appeared on the computer i went with her to see what it was there was nothing there i asked her why there wasn't anything there and she told me that she had closed it i told her that there was nothing i could do and to leave it open if it came back next day she comes and tells me that it came back so i go with her to her computer there's nothing there she had closed it again i repeat what i had told her the day before and she starts getting annoyed at me for not being able to fix her computer this keeps happening and i grow savvy one day when she comes to me i ask if she closed it again which she did i refuse to drop what i'm doing to come look at her wallpaper and she gets angry at me for being unhelpful after this she stops coming to me if i had to guess i'd say she went to my dad to get him to fix a computer and got the same message from him when i got my first optical mouse i spent a whole afternoon trying get it to work downloading drivers rebooting googling tech websites repeat turned out it wouldn't work on a black table when my friend's mum finds an error in her text she will delete everything she has written since the mistake correct it and then retype the whole thing it's like what we do with passwords when we make a typo because it's hidden we just delete the whole thing and start again or at least i do tried to teach my 89 year old grandmother the internet because i told her it had recipes on it an hour and 30 minutes of my life i went back we had a bad experience hiring a computer programmer for my company once we ended up using a recruiter due to a lack of initial candidates most of the new candidates weren't local so we held skype video interviews one of the applicants couldn't get his camera working for the technical interview so we did a phone interview he aced the all of our technical questions and we ended up hiring him the guy moves and shows up for his first day as part of the orientation he has to read some documents on a shared drive when told to find them on the already mapped network drive he looked confused he was walked through that but then he was told to open an app and couldn't find it since there were no shortcuts on his desktop he was told to open the start menu and search for it he failed at opening the start menu a computer programmer couldn't use basic windows functions he was terminated a short time later it seems like the recruiting company provided a stand-in for the interview process so they paid us back for our expenses and we don't use them anymore i once witnessed the owner of a fairly large company work the mouse while a subordinate worked the keyboard they were older gentlemen it was adorable like two toddlers working on a rubik's cube i sometimes do that as a challenge with my friends playing cs go my mom sent me a text asking if my internet was out because hers wasn't working i reminded her that we lived 1 200 miles away from each other she was just checking on the global communications network since you put computer illiteracy in quotes this is not computer related just technology related my grandmother was from the old country and never learned to speak english she kept asking us to buy a tv that was made in the old country so that she could watch tv shows in her native tongue i worked with a woman who would tell me her web page was wrong she didn't have a web page it took me a while to figure out she meant her desktop display her excuse i can't remember all those terms you'll just have to know what i call stuff i had to do support for the whole office she thought it was perfectly reasonable that i should learn 12 different names for common computer things instead of her having to learn the correct ones she was also a bee she's also dead now and i don't care when my granddad got a new computer he set everything up and wanted to plug in the mouse into the homie port he jammed it in it didn't work he jammed it the other way around it obviously didn't work so he stripped the usb cable and soldered it into the port now that's dedication way back in the day when my family got our first computer we were all learning how to use it this was in the early 90s and pcs didn't do a whole lot ours was basically a glorified word processor with memory and solitaire one day my mom was writing some poetry in word and after having saved the file decided it was embarrassing or something and wanted to delete it unable to find the right file she somehow ended up deleting some seriously crucial stuff and i ended up having to reinstall ms-dos and windows all over again off of 3.5 discs if i had to estimate how many discs this took i'd say between 30 and frick my life we got our first computer when i was 13 i was the only one in the house with computer experience and it wasn't a lot i don't remember what exactly my father wanted me to do to it but it was something along the lines of rewriting the os win 98 to make a working man's computer he was very upset that i wasn't willing to try and hack windows some 18 years ago kevin was having a new database program deployed in his auto body shop the technician was showing him how to navigate around the program when kevin gave him a pad of paper and pen and asked the tech to write down the steps he needed to know the tech took the pad and pen and began to write in just a few seconds he hand the pad back to kevin somewhat bewildered kevin grasped the paper and looked down to see three words read the screen i used to work in it at a high school around 2011 and got a few amazing ones one teacher called me in foreign unrelated issue the setup was a really crappy one where the tower was right next to the mousepad i asked her to click something for me she moved the mouse to the right until it touched the tower and then instead of readjusting her position she went up the side of the tower with the mouse clicked then held it there i tried to act professional and not laugh but i have no doubts that my eyes were sticking out of my head while i strain to not die laughing right there these people educate your children if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: Updoot Everything

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Keywords: computer noob, noobs, computer illiteracy, computer illiterate, computer illiterate funny, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2019, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: F_UztEPs0AE

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021