Queen of Rambles

It’s really amazing to me when I run across people who don’t know the meaning of the word “upload” or “server” or “photo host” and other things that are a part of my daily life. It’s not their fault. They aren’t stupid–just ignorant and in need of education. Still, it boggles my mind. The subject comes up because I was just doing my daily check of three different forums and each forum had users asking some very basic computer questions. That’s fine. We don’t learn anything without asking. Unfortunately they couldn’t understand the explanations. I guess I’m bothered because one guy blamed his computer stupidity on being American and said that Swedish people were more technologically advanced. No. Don’t think so. Uploading a file has nothing to do with your national origins, I’m afraid.

It’s giving me a headache just thinking about it, probably because it reminds me of my time as an Apple support technician. We used to joke that there should be some sort of license requirement before people were allowed to use computers. Some of the questions were too freakishly scary to be made up. One time I spent a full hour on the line with someone trying to get their Internet connection to work. Nothing would help. Everything was a dead end. I was about to give up and send out a technician when I thought to ask the simplest question of all “you do have it connected to your phone line, right?”

“What? Why would I need to do that? I want to be on the Internet, not a phone line!”

My brain exploded at that point.

Then, of course, there’s the classic case of people thinking a window is literally a window. I thought it was a joke, but there are little old ladies out there and they have computers and they think they have to open and close their living room window to fix their computers. It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? And, of course, there’s the folks who think their CD tray is some sort of coffee mug holder or else they don’t know the CD should go shiny side down. It feels really patronizing to tell an adult “put the shiny side down. Make sure the label is facing up.”

Of course, there were real problems too and those were more fun to work with since it involved a brain challenge. They were also a lot less frustrating since generally the real problems were called in by people who could work a mouse. You didn’t have to explain that the cord should be coming out of the top of the mouse.

I’ve had many jobs in my day and that was by far and away the worst job in the world. I would go back to full time teaching before I would work there. I guess the point is moot since I just found out the company I worked for is going under (I’m not supposed to say this, but Apple didn’t provide it’s own support. We were employed by an entirely unrelated company who also provided tech support to Disney, Adobe, Intel and a lot of other places).

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2003 at 11:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.