Ask Lemmy

I'm mostly patient with my parents or friends as long as they try to understand. But I'm a software engineer and when my very well paid coworkers don't understand how to operate their IDE for the fifth time that day I have a hard time not to bite them in the neck.

I didn’t lose my patience but it did make me think of a tale. I was once asked by a coworker to see if they were visible in a zoom event they were attending (goofy concern to begin with since they had left their desk to come to me to ask). Upon return to their cube, with the meeting still ongoing I pointed out that no, they weren’t visible or audible in the meeting because they didn’t have a webcam. This was during the “return to office” phase of the pandemic and our in-office stuff was decidedly pre-pandemic so none of the workstations were equipped with videoconferencing equipment.

I’m not even IT staff.

I have a boomer boss and he has a hard time with email. He also didn't know how to zoom in when taking a picture.

So completely forget excel.

I used to work help desk, so I've had lots of practice with patience of this sort, but I have come close a fair number of occasions. My company hires retired folk for some part-time positions, and I was helping one of them reset their password. I was on this call for 45 minutes because he couldn't type the default password correctly, eventually his manager came by and helped him type it in and make a new one (against corporate security policy, but I was so done by then that I didn't argue).

One thing I learned while working there is that most people, regardless of age or anything else, know exactly enough about computers to perform their job role, and as soon as they encounter anything slightly outside of their knowledge, it's freakout time.

No, but I think this is only because I’m the ‘tech guy’ in my family and I’ve had years of helping my grandparents in their misadventures in using Windows, and I know it’s not their fault that they don’t understand, so I’m naturally patient with them

There are only two people who ever ask me for tech help. One is my father, who is decently tech-litterate for his age, helping him usually revolves around media piracy. I very occasionally lose patience with him because sometimes I'll tell him to check something, he'll say he did it, and I keep trying to figure out his issue only for him to realize half an hour later he didn't actually check what I told him to.

The other is an older lady who used to be my neighbour, we became friends and still keep in touch since she moved. I absolutely adore helping her out, since it's usually something silly that takes literally less than 30 seconds to figure out/fix. She's always immensely appreciative and acts like I'm the smartest person in the goddamn world. It's honestly a welcomed ego boost, plus it makes me feel great to see how genuinely thankful she is.

I think, especially with older generations, you really have to keep in mind how much the world has changed since they got here. My old neighbour didn't have electricity or running water growing up, and now we expect her to understand GUIs, OSes, settings, accounts, networks...

I get much more upset when I see people around my age (late twenties to early thirties) who can't understand the basic functions of a desktop operating system. I understand that not all of my generation were tech-obsessed kids/teens like myself, spending their free time figuring out stuff like upgrading from Vista to XP or partitioning the hard drive on the family PC to dual boot Linux distros, but you'd think they'd at least understand the basics of a filesystem and how to change settings.

I work with phones and you might think nobody would struggle with 150 year old technology, but alas many do.

I don't get frustrated though, everyone has different skills and someone not sharing my skillset doesn't make them less capable.

Mum writes all passwords down...in random notebooks and on scraps of paper.

Want to set up Netflix on new device? Time to guess which email was used and hope we find the password for it so we can reset the Netflix password again.

Oh yes indeed!

I was a hardware tech at a cell phone, tablet and computer shop. For a while the boss hired this lady around 22 years old to work up front. Now this chick couldn't cut a piece of plastic to save her life!

See, there's different size SIM cards out there, and sometimes when upgrading a phone you gotta physically cut the SIM card to a smaller size. We actually had all the proper punchout tools, but somehow she couldn't even manage to put the card in the indented area the right way.

She'd sometimes put the card in upside down or backwards, cutting the SIM card all wrong and destroying it. And even when she did manage to cut the card the right way, the card might have slight burrs on the edges.

Now of course that's not her fault, that's an imperfection of the punchout tool. But she didn't even have the common sense to pull the fingernail file from her own purse, or come ask a tech in the back for a file, to remove the burrs.

So not only did she destroy many SIM cards, but she even destroyed many SIM slots in the phone by forcing a card with burrs into it.

Well, one day it's just me and her working. Coincidentally, we had like five iPhone 5s come in all back to back. 2 busted screens, 2 bad charger ports, and a bad speaker I think. Keep in mind I'm the only tech that day.

As these phones came in, everyone asks about how long should it take? She tells them all the typical 20 minutes!

Like WTF? Does this dumb chick not realize that I can't fix them all simultaneously?! All these customers are gonna come back mad at me because I didn't finish in the ridiculous timeframe she quoted them.

20+20+20+20+20, duh! Common sense should have told her it's gonna be a while.

Anyways, I wanted to punch her to be perfectly honest, but I decided to go out back and punch a brick wall instead.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

No. Computers are hard. Especially if they aren't built for you.

Lol I do it all for them. It's just easier.

I've been spending my week trying to train someone barely capable of anything why feeling bad for her because it's not her fault and life is complicated for her.

I'm losing my patience with three people. In none of the cases it's tech illiteracy, it's something interacting with it:

1. Friend who calls me every 2~3 months because he forgot his Facebook password. It reached a point that I annotated his password in my machine, but I don't need it because I memorised it.
2. Neighbour who sends a 10min audio file, full of contextually irrelevant stuff, to ask a simple "how do I do X?". No, 10min is not an exaggeration.
3. Mum. Asking her any relevant piece of info means asking the same question up to five times in a row, because: she didn't hear it, didn't pay attention to it, answered something "random", assigned it a name that only her knows.

I'm not even a "computer guy" dammit. I don't work with programming, IT, or related.

Only sometimes?

I work in software engineering/development. There’s a guy on my team who manually copy/pastes every Linux command he runs, into a fucking text file. He does this so he has a record of which commands he ran. As a result, he has a 12,000 line text file, full of garbage. With few exceptions, Linux stores every command you run, chronologically, with a configurable limit. He knows this, but insists on saving all of them to a Fucking. Text. File.

Watching him work makes me want to rip my eyeballs out.

It's not annoying when they can't do it. It's aggravating when they refuse to learn to do it and just want you to do the whole thing for them every single time.

No, most definitely not. Mostly considering I'm on help desk to help those that need IT assistance.