I have a user that calls her PC tower "The Modem."
Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10
- Thread starter TragicMonkey
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I have a user that calls her PC tower "The Modem."
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I once had a cubicle neighbor who called all computers "systems". I'd overhear crazy conversations when she had desktop support over. "My system is so slow! It is clogged up!" "Um, maybe that's for your doctor?" And she'd ask people how their systems are doing, she paused quite a few conversations while people tried to figure out what she meant.
She wasn't a native English speaker, so perhaps that's an excuse. She also said "luggages" so people would try to prompt her to say that. "You're going on vacation, right? Are you packing a lot of things to bring with you? In containers of some kind? That go in the bottom of the plane?"
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Who's the "them" in this context? A lot of occupations on the list I provided can be self-employed or can be worked by being an employee. If you're an employee, for the occupations I listed you don't need to know computers.
If you're self-employed, you may need to "know" computers only as far as being to handle email. You can hire someone else to put up a web site for you. Keep receipts and cheque stubs and your accountant can do the books and taxes for you.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Until recently, our clients almost universally called it the "hard drive".
Maybe, but I guarantee that an appreciable percentage of those employees play Call of Duty when they get home.
Sure, if you want to continue to live in the 90s, I guess it would still be possible to run a business that way. It's much easier if you use a computer.
Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
For sure. I misunderstood the point that Norman Alexander was trying to make. I misread it as "if you're tradesman of any sort you need to know computers." His and your comment says if you're a tradesman running your own business, knowing how to use a computer is certainly an asset.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Being able to use a computer is no more necessary to business than literacy is.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Like getting a job as an OBGYN and declaring "I don't know nothing about birthing no babies!"
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
But hey! I'll look into it!
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Yes, that is indeed the problem. It shouldn't, as I said, be allowed.
Yes but if you support the Medical Field in IT that is everyone in your user base within a rounding error.
And I'm serious when I say it's not exactly a lack of skill, it's a character trait. These aren't (just) people who are bad with computers, it's people who see being bad with computers as part of who they are.
The big issue. For the most part none of them were trained in any real sense of the term. What the entire medical industry has is about 40 years of a vague layered tribal knowledge and the horrible, horrible, horrible industry standard of training via "shadowing" which is goddamn cancer (no pun in my case) on the general office computer skills.
40 years ago a widdle ole' lady sat down at a Apple 2e or a TRS-80 or whatever and got actually trained by someone to enter medical records into a patient file. And that, in a very real sense of the term, is when actual training stopped. When it came time for that widdle ole' lady to retire someone in Corporate said "Hey let's not pay the guy to come out to train our next widdle ole' lady, that's a waste of money. Just have the new widdle ole' lady sit down next the old widdle ole' lady and watch her work for a couple of weeks!" and then the executives all high fived each other and went off to do cocaine in the executive bathroom.
So the next widdle ole' lady learned what buttons to press to make this happen... but learned nothing about why anything was happening or why they did this way. She learned a skinner box behavioral pattern and nothing else. So when the software got updated or they changed OSes or a file type got changed from .TXT to .PDF she didn't only not know what to do, she lacked the basic framework that made it possible for anyone else to explain to her.
Repeat this process for the next 40 years through 10 generations of widdle ole' ladies every one of which was shown how to pantomime what their predecessor did and literally nothing else and this is the result, an entire industry where 80% of the people in are performing shadow puppet theater of their own job, totally and completely unprepared for any change; planned or unplanned, in how the process works.
Like dead serious if anything I say in this thread makes it out in any way to greater world enough to become a bug in anyone's ear it's this.... do NOT use "shadowing" as your sole or primary way of user training.
That's about 90% of it right there. There's a few other things in the margins, like how it's really more a case that the users are "scared" of their computers then ignorant about them. I don't know if there was a period in the past where "Listen just do exactly what you were trained to do and don't deviate from the slightest because if you so much as look at the wrong button this computer will explode and kill you, everyone you love, and go back in time and kill Jesus." like a generic Windows workstation is the goddamn Therac-25 of something but I do wish I could somehow get to my users that seriously the number of things you can break that I can't fix in a few keystrokes is not that great.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
My current workplace was never that bad, but whatever lingering vestiges of that sort of thing we had was killed off when we converted to Epic. "Hi, your job is X? You need to pass this certification course. You get three tries to pass, and if you don't you're fired." As much as I dislike having to take the tests again every couple of years I guess it's worth it if it weeds out the unfit.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
In my industry it's just part of the job selection criteria. If you don't have basic computer skills, you just can't get a job in the public sector.
Also, this popped up when I hit the Random button and I thought it was relevant for this thread:
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
It's a bit different here, not just computers but robotics. Some 12 to 20 feet in the air, so trainees following you around and watching, hopefully learning is the only way. Though, we try to explain the intricacies, basis, reasons, benefits and contraindications for the actions, still some just won’t learn. Even apply things they should already know, just to get to this point, about such things.
We had some certification testing a decade and a half ago but the people that went through it never got their certification certificates. I know, because I saw them and they were never distributed.
I think I’ve told this story here before. Sometimes we have to access equipment remotely, due to perhaps failure of the local user interface. So you had to do a NetMeeting to the remote device with the IP address. To shorten that process we put shortcuts on some other common and reliable interface devices to more easily get to a broader range of other devices. However, when we had a major ‘lift and shift’ changing IP addresses, some people just couldn’t remember how to do it without the shortcuts and these are all suppose to be computer, robotics and technology people. Even with new IP address lists known at the common device locations. Solving such types of problems is their job. It just went to show, you work to make things easier for people, then without that crutch, some people can’t even walk anymore.
Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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That thing that would "never happen in production," happened in production. Again.
"What shall we do?"
I said, "it won't do any good, but we have been told to escalate through the proper channels, so that's what we should do."
"What shall we do?"
I said, "it won't do any good, but we have been told to escalate through the proper channels, so that's what we should do."
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
Ah, escalation, when you ask "what should I do" and they say 'well what would you recommend'. I already did everything I could recommend, that's why I'm ******* escalating!!
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gnome
Penultimate Amazing
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I suppose there's a place for it if the escalation gets you to someone who actually has more power, such as the ability to authorize an infrastructure change that you can't, or the authority to make someone do something that you can't.
So "what would you recommend", can be "I recommend you get someone in here to replace this ****** server!"
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Argh. We need to put test data into the production system to test production stuff, sure. But it has to be flagged in such a way that it doesn't get mistaken for real data. Oh, but to test X we need to not flag it the normal way because X filters out flagged test data. Okay, use the second method of flagging test data, that isn't filtered out by X. Wait, now we need to test Y, which filters out both....
...leading to the situation where we have FOUR distinct, different ways to flag data as test data only, do not report on it or treat it like it's real...and some test data is not flagged in any of those four ways and gets mixed in with the real data. Of the data that is flagged, it can have anywhere between one and four of those flags.
And the proposed solution? You guessed it! We're adding a fifth distinct way to flag test data as test data.
...leading to the situation where we have FOUR distinct, different ways to flag data as test data only, do not report on it or treat it like it's real...and some test data is not flagged in any of those four ways and gets mixed in with the real data. Of the data that is flagged, it can have anywhere between one and four of those flags.
And the proposed solution? You guessed it! We're adding a fifth distinct way to flag test data as test data.
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
True that, good point.
I use to be able to go to our customer management representative. He could authorize things and get others to do things none of us could even ever hope to and just keep my management ‘in the loop’. He’s retired now and the two people that replaced him ain’t a third as effective as he was.
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