Jesus Christ, I hate stupid people. Seriously! There is nothing worse than watching an idiot try to use internet. It is a rage inducing torture if I have ever seen any. I have no clue how do some of the people out there manage to function when even getting to a website is a wondrous magical journey for them.
Do this experiment for me – observe how some of your friends and loved ones log into Facebook. Watch what they do first. See if you observe this pattern:
- The subject erratically moves the mouse in circles while searching for the web browser icon. This usually takes up to a minute if they are using their own computer.
- The subject spots the blue E icon and double clicks on it
- The since Internet Exploder takes about half an hour to start up, subject invariably double clicks on the shortcut again 3 or 4 times
- The subject becomes confused that several windows have opened so he closes them all
- The subject stares at the desktop wondering what happened
- The subject hunts for the IE icon again, having forgotten where it was due to the fact they have TEN MILLION files on the desktop
- The subject opens 5 instances of IE again. This time they manage to close 4 of them leaving one open.
- The subject waits 20 minutes for the MSN homepage to load
- The subject uses the mouse to click into the address bar and the URL becomes auto-highlighted by default
- The subject ignores the highlight, uses the mouse to click on the text to un-highlight it
- The subject laboriously re-highlights the URL with the mouse
- The subject hits delete key on the keyboard
- The subjects uses the mouse again, to make sure they are still in the address box
- The subject types in www.google.com
- Google page loads, and the search box becomes the active form
- The subject ignores the blinking cursor in the search box and uses their mouse to click inside the box
- The subject types www.facebook.com into the Google search box
- The subject uses the mouse to click on the search button
- The subject clicks on the first result
Then when they see me high Ctrl+L, type in facebook and hit Ctrl+Enter they think I’m some kind of wizard. It is painful, PAINFUL to watch you people do this. It’s like watching someone try to drive their car by first sitting in the passenger seat, then laboriously climbing over to the driver seat only to pop the trunk up, then climbing to the back seat, dismantling it, exiting car through the trunk, and then finally walking around to the driver side door. Stop fucking doing this.
Also, can we please stop putting www in front of every fucking web address? I am sick and tired telling people that:
- No, you can’t access webmail.your-company-name.com by typing it into Google
- Putting www in front of webmail is both unnecessary and counterproductive
Yes folks, using a sub-domain other than www may prevent some people from ever reaching your website – unless of course you create a sub-sub-domain named www. This is fine for blogs and message boards – frankly we do not need this sort of people wasting our bandwidth. But when said site belongs to a company and the employees can’t figure out how to access webmail, scheduling and timesheet sub-domains this is a problem.
I’m not shitting you here – we had a guy call the tech support desk the other day claiming webmail was down. We scrambled to see what was going on. It turned out that he just decided to put www in front of the address. For the record, that guy has been with the company for several years, and the address of the webmail has never been changed.
Here is another example of luser brilliance: I told someone to try downloading Malwarebytes to help with their virus woes. I made sure typing www.malwarebytes.org into Google yielded the correct page. What I did not anticipate was the fact that Malwarebytes just like many similar projects does not have direct downloads. Instead they use a distributed system of popular mirrors – so the default download link will forward the user to Cnet, Majorgeeks or some other site like that. All these download hubs have one thing in common – they are supported by advertising. Guess what my luser did?
He downloaded everything on that website other than actual Malwarebytes executable. Poor guy ended up with Registry Mechanic, Virus Vanquisher, Malware Eradicator and etc… I didn’t really know whether I should laugh or cry.
Oh, and one time we had an outraged dude call the help desk and demand we switch his home page back to the way it was. Apparently MSN changed their layout one day, to be more like Google and the fact that you could no longer have both the stock quotes and juicy celebrity gossip on the same page was unacceptable.
I know that computers are mysterious and magical. I know that things like the hierarchical file system designed to mimic a file cabinet with files and folders is impossible to comprehend without a degree in computer science. But web browsing? How the hell do you not know how to browse the fucking web? I mean, this is ALL YOU FUCKING DO on your computer – and every time you do it, you act as if this was your first time. STOP IT!
In this comment thread we talk about friends, relatives and coworkers failing to internet properly. Please tell me about that one time when you were forced to face palm so hard you almost knocked yourself out.
LOL
How many times I faced this is beyond my capacity to count. But I have a theory to explain this behavior: fear of change or the new. People that have never been used to computer are afraid of it and when they learn the basics, they stick to it as their only hope in this new world. It is like if any new thing would make them drown.
You can notice the same behavior of some people with any new technology. In my hometown, around 15 years ago, we got the first shopping mall with escalators. It was hilarious to see people afraid of it. The simply couldn’t step into the thing.
So even if the adults to be (the current teenagers) do become more familiar with current technology, they may still be afraid of the new and won’t be prepared to deal with a whole new breed of stuff that is yet to come. (Teleportation, please bring teleportation!)
I swear to god this was the most awesome post evar! I have a techno friend that I swear still goes to Google to go to any website! He wants to go to espn, and he google’s ESPN, then clicks on the ESPN website link. One time I asked him, why not just ask .COM at the end and type it in the address bar. His response, “I think this is just as easy!” FACE-PALM!
i hate it when people dont know the difference between objects you click twice (folders) and those you click one(links or start menu items)
Yep it’s all SO true!! Great job articulating it….you had me and my wife rotfl’ing!! I’m trying to slowly train one of my bosses to clear off her desktop and try…GASP…folders!! Although I will say she’s pretty good about finding stuff in the clutter, amazingly enough.
Scott
HAH! Loved the car analogy. Perfect.
I used to think I learned computer stuff from my dad. I used to think he was pretty computer savy for an old guy. Then the other day he asked me what the difference was between a web browser and a search engine…… I was so shocked, I didn’t know how to answer, I wanted to cry.
On a related note I don’t think you should be allowed to use a computer until you’ve mastered Tab/Shift-Tab to switch between form-fields. Nothing irritates me more than watching people type in their username (staring at the keyboard). Look up a the screen. Move the cursor to the password field, click, then look back at the keyboard to type in their password. Then, do they just press enter? No, they use the mouse to click on the ‘Login’ button.
So true. Google Analytics shows 40% (!!!!) of our corporate website traffic coming from people typing the website URL into Google.
WTF?
Surely if you are typing the damn URL you can type it into the address bar rather than the Google search box?
But 40%? Clearly most people have no clue.
I have a relative who somehow managed to set up so that through a series of mouse clicks involving the internet explorer icon, she can get a box that she can type a search query into which then opens the google results page in ie. This is exclusively how she uses the internet. When she wants to go to a different website, she closes her current ie window and repeats the ritual.
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MrJones wrote:
There are very few things I hate more than watching people do this.
I am currently writing the new user guide for our organizations move to Ubuntu 10.04. This time i made sure to dedicate a section just to explaining mysterious concepts like the difference between “URL bar” and google in firefox. I doubt it will do much good since the lusers would be required to actually read it, but its worth a shot.
It really annoys me when lusers get convinced that cookies are slowing down their computer and ask me to instruct them how to clear them out…sometimes multiple times. I once had a luser ask if we could “defrag his system cookies”.
LOL
I hate how “The Internet” means MSIE for so many people.
On the other hand I take some advantage out of it. In my company we developed a CCTV software that we install in a server and the GUI is a webpage. When I install it on a customer computer (usually for security people, not too computer savy) I install Firefox, I set our software as homepage, then I hide the URL bar (and everything else) and rename the desktop icon as “CCTV”. Usually it works great.
Then, a few weeks ago I had a call from a customer: “all buttons on the application have disappeared, we can’t do nothing”. I had one of these conversations you described so well in some of your posts. To cut the long story short, someone had managed to block all images coming from the server. And didn’t know he had.
Shamus talked a bit about this before, with a highly interesting and insightful incident. This article,
Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login
accidentally got a high search engine ranking for “facebook login”. Go look at the comments there first to see if you can figure out what happened.
When it happened thousands of people started showing up expecting to get Facebook, then complained that they didn’t like the “new Facebook” and couldn’t figure out how to log in. They left angry comments demanding to be allowed to log into Facebook.
These people were always going to Facebook by typing “facebook login” into a search engine and following the first link, no matter what it was, then blaming someone else for whatever goes wrong. I find this incredible.
(another writeup on it)
“Can you just Print out the internet for me?” Yes, it has been said. Sometimes though I find the in even older generation folks, the one that think Fax machines are the latest greatest, and still use Dial (yes the ones with the dials) telephones, and of course typewriters. Those people won’t even touch a keyboard. But they think us wizards can / do / find / know everything, and can produce it all instantly. As in this week, the telephone rings and:
“A friend told me about a web site http://www.blabla…. can you see it?”
No, I have something else going on, hold on a sec…
“you see it now?”
No, it might take a sec…
“uh? well what do you see?…”
ok I have the web site up now, what is it that you’d like info about? (sounded reasonable to me)
“Can you just print out the web site and fax it to me?”
No.!. No I will not print out the Uni X’s whole web site and fax it to you.
” Well how many pages is that then?”
Yes, of course we can print out the internet and fax it to you, coming right up. and BTW That has happened a lot lately, it seems that the elderly have heard that the internet holds every thing their little hearts desires, and that we the wizards can get it for them. Good Luck.
My step-sister visits me once or tice a week so I can translate her Engrish papers into something more understandable by the general population. I noticed her accessing facebook with the google search one night, and ended up showing her how to create bookmarks. Luckily for my sanity, she’s actually quite smart and adapts quickly, so the next time I saw her, she had stopped using google to visit her websites. Now I just need to teach her how to un-clutter her desktop…
Wow! This one was an advanced luser!
Usually, they fight to place the cursor at the end of the line and use backspace repeatedly to erase the characters one by one…
We use Google Apps at the office, and Firefox is our standard browser. Users usually start with Gmail. Then, they click the calendar link at the top of the Gmail page, and it opens in a new tab. Now, they want to check their email again and of course, they click the Gmail link instead of switching back to the former tab… and so on with the other apps.
At the end of the day, they end up with a billion tabs open, most of them showing the same 2 or 3 apps.
Tab-browsing may be smart, but not for lusers. At least, with IE6, they would have hit the red close-button a few times ;)
I was about to say something about points 10-12 but ST/op beat me to it. I’ve noticed many timed users do not understand what highlight means, and will go out of their way to get rid of it. So your points would be :
9 The subject uses the mouse to click into the address bar and the URL becomes auto-highlighted by default
10 The subject ignores the highlight, uses the mouse to click on the text to un-highlight it
11 The subject clicks again at the end of the URL to place the cursor at the end of the line
12-1 The subject hits the backspace key once
12-n The subject hits the backspace key for the nth time, n being the number of symbols in the address
When watching people type stuff, I’ve often noticed they remove words and sentences the same way : by placing the cursor at the end of the portion to delete, then pressing Backspace repeatedly. This is painful to watch.
Also, I didn’t know Ctrl+L.
@ Ricardo:
Teleportation would scare even me a little bit – mainly because of this.
@ Zack:
Sigh… Give him firefox, and tell him to type int facebook into the address bar and hit CTRL+Enter. Magic!
@ MrJones:
Granted, you can set up windows (at least XP) to use single click. It even underlines the names of clickable items so that they look like links on a website.
@ road:
When I gave my dad his first computer I hid the IE icon and labeled the Firefox icon “Internet Browser”. I don’t think he still doesn’t even know what IE is, and I’d prefer to keep it this way. :)
Btw, he uses the computer purely for recreational stuff – mainly Polish social networking sites, reading news and watching videos of cats on Youtube – so it’s not like he is missing anything.
I recently installed Chrome on his system labeling it “Also Internet Browser”. Now he alternates between them.
Oh, and none of his friends from US actually know how to install the Polish spell-checker dictionary, or change their keymap to allow Polish special characters. I set it all up for him and he feels pretty smug about it.
@ copperfish:
40%??? Wow… That’s… Horrifying. I didn’t think it was that widespread…
@ SapientIdiot:
Firstly – I am totally jealous that you work at a Linux based organization. My company is married to Windows with no possibility of parole.
Secondly – good luck. I have yet to see a user who would actually read a manual for anything. That includes myself. Still, like you I naively write damn user guides with step by step screen shots hoping someone will read them…
@ Hector:
Ok, I’m sure you already know about this but Prism is exactly what you need. A stripped down version of Firefox without any UI that allows you to open a web application in it’s own window. It doesn’t expose any UI to the user so they won’t inadvertently make their images disappear.
I’d recommend looking into it if you haven’t already.
@ Chris Wellons:
Yeah, I saw that. Found it pretty hilarious and sad/scary at the same time.
@ D. Taylor (dawgit):
Wow… You win. I have yet to be asked to print/fax someone the internet. LOL!
@ Macedoneus:
You know, I am sometimes guilty of the desktop clutter myself. It’s because sometimes that’s the fastest, most convenient place to put something. I always intend to clean-up or delete stuff afterwords but often I forget – until it’s time to do general cleanup that is.
@ ST/op:
My dad does this sometimes too. Though he now knows how to close tabs, he is sometimes shaky on how they work. Or he doesn’t notice/forgets he has tabs open. :P
Also, good point about backspace – I think I blocked that part out due to trauma caused by actually witnessing someone doing it.
@ Zel:
OMG, yes. I have seen people doing this in word documents too. Also, I am usually mildly annoyed when highlight the last word by holding Ctrl and pressing Left Arrow a million times instead of using Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow once.
Sigh… Did I tell the story about a girl I knew who used to double-space her papers “manually” by hitting enter twice at the end of each line? I shown her how to do it properly and she went “Meh… This is easier”
I did not even facepalm. Had such a huge crush on that girl this shit didn’t even phase me. :P
Zel wrote:
ಠ_ಠ
Seriously… Let’s review:
Ctrl+K – go to search box
Ctrl+T – open new tab
Ctrl+W – close tab
Ctrl+Shift+T – undo close tab
Ctrl+PgUp/PgDwn – next/previous tab
/ – incremental search
‘ – incremental search in links only
Ctrl+G – next search result
Ctrl+J – bring up download dialog
Am I forgetting anything?
Thanks for the reference to prism.
When I said “the long story” I really meant it. It was no inadvertently made mistake, it took them a few hours trying to solve a non existing problem to make images disappear. :-(
FWIW, i found a solution to the desktop clutter problem in my life: I have a folder on my desktop called ‘Random’ and every few weeks I dump all the Desktop crap in it. It’s easier (mentally) then deleting it all because it allows me to clean all the garbage off my desktop without worrying about whether I’ll ever need it again.
Ah yes, posts like these is why I come here :) It’s better than therapy and cheaper too, I’d wager.
My dear old dad, much as I love him, is a complete and utter moron when it comes to computers. He knows absolutely nothing about using any kind of program in any way. Unfortunately he deems it necessary to do so. Guilty of at least 15 of the listed charges. The worst part of it is that he calls me whenever his malware-ridden computer ‘doesn’t work’, usually when I am in the middle of a crowded place. Why is the computer such a haven for every malicious program ever written you ask? Because my younger sisters want to play online games and download music with Kazaa for starters. I won’t even go into the real ugliness. Now picture me trying to explain over the phone how to start up windows explorer or how to download a frikkin’ attachment from an email. How can you sit behind a computer most of the time and not know these things?!
Bonus:
Yesterday I spent till 11 p.m. setting up the digital newsletter for my company because the people responsible screwed it up oh so royally (again).
Today at 3 p.m. I get a phone call; they accidentally deleted the entry from the CMS…I could get it back I suppose but I won’t do it because of the aggravation they caused me! Ha!
I cringe whenever I hear someone say ‘wtf, how did you do that’
or ‘wow, you a hacker or a nerd or something’ behind my back when in front of a computer. Using some short keys doesn’t make me a whizzkid.
In fact, if everyone of them would take the time to learn how to use a program quickly, they wouldn’t constantly nag about ‘stop doing it so fast, i can’t follow’. AAARGH.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother in law dearly, and we bought her a laptop last christmas so she could see pictures of the kids and email and hopefully try to use the internet. She lives a few states away and kept telling me that she was trying to send emails but was “losing” them. I wasn’t getting them, so I had no idea WTF was happening. We go for a visit and I open her computer to do my usual clean, defrag, decrapify and there are envelopes all over the desktop, I still can’t figure it out. How do you do this instead of hit send?
Luke Maciak wrote:
You missed a few:
Ctrl+[Shift+]Tab: another next/previous tab
Ctrl+[1-9]: goto tab #
Ctrl+’+’: zoom in
Ctrl+’-‘: zoom out
(You can also zoom with Ctrl+mousewheel)
Ctrl+0: default zoom
Ctrl+f: more full featured find.
I’ve probably still missed some because Firefox can do almost anything (including cooking breakfast) with the right shortcut :)
My mom banks, pays for things, and plays WoW online. She does not have a virus scanner, does not update her install of Windows Vista, and does not have any kind of Malware protection. She uses IE 7. I tried to show her how to protect herself, but she stated that it was taking too long and aborted before I could install Avast, which was the very first thing I was doing. She has worked with computers and electronics (selling them) since the early 90’s.
Yesssssssssssssss. This makes my day.
I temped at a sales office for a year and by the end of it I was the go-to girl for anything computer related just because I knew the difference between my ass and a command prompt…
My dad can be pretty painful to watch… not nearly as bad as some though so I won’t complain too much.
It’s the terminology he uses that really gets me – every mp3 player is an iPod, a webcam is also an “i-thing” (possibly “eye-thing”, I’ve never been sure).
I’ve got him onto Firefox, but the keyboard shortcuts are a step beyond (even the Google searchbox is a bit beyond him – tends to use the default start page, or look up google.com)
Luke Maciak wrote:
How do you type those characters that look like eyes? :mrgreen:
Fun is where you find it, son. People know about things that genuinely interest them and don’t know much about things they really don’t care about.
Most people’s interest in the Internet is confined to the content found there and does not extend to the computer itself. If you simply can’t deal with this modest diversity of interest, I’d suggest you start spending even more time alone than you apparently already do.
Oh, and have a great day.
Dear looser, learn to spell.
Dear looser,
1. Learn to spell.
2. Don’t bastardize your mother’s tongue.
3. Get a hosting service that doesn’t crap out when a one line comment is submitted…
@ road:
That is a good idea. I usually end up with folders named: tmp, temp, stf, stuff and misc. :P
@ Sameer:
Sigh… Don’t you love when people who have been working professionally with MS office every day for the last 10 years need the IT guy to fix their Excel or Word formatting, margins or headers/footers. I mean the only time I actually use Word is when I help people with stupid stuff.
I sometimes use excel when I need to make some quick charts or tabulate some data and I’m to lazy to use gnuplot. That’s about it. And yet people who have constant daily exposure to this software need me to help them all the time.
@ Becca:
LOL! Wow, I have yet to see someone do that. That’s a skill. :)
@ Nattles:
This is why you should always pretend you are as ignorant about computers as you coworkers. As soon as they figure out you know more than they do, they will latch onto you and never stop calling you. Especially since you are one of them – not some NOC dwelling space-man like me. :)
@ Matt`:
Google look of disapproval, copy, paste. I’m sure there are Unicode numbers for it somewhere but frankly I’m to lazy to look them up. :P
@ Saxo Grammaticus:
Firstly, I’m not your son. Don’t call me that because it shames me. If my father said something like that to me I would die out of shame. He does not know much about computers, but he is always eager to learn. He actually enjoys figuring things out by himself. He has only been using computers for about a year now, and he is already head and shoulders above most people I know. People who have been working with computers for years.
Does he have a passion for computers? No not really. Not like I do. But unlike most people he realizes that knowing your way around a machine is an important skill.
I have no interest in cars – but I know how one works and what to do in order to keep it working. I don’t expect people to become experts. I just expects a person to be able to use a computer without fumbling around like an idiot when it’s their job. Seriously – do you drive in first gear and with your hand break up and your trunk open? Because that’s how your computer usage looks to me.
Please take your anti-intellectual approach somewhere else.
Vlad wrote:
Dear Vlad, learn how to Google terms you do not understand.
Vlad wrote:
No problem. Are you gonna pay for it though? Should I put up paypal link or something?
Also regarding bastardizing my mother’s tongue:
Uprzejmie proszę aby pan sobie wsadził ten argument tam gdzie światło nie dochodzi. Nie ma pan pojęcia o moim ojczystym języku więc niech pan siedzi cicho i się nie odzywa. A jak nie to won mi z bloga.
@ Luke
LOL at what Google Translate did to your Polish:
“We kindly ask that you put the argument where there is no light. You have no idea about moin native language so please sit quietly and not heard. And not that I won from your blog.”
I’m going to take a guess at what “where there is no light” really should say :)
Hey man, don’t write something like this again. I am chasing my head around the room where it fell off while laughing:)
@ copperfish:
You could almost say it…
*takes off sunglasses David Carouso style
… bastardized it.
YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAH!
But yeah, that’s sort of the gist of it. I politely told him to shove it when the sun don’t shine and be quiet or GTFO. :)
it would also help if I didn’t make a typo. Moin should be moim. :P
Humorous post, but shortsighted. In all activities, including using a computer, there are people who are proficient due to years of practice and use and those who aren’t.
The very first time you opened a web browser, you didn’t just magically know how to do everything. You learned and figured out ways to speed things up, but you did these things because you wanted to.
I’ve worked in IT for almost 20 years and am learning new things every day. Because I want to.
Users who use the web mainly for mail and Facebook know one method and that’s it. The technology may scare or intimidate them and because they don’t understand, or want to understand, there’s a learning block. There’s no desire to learn other methods of doing what they’re doing.
I personally know someone who, quite literally, uses the web for Facebook only and comes to me for help because they have no concept of copy/paste. This same person however can climb into a small single engine plane and fly from here to there without even thinking about it.
I however am completely clueless of how to even open the damn door of the plane sometimes. My knowledge ends there because I have no desire to know more in terms of flying an airplane.
Adrian wrote:
I once showed a co-worker how to quickly crop an image in PSP using “Shift-R”. She stared at me and asked: “Are you autistic or what?”
@ M Hopper:
Yes, but the main difference between you and that guy is that you do not pilot planes every day. Both you and me have no interest in learning how to fly a plane and that’s ok because we have the luxury not to learn this skill.
Computer users do not have this luxury. If you want to use a computer you need to know the basics. If use of computer is required for your job, you should at least make a minimal effort to learn how to use it properly.
So I think a better analogy to this is driving a car. Seeing someone ask the same computer questions and make the same mistakes every day is like watching a person drive their car everywhere in without ever learning how to shift gears or how to take the parking break off. And have that person call you whenever they need to back out and they can’t figure out how to put the car in reverse. And then you get a call saying they can’t get their swishy, swashy things working and it’s raining. And they always drive at night with their headlights off because they can never find the button to turn them on.
Not to mention the fact that that you need to jum-start their car every morning because they leave the overhead light on draining the battery each light, and that you have to remember to refuel their car every couple of days least they get stranded somewhere – because they won’t remember, and don’t even know how to check hoe much gas they have left.
That’s how I see people’s inability to use a computer.
@ ST/op:
Shift-R. Got it. I’m writing this down. Seriously – I use Photoshop like once in a blue moon and every time I open it I feel like I’m developmentally challenged – to the point where I usually end up googling “how do I ___ in photoshop” type stuff.
See, you learn new things every day.
@Luke, Copperfish, and Vlad… That certainly adds new meaning to the term “Polish Notation” ;) I don’t (want to) think though Vlad was referring to anyone here in particular, (at least I hope not) but just to the subject kritters being mentioned. (my spoll chucker is ‘On’)
Being that my rear-end is in Germany, which is just across the river from Poland, I can say they do produce some fine programmers. The term “Hacker” is a compliment there. In fact they even publish a magazine called “Hakin9”. (the Hard Core IT Security Magazine [ http://www.HKIN9.org/de ] that will be in German ;) ) It might just be available in English now. (It was always published in German as well as Polish) Excellent magazine BTW, IMHO. (no I don’t work for them, I have to pay too. :( )
Now, if I my go back to my Sudokublock Russisch. ;)
Vlad,
Loser has one O.
– omfg
@xonix_digital noticed that, but I decided not to feed the troll :) But I guess he’s gone by now…
how often are you watching people load facebook?
make a World Wide Rule !
If you going to purchase a computer, you need a licens.
What’s great is how superior you think you are because some people are not as proficient at something as you believe yourself to be, and yet the amount of spelling and grammatical errors in this post lead me to believe your reading and writing skills are equivalent to that of a second grader.
@ wtf:
All the time. I go to visit, and they are like “yo, did you see the pictures from so-an-so’s party. Check this out… Hold on… Let me log into facebook”
*click
*click
*click
*type type type
*backspace backspace backspace
*click
*click
*click
etc..
Half an hour later we view pictures and laugh all merry like.
@ Andreas:
You know… This would be one way to end the Eternal September once and for all.
@ Mellanie:
What’s great is how superior you thing you are because some people are not as proficient at something as you believe yourself to be, and yet amount of fail in your comment led me to believe your computer skills are equivalent to that of an untrained kangaroo.
Yes, I am known to make spelling and grammar mistakes. I never really make excuses about this. I am always grateful when people point out typos. This is a flaw I have been working on for a long time. I do want to improve and I do work on correcting my grammar, spelling and finding better/faster ways to proofread my work.
I am complaining about people who refuse to work on equally important skill set just because they don’t deem it to be important – even though it is.
So let’s review: you feel superior to me because you are better at grammar and spelling. I humbly apologize for my failings, thank you for your constructive criticism and decide to improve in the future.
I try to help people realize they should better themselves by poking fun at their silly habits in good humor. You attack my spelling to discredit my work.
My point is that anyone can become a power user. All it takes is a bit of practice.
you have pretty bad grammar
Sigh… I love how all the jackasses who leave comments just to criticize my grammar are windows users.
Dear StumbleUpon visitors: please learn the proper way to be a grammar nazi – meticulously you point all the mistakes one by one (preferably in the form of a bullet list). Popping in just to say “U HAV SUM BAD GRAMERR” doesn’t even make you look clever.
If there is a mistake, point it out and I’ll fix it.
@ jumblecump:
Before you criticize my grammar I humbly request that you learn the following useful rules:
1. A sentence must begin with a capital letter.
2. A sentence must end in a period.
Criticizing someone’s grammar only works when your own grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling are impeccable.
@ Garrick:
To be fair, Vista and Windows 7 have turned what used to be double click icons into single click links.
And to Luke, I’m guessing you’re the OP. In which case, whilst popping in and only saying ‘OMG SPELLING MISTAKE’ probably isn’t helpful, we’re not here to be your spell check and editor. There are a few in the first couple of paragraphs. ‘I have no clue how do some of the people out there manage to function’
Is one, but I can’t be arsed to do the rest. No worries.
Interesting post overall, but generally if people are this slow I just walk off and let them sort it in their own time.
@ Alex:
Yes the yellow highlight means that I am the OP.
I didn’t expect people to be my spell checker. I’m just saying that if you want to criticize, do it constructively. Otherwise, why bother? I mean, other than being an ass on the internet that is.
Eh, I guess I’m just spoiled because the Terminalist brigade is composed of super polite and eloquent folks so I forget that the The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory applies even here. :)
@mellanie @jumblecrump:
What Luke is apparently too self-effacing to emphasise is that English is his second language: and yet, despite the occasional error, he still expresses himself with a grace and fluency that shames your sub-neanderthal gruntings.
Come back when your Polish is as good as his Engl… never mind, ain’t never gonna happen.
I’m worrying the companies will adapt and suit the retards needs. I really miss the old times when people using the internet didn’t use it for THE Facebook, I mean like 2002, when the people you talked do often were aware of whet the hell they were doing online. Well, I bet the mainstream folks will make the internet a hell hole full of ads and a sort of ‘pay-for-fast-internet-and-access-exclusive-web-pages’.
@ copperfish:
Copperfish,
40% is not most people.
@ SheriffFatman:
Thank you. :)
@ Dan:
They already are – Chrome OS is a perfect example here. Google is dumbing down the OS layer to the point where it is merely a browser shell. Also in chrome the address box is also a search box – sort of reinforcing the “let me google facebook” pattern.
@ splooie:
No, it is not. But it is huge chunk of inbound traffic from Google. Not only that but it’s probably also the biggest piece on the pie chart. The remaining 60% is probably divided into a diverse array of 10-15% chunks making the 40% stand out.
Chris Wellons wrote:
That is absolutely hilarious!! and sad.
Another funny thing (assuming Vlad is serious) is when someone makes a fool of himself when attempting to sneer at others:
Vlad wrote:
1. “luser” wasn’t misspelled.
2. “looser” is misspelled. The correct spelling is “loser”.
3. It’s “mother tongue”. Your “mother’s tongue” would be the actual thing in your mother’s mouth, and I don’t want to visualize what bastardizing it would mean.
The worst are:
1. When someone decides to clear the address bar by putting the cursor at the end and using the backspace one letter at a time. It’s so damn tedious and infuriating!
2. Why do people use Google to search a website they know the address for?! It’s pointless, slow and you just look retarded.
3. Finally, I die a little when people scroll up or down by clicking the little arrow at the end of the scroll bar. THE MOUSE HAS A GODDAMN WHEEL FOR EXACTLY THAT!!! There, rant over.
This is hilarious and so, so true. I especially love the car analogy. The next time my parents do something stupid on the computer and try to pass it off as “oh, well, this is easier for me”, I’ll have to explain it that way to them!
Reading through the comments, I have seen SO MANY of these things… it drives me crazy. My mother is the worst offender, I think. She’s one of those people who SHOULD know a lot about computers–she actually used to do accounting on the big old kind with magnetic tape, back when people honestly thought you needed a college-level education just to use a computer. And she’s used computers a lot since–she and my dad own and manage a small business together, and she does paperwork, budgets, everything daily on a computer.
Yet… God forbid a program take longer than fifteen seconds to come up… no, clearly the computer has stopped responding, so you must double-click on the icon another twelve hundred times. I’ve tried and tried and tried again to explain to her that this will make the process slower because the computer is going to open a new window for every click, but she just insists that the computer should “know” she only wants it to come up once. Sheesh.
She’s web-savvy enough to use most sites on her own, and can both type an address into *gasp* the actual address bar AND use the address bar to search for terms without going to Google first, but then there’s other things that just drive me crazy. For example, she double-clicks everything. Every time I see her do it (since I was about six years old and learned better in computer class in school, mind you), I mention it because it drives me crazy, and yet here we are, fifteen years down the road and she STILL does it EVERY time!
And don’t get me started on how she types! She’s a fast typist, she used to be a secretary and everything, but somehow (and this might just be a holdover from typewriters) if she gets to the end of a sentence and it has ONE mistake in it or she wants to change the wording slightly, on goes the backspace key. She will then proceed to remove the entire offending sentence and retype it… with maybe one or two words changed. I’ve tried to show her the other, easier ways to do the same thing (click with the mouse, use the arrow keys, at LEAST use the mouse to highlight the whole thing to delete it all at once), but it never changes. And you wouldn’t believe the arguments we’ve had about how, apparently, downloading files is automatically “dangerous” (yes, there are such things as viruses. But I sincerely hope that after, what, fifteen years of computer use, I know what is and is not safe to download) and “slows down the computer” (because apparently, the more hard drive space is taken up, the more RAM is used? And of course it’s impossible to make my parents understand the difference between actual memory (RAM) and what people call “memory” (hard drive)).
Oh, and apparently defragmenting your hard drive is dangerous and could potentially mess up your computer. Who knew?
/rant
*sigh* I know my problems are relatively minor compared to some people’s stories, but… it drives me insane!
@ copperfish:
Your company should use chrome.
Don’t forget about the phrase they are trained to say: “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m computer illiterate…”. How concepts like the address bar and the URL of a website have not made it through to lusers is beyond me, they have such clear analogues from real life.
Luke Maciak wrote:
Oh, no… PSP = Paint Shop Pro, not Photoshop. This shortcut crops the image to an existing selection. Neither Photoshop nor Gimp have similar shortcuts as default. You may have to create your own.
Yeah, reminds me of people who don’t know how to use a crank to start a ’25 Ford by hand. What do these people have against archaic irrelevant technology? Hint: your grandkids are going to think you’re a fucking asshole
@ Stikman:
Or there is the opposite of the mouse wheel thing. Let’s say you have a massive document of web page open – say 80 page word doc and you want to scroll down to about the mid point on the document. That’s when you really want to make use of that scroll-bar on the side. Or you know, Ctrl+G and type in a page number. But a luser will invariably use the mouse wheel to go through 40+ pages. Torture!
@ Annie Moose:
I love how people only have a vague idea of what memory is and they always manage to guess it wrong. When I want to add more memory they freak out they will lose stuff. Then they turn around and ask you to add more hard drive to their laptop and can’t understand why this would require imaging the machine and restoring it back (or reinstalling windows).
@ Hector:
Yep, and they act like that’s a valid excuse. It is 2010 – that shit ain’t cute anymore.
@ STop:
Ah. Got it. :)
@ dwindle:
Holly shit dude, are you from the future? Please pray tell us what is the wondrous magical technology you folks use to access online information in your time. Last time I checked web browsers, word processors and spreadsheets were FUCKING MAINSTREAM TECHNOLOGY.
Few people know how to crank up a ’25 Ford by hand because few people have access to these cars. Fuck, I’d love to learn how to do it myself but alas, I do not know anyone who owns such a car and would let me mess around with it.
On the other hand everyone who owns a computer has a web browser and a word processor. What’s more, they use them every fucking day. I you use something every day, for X amount of years you should become more proficient at it. It’s called experience. And yet, people somehow manage to switch off the learning mechanism in their brain every time they sit at a computer somehow.
Oh, and I really hope that when I’m old enough to have grand kids I will still be up to date with the current technology – at least for the most part.
Yeah, chief. Here in the magical world of 2010, we don’t even use windows 3.1 any more. We just click the Firefox, Safari, or Chrome icon at the bottom of the screen, and it likely already has facebook loaded. If not, we either click the facebook icon from the bookmark toolbar, or from it’s own proprietary toolbar. Doesn’t make much sense to type in the name of a page you’re on everyday. Seriously guy, I have never seen anyone have this much trouble with a computer. Come up with a more realistic rant, or better yet, stop posting nonsense altogether.
@Luke
Great OC. You are very well spoken and I am so pissed at my family and friends for being ignorant computer users, when they have the full capacity to learn the basics of computing. I know how to fix these types of people, but sadly, they won’t allow it. If they would simply sit down at the computer with an OPEN mind, they would all lrn2interwebz in a matter of days. Bookmarks, tabs, links, shortcuts – these words and actions would be second nature, and no-one would expect them to know anything more than that. Meanwhile in the real world….
@dwindle
Fuck you, troll.
@ dwindle:
So, how do you go to a page you don’t have bookmarked? At some point you will need to use the address bar, or Google Search to reach a website you have never been to, no? I used facebook as an example because that is a popular destination.
Are you really going to say that no one needs to learn how to type in a URL into the address bar because we have bookmarks? Really? Seriously?
If typing a string of characters into a box and hitting enter is too difficult to learn then I give up.
Also, you have Facebook on your bookmarks toolbar? Why? I use my toolbar for bookmarklets – you know, scripts that actually do something. Like Tumblr bookmarklet for posting things to my tumbleblog. Or Gmail bookmarklet for easy emailing current page to someone. Or the Readability bookmarklet which reformats the page for easier reading. Or Google Bookmarks/Delicious bookmarklets. Or tiniurl creator. Why would I waste the precious space there on a website I visit every day and I know the URL by heart.
I bookmark pages that I may forget about. Why would I ever need to bookmark Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and etc?
@dwindle:
I call bullshit on your bullshit, sir.
It’s a fairly realistic rant in all actuality. A lot of the people he is making example of in his post don’t pay attention to icons, or bookmarks, or anything of the sort – they use exactly the process he described. I’ve worked in IT. My boyfriend has worked in IT. I cannot even begin to estimate how many people called up with stupid requests, things that make you want to cry or scream or throw things across the cubicle farm.
Granted, you won’t see “anyone have this much trouble with a computer” if you mainly hang out in ‘tech-savvy’ places… like, say, wi-fi hotspots or internet cafes. Like he said, though, it’s mostly businessmen and women, older customers, and people that hit middle or high school right before decent computers were considered staples in schools and homes (and affordable).
Opening firefox & going to facebook from the desktop for me is super+space facebook.com enter.
It really annoys me when my mom double-clicks a quick launch shortcut or a link.
@ Annie Moose:
Annie here is an informative way to explain the difference between RAM and everything else. My mom also does that annoying typing thing; it bothers the hell out of my!
http://davidrothman.net/2006/07/08/how-to-explain-ram-to-non-geeks/
Luke Maciak wrote:
Well, I bookmark even well-known pages for 2 reasons. 1) because FF will autofind and show any matching bookmarks as you start typing it–love that– and 2) so I can put keyword shortcuts on them. For example to go to my local National Weather Service forecast page, which has a long cryptic url, I bookmarked it and now I just type ‘nws’ and hit Enter to go there.
@Mike:
I’ve always used the following to describe it:
The RAM is like a real desk top
The hard drive is like a filing cabinet
The person is like the CPU
The person(CPU) is what performs the work and adjusts things, retrieves them, modifies them, etc
The desk(RAM) is the area that the worker can see and limits what they can work with at any one time
The filing cabinet(HDD) can store heaps of stuff, but the person(CPU) can’t work with them in the filing cabinet, they have to be retrieved and put on the desk.
I usually pull that analogy out when someone says they’ve deleted files from the hard drive to make the computer run better and it’s still slow. It’s hard to fill a filing cabinet, but easy to fill the ‘work space’ on the desk.
Me: “Grandma, can you text me the address of the restaurant?”
Grandmother: “I can’t text you, my computer won’t turn on.”
Me: “You send text messages from your phone, not your computer.”
Grandmother: “Oh. My phone doesn’t do text.”
Note: she has a motorola razr.
This makes me think of trying to explain to my mom how to use the computer. Eek!
Thanks for the cont + L trick- didn’t know about that one.
had a guy, whose cd tray didn’t open within a one-second timeframe. So he hammers the eject button like 10 times and declared the computer “f**k’d again!”, proceeding to click repeatedly on the power button to reboot……*sigh*
Things that should have been established a long time ago which should no longer upset anyone:
1. Oh my goodness! There are people on the internet who don’t know how to spell or write in complete sentences!
2. It’s very easy to be intolerant and hateful of other people when you can hide behind a keyboard and alias, even when you are truly ignorant of their situation.
3. ???
4. Profit.
My mom, after spending some time on, say, Facebook, she exits Firefox entirely and start it anew in order to visit another page. One instance with no tabs.
So the procedure goes like this:
Mom is browsing Firefox, one (1) instance running, no tabs.
I ask her to look something up on Google.
She’s reaching for the close button.
I say “Don’t close it, just type google.com in the address bar”
And the answer is; But that’s on another page!”
I’ve tried to explain all of the simpler ways to do it to no awail.
@ Vlad:
LMFAO…I hate smart asses and you are an idiot to boot…come down off your high horse moron!!!!
looser is the comparative form of “loose” (adjective) as in opposite of “tight”….. Like you have a few loose screws, my friend!
“lose” (verb) as in opposite to win and used as a noun is “loser” (one not prone or inclined to win) like smart ass idiots who think they are clever!
learn to spell you and use grammar, so that Iusers can actually understand what the fuck you are saying to them.
@ kody “fucktard” lucifer:
I love how people who can’t even write a single coherent sentence criticize my grammar and spelling.
Kody, I have a few questions:
What does this mean “learn to spell you and use grammar”? I already know how to spell the word you. I don’t get it?
What is Iuser? It that Apple version of a luser? Shouldn’t it be spelled iUser though?
Also, are you aware that the English language requires you to capitalize the first letter of the sentence? If you are criticizing my spelling, I expect your comment to be grammatically correct and impeccable. Otherwise you just end up looking like a jackass.
Thanks for trolling by. Don’t come again.
@ Garrick:
You would go insane in my office – three people sit with their backs to me, so I can see their monitors from my desk. The double click everything. It may not be a big deal, but dude it drives me NUTS.
And you were all born computer whizzes with a USB up your butt.NOT
@ John:
LOL! I haven’t seen anyone use the NOT diss since like 1990. Well, other than Borat I guess, but that doesn’t count.
Also, there is no such thing as a “computer whizz”. Anyone can learn how to use computer proficiently. I’m not kidding. They are designed to be user friendly and have various keyboard shortcuts that really make things easier. You just have to memorize couple of them. The rest is just trial and error. 99% of applications an average user will need can be figured out using just that.
If you are incapable of doing this you either:
a) just don’t want to learn
b) are unable to learn due to some sort of severely debilitating mental deficiency
Also the butt is not a good place for a usb port. You usually want to keep these things clean and dry. I don’t recommend installing one down there for hygienic and maintenance reasons.
dude… lighten up. or get a new job. i don’t disagree with some of the things you are ranting about but really, not every person who has a computer and access to the internet are going to invest as much time and energy into learning all the little shortcuts and user preferences etc as you. there are more important things than always successfully navigating the interwebs.
hope you cringe at that last one.
<3 misery loves company!
glad someone welse feels my pain too!
I don’t think you have a good understanding about how humans perceive the world around them. I don’t think you understand the interface issues that exist with computers either. Clearly you are intelligent enough to recognize these differences but not intelligent enough to offer a solution aside from “learn how to do it”. Neither are you intelligent enough to have the patience to deal with it; given you felt the need to write a post about it.
Try reading The Design of Everyday Things and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. They are good books about human interaction and interface design. They’ll help explain why people do what they do with computers and more importantly, point out how flawed a tool they are.
@ Luke Maciak:
Ok, now you look like an idiot.
You use bookmarklets? That’s script, which is a form of programming language. So you write code to get something done in your browser. Ah ha. Now your rant makes sense. If you can do that then anyone with reduced skill in using computers would in fact irritate you. I bet you are in your twenties.
@ Joe:
“point out how flawed a tool they are”
…the computers, not the people.
@ gin-jar:
Yes, everyone is so fucking busy they can’t spare 15 minutes to learn how to use a web browser in such a way that it will immensely improve your online experience for the rest of your life?
Because I honestly believe this is all it takes. I can sit you down, and take you from uncoordinated spaz that flails the mouse around the screen without understanding what is going on, to a power user who can comfortably browse the web in under half an hour. You just need to open your mind and try to remember and understand what I’m showing you.
Hell, we don’t even have to do that. All you need to do is to watch what I’m doing when you call me over to fix your internet problem. Don’t go to the bathroom. Don’t stare at the wall humming a song in your head while nodding as if you were listening. No just listen. That is all it takes.
But if your attitude is “I have better things to do than become 100% more proficient at this thing that I do for hours every day” then yeah – you will never learn. And that’s the problem. The attitude.
@ Joe:
I absolutely agree that most of the user interfaces are deeply flawed these days. We are getting better at designing them, but we are still not there. And that’s why users need to put in that little extra effort. Because the UI paradigms we have are not as intuitive as they should be.
I’d love to hear your solution to this problem. I’m all for designing better user interfaces. I really am. But this is a slow and gradual process. We will get there eventually. For now though what I recommend is that users learn the current UI paradigms because the tools they work with on a daily basis won’t adopt the new and revolutionary ones for a little while.
@ Luke Maciak:
Excellent response and I agree with your last statement. Well articulated. I don’t have a solution to the problem … but I’m learning. ;)
@ Joe:
I assume you never actually used a bookmarklet. While it is true they are usually written in Javascript they do not require any programming knowledge to use them. Basically this is how it works:
1. Go to a website that offers the bookmarklet
2. Click on the link it provides
3. Drag that link to your Bookmarks toolbar in your browser. Done!
Now you navigate to a page and hit that bookmark button and it does something.
For example, try this one. It is a great usability tool. It will reformat the web page you are currently reading according to your reading preference – this includes increasing font, changing the margins, removing superfluous images, side bars and etc..
No programming involved. :)
Are you mad?
ctrl-L
that requires 2 keys, you should learn
F6
@ mIkEy:
But to reach F6 you need to take your hand off the home row. Ctrl+L is within the reach. It is also consistent with many other shortcuts: Ctrl+T, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc..
@ Zack:
I am a computer technician for a living… the only time I use google for searching actual webpages is for things like… drivers… etc etc. For instance trying to navigate through HP or Dell’s miserable support website I will type in “HP drivers” or “Dell Drivers” which will take me to the back alley page they use for support and driver search versus support.dell.com and trying to get at it that way… saves me sooooo much time. <3 google
@ gin-jar:
you sir use an apple product… just because you do not want to take the time to invest in learning something useful such as linux and want to get out the easy way by buying the oh so sacred Mac leads me to believe that you don’t really want to take the time how to learn much. I deal with lusers on a regular basis and laugh at most people who ask me if I deal with or service Apple products.
@ Luke Maciak:
Yeah but it is next to F5 which is refresh.
Also it is clear reach, i can reach F6 with my hands still on the home row.
I just launched a new website for a customer. He told me his dad was going to look over it that night …
Checked analytics the next morning, and someone had searched ‘www.thesite.co.uk’ – obviously the father :D (who surprisingly wasn’t as much of a technophobe as the customer.)
@ Luke Maciak:
dude, you should have mentioned to him that LOSER is not spelled LOOSER, regardless
HAHA, man i love it when people do that.
“hey you can’t spell this word, let me teach you how, by also spelling it wrong!”
oop, thought your comment system worked a bit differently :B
ah, well, that is alright. *shrug*
i tried sending my mom an article like this one once, i don’t know if she ever read it.
i think i should send this one, too
haha
Absolutely yes!!!!
My mother often asks me to help her upload her pictures to the cosco website to get them developed. The amusing thing is just recently we ran our of room on our native hard drive and had to get a second solely for her pictures. After doing this she had about 27 gb of pictures on her new 1 tb external hard drive. She called me one day asking why the cosco up-loader wouldn’t find her most resent pictures. After closer inspection i found that she doesn’t know how to use folders and has had all 27 gb of pictures in a single folder. Cosco only reads the first 1000 pictures before cutting the rest off. I had to teach her how to press the “new folder” button and organize her pictures. It took about 10 min for the actual folder to open so we could begin to separate them out.
mlia