Look, I am a Xennial, which means I have transitioned into this brave new world from a childhood that was largely free of devices right along with the technology that now rules us. I should understand it better than anyone, but here’s the thing – I also have two jobs and two little kids, so many, many things escape my immediate attention.
Which means I have looked like the tech-noob on more than one occasion, even though I do my best to stay in the know and everything.
So I can definitely sympathize with people who get tripped up here and there, but these 16 folks? They have a long way to go before even being ABLE to be tripped up.
Just saying.
16. I need to know why this happened.
This girl I know took off the W key on her keyboard and switched it with her A key and was super confused when the key binds weren’t switched.
15. Maybe a laptop.
We were trying to teach grandma how to use a computer. She got stuck at the mouse because she kept lifting it
14. THEIR PROFESSOR.
My professor wants to take a photo with an iPad instead of a phone so that it would look larger when uploaded.
13. Just picturing this is giving me heart palpitations.
My mom makes a new folder every time she uploads a new picture. She has like 600 folder with one or two pictures each. She doesn’t see the problem
12. This is the guy in charge.
My boss: the guy doing the PAT testing has broken my computer!
Me: how has he broken it?
My boss: it won’t switch on!
Me: that’s the monitor…….. switch it on at the computer.
My boss: this is the computer!
Me: no that is the monitor…………….. What is the box black box on the floor?
My boss: a printer?
Me: what???
11. Why do people insist on doing this?
Someone who also insisted on printing anything and everything also covered up the second monitor with a piece of paper because “they didn’t need it”. Everyone there had two monitors at their workstation and it was really damn necessary. This person insisted it was distracting and there was nothing they couldn’t do without it.
10. Someone is going to be spending more money.
Wasting an entire tech budget on peripherals, with no computers to attach them to.
9. Just the monitors though.
Trading computer monitors with someone so they could see how their desktop was set up.
8. Oh my goodness bless his heart.
My Nana once asked my Grandad to turn her laptop on for when she got home. He ended up ringing her because he couldn’t find the button to turn it on. So she was getting annoyed saying it’s right there in the top right corner! After a minute or two of utter confusion she stopped, laughed, and asked if he’d opened the lid of the laptop. He asked, what lid?
7. This kind of blows my mind.
I’m in a high school engineering course, and we were doing 3D modeling on laptops. This one girl who was clearly just there to fulfill graduation requirements used the trackpad every day for over a week, and if you’ve ever tried 3D modeling with a trackpad, then you know it just doesn’t work. Eventually, I asked her why and she responded “my mouse doesn’t fit” and proceeded to prove to me that her mouse (USB) in fact does not fit into the SD card slot. It still amazes me that a 16 year old kid who has grown up in the 21st century does not know how to plug in a computer mouse.
6. I bet he likes pushing your buttons (pun intended).
My dad who is 95 and completely computer illiterate, knows that you can look up anything on a computer but doesn’t know the right words. He was talking about an old boxer the other day, I think it was Jack Dempsey. He stated some stats of his career and when I expressed surprise he said, “Go look it up on your Ebay. They’ll tell you I’m right!”
5. This happens all the time.
I work in a cellphone store. I have had on more than 1 occasion, customers get mad at me that I cant access other peoples text messages…
4. Someone in every family has to tackle that job.
Back around 2009, my dad was pretty sure that partition was just the more official term for folder. Not really sure how he got the idea, but he sure ran with it.
That was a pretty painful time, not least for my brother who was studying computer science at the time and was therefore tasked as the laptop-unfucker.
3. My mouth is hanging open you guys.
I work in web dev, which includes some occasional photo manipulation.
One client brought in an old photo of her great-grandfather, with his back to the camera. She wanted me to turn him around in photoshop so she could see his face.
Another client got absolutely livid with me that I couldn’t take the hyperlinked words from her webpage, port them over to her print ad, and still have them function like a link.
2. I mean. It worked, right?
Asked client to restart her computer and she proceeds to unplug it…
1. She obviously just refuses to learn.
old lady asking someone to withdraw money at the atm (and giving strangers the pin for her card) because she didn’t know how to do it.
She does this regularly.
I don’t even know how I would have handled these questions and situations, y’all!
What’s your favorite story that you could add to this list? I know you’ve got some!
