Ask Lemmy

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.

IT tech here, lack of knowledge/skill does not bother me, lack of will to learn does.

the only time I get annoyed or frustrated is when they don't read whatever pop up they get and immediately press "ok" or "continue" and it borks everything

Ooh, can I share a sweet story instead, because this made it pop into my head and it's a memory of a wonderful person that I wish everyone could have known?

I used to work at this small business when I was younger, and one of the employees was an older guy in his 80s who had retired and worked a few hours a week just to keep busy. He loved us teens and twenty somethings and we adored and respected him.

As time went on, the assistant manager left and I ended up being promoted to assistant manager. And eventually daylight savings happened and the clock changed. This employee came in for his first shift after the time change and looked half dejected and half embarrassed and he quietly explained to me that he didn't know how to change the time on his watch, that the previous assistant manager had always done it for him, so now he was trying to deal with his watch being an hour off. I happily changed the time for him, and after that I changed it for him every time change. Even after he retired for good he would come in during my shift and give me his watch and I'd set it forward or back the hour so it could be right and he'd be thrilled every time.

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.

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 when they ignore or argue with the person theyve asked for help.

If you're going to do that, you can flail on your own.

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.

There are so many other reasons to lose patience with some of my coworkers, tech illiteracy is nowhere near the top of the list. If anything, I like helping people with tech.

I get annoyed when they want to do things but don't want to learn how. they want someone else to do it as opposed to show them how they can do it.

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.

Yea mainly when I was trying to teach my friend how to get pirated games. It is crazy that people can just keep using computers with surface level understanding. I accidentally yelled him a few times now I try to be more patient because I ubderstand what's second nature to me is unfamillar to him

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Its a me problem but I get a little frustrated when helping team members (we're 100% remote so this is generally via a shared session) and they don't click right where I want them to. I don't lose my patience though.

well I have been rendered speechless on several occasions. The most recent is when I told an employee at a high level in our organization who was setting a password not to use his name, old passwords, or anything sequential like abc123. I spent the next half hour trying to figure out why it wasn't accepting his password until I had him tell me one of the rejected ones. hisname123456789. He told me it's not abc123. This man has multiple degrees and uses a computer every day. How is he this tech illiterate and just plain illiterate

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

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.