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On Wed, 29 Jan 2014, Julian Hall wrote:
Customer asked to right click on the mouse. Puts phone on desk and returns a couple of minutes later and says 'Done that..' Having been queried exactly what he had 'done' by the tech it transpired he had done exactly what he thought he had been told. With a pen. Wrote 'Click' on the mouse.[1] Actually after 6.5 years working ISP Tech Support I have a wide choice, but this is the killer.
Funny? To some, yes, but actually... Who's fault is it that the customer didn't understand (or interpret) the request correctly?
It's far to easy for us geeks to scoff at things like this, but something happened to me about 34 years ago that made me realise not everyone was as adaptable or willing to adapt to computers.
So back then I was at school and had been tasked by my teachers to write a computer aided learning program to help pupils understand transformation geometry[1]... So I did this on the schools Apple II and the program was eventually distributed through all schools in Edinburgh/Lothian who had Apple II's (most of them at that point - this was 2-3 years before the BBC Micro). One day I was demoing the program to a pupil... There was a screen of instructions then a prompt which said something like: When ready, press "Y" to continue...
So the girl read the instructions and sat there somewhat confused - I said to her something like "Are you ready?" and she said (to me) "Yes", so I said tell the computer that... And in a loud clear voice, she looked at the screen and spoke the word "Yes".
So we all had a good laugh at it, but of-course this was the first time she'd sat in-front of a computer, let alone type anything on one...
So it's easy to say that some people are just dumb, but the reality is that some people simply don't know.
When she first saw it, my 5 year old niece got frustrated with my DSLR camera because it doesn't have a touch screen - she's used to swiping her mummys ipad and touching it to take photos, etc. who's fault is that? Fortunately she's very adaptable and when I showed her the buttons she very quickly got the hang of it. It would have been easy to laugh at her, but would that have helped?
I kept being told all those years ago that computers would make our lives easier... Still waiting for that to happen... "OK Google" is getting there though.
Gordon[1] I found the teachers notes and a printed listing of this program about 2.5 years ago and it's the memory of that which prompted me to write my own BASIC interperter... The idea being that I could run that program again. I then went out and bought an Apple II off ebay - ran the program on that. Still wrote the BASIC though: http://drogon.net/return-to-basic
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