spiraloz.com — When you’re a tech nerd working or living with the not so tech savvy, there are a few things they tend to do that make you bite your tongue, and resist the urge to take over what they’re doing and get it done yourself. They may be trivial, but they are all oh so wrong.
Feb 11, 2007 View in Crawl 4
leslieann1Feb 12, 2007
I'm a graphic artist. My monitor is PRECIOUS to me. I DESPISE anyone who touches my monitor! It is amazing how often people come into my office with some greasy donut or bagel (gobbed up with wretched salmon cream cheese). They insist on eating it right near my pristine desk, and then with their filthy hands, they touch my screen. I have to clean it every day. I don't understand how someone can't point at something without touching my monitor. The company didn't spend 2k on a monitor so it could be fondled by some sweaty fat grease ball from marketing. I want to put a sign on my door that says: "Please wash your filthy hands before entering my office, you fat jerk....PS...Don't touch ANYTHING while you are in there"OH and being a female that is tech savvy is absolutely a nightmare sometimes. NO I WILL NOT COME TO YOUR HOUSE ALONE TO FIX YOUR COMPUTER YOU PERVERTED POS. My name is not "Angel", "Sweetheart", and its especially not "Sport". I have made friends with the IT guy. He also gets called "Sport" as well as "Chief", "BUDDDYYY", and his favorite: "BRO". Anyone need some freelance work?? =)
gmorganFeb 13, 2007
Nonsense C++ gets its name as an in joke. The ++ refers to the increment operator in C. Before hand the language was called C with Classes.C+ was totally unrelated but certainly existed.
hetzjagdFeb 13, 2007
@ NateB2Thats why I like to write a text file of step by step including details like where the user has to physically look on the screen. Then I stand over them while they try follow the text file and if they stumble and literally can't work it out for themselves then I'll add further notation there and then and make sure they understand.Even that isn't foolproof though but you can try "I'm busy, ask someone else to go through the instructions I made with you" and you might be able to palm off the work to someone else with even a minimal clue.
orgies4everyoneFeb 13, 2007
where to begin...I am a graphic design major, who, because I am somehow the only individual who knows how to use bittorrent, and because I've shown a minimal amount of competence in osx just months after buying my first mac, people think I can handle anything that goes wrong with a computer. I will only list the most grave examples that come to mind, the ones that have made me question the intelligence of some of the people that surround me.1. a year ago, this guy I knew who was in the industrial design program at our fine school, calls me up one day, asking me if I'd help him make a process book for one of his projects. First off, I haven't spoken to the kid in like 8 months since we took our foundation courses together, but, being the giving person that I am, I agree to take the time to help him. I go on his computer, to find that he is running Adobe CS, no biggie, except for the fact that someone had found a copy of CS2 premium for mac on piratebay that didn't require an activation and had burned it and distributed it amongst the student body. I tried to give it to him, but he flat out refused the upgrade. Anyways, I ask him to show me what he had for his process book so far. He hands me a flash drive with an apple works file. I'm running ms office, again, no biggie, i go back on his ibook, open it there, and after about 30 secs, I ask him if he had ever heard of InDesign. I finally find the original jpegs he had used and being editing them in photoshop, knocking out the backgrounds, and placing them in InDesign. I do what I can with what he gave me to work with. The f**ked up thing is, this book, for his presentation is due tuesday at 9 am, he called me sunday at 8, i had class all day monday. Remember, I agreed to help, not make it for him, so I did my best to get him started. A few days later, I hear from one of my other friends that the previosly mentioned individuals presentation was terrible, and was chewed out by his prof for such a poorly designed process book. He then blamed it all on me, and continued to talk trash about me and so on. This, from the ungrateful, unreasonable individual who came to me to make me do his work, with little more than a day's heads up. Needless to say, a year later, I see the same guy in our computer labs plopping images into microsoft word, when our labs, both mac and pc, ALL have Creative Suite 2 premium.2. A few months later, I see more ID students finally using InDesign for a poster. I ask one a question as simple as,"hey there, looks cool, how big are you gonna have to print it?" To that, I get a response going along the lines of,"actually, we're not printing anything, we're gonna leave these as indesign files and present them on a computer, cuz thats how the faculty wants us to do it". I tried my best to not say anything mean.3. there was this one girl who was having a hard time moving some file she had been working on at home and had emailed it to herself. She then left the lab after a few minutes of struggling. She came back and I ask her what was wrong, and she says,"oh, I let my browser remember my university email password, so I dont know it anymore, so i had to go back home to forward that file to my hotmail account that I've had since junior high and then come back and download it here, cuz hotmail's is the only password i can remember". 4. I used to work as a lab monitor at my school, and one day, a freshman comes up to me cuz his prints had been charged to his account, but never came out. First off, the kid had dumped two jpegs into word, and then sent the file to a 16" glossy epson printer with 6 ink cartridges, obviously meant for a more professional output, without any special formatting. He probably sent it as the default letter sized option for word. I found out he just wanted thes pics as references for a drawing he had to do, so I went in step by step and showed him how to do it in photoshop, saved as a pdf, print from acrobat, and Voila!, it printed.5. same job again, but this wasn't just one user, it was everyone. The simplest, most sure fired ways to guarentee prints was for people to flatten their files and save/export as pdfs. Apparently, our supervisors, and most of the faculty, have done a piss poor job at properly educating their students. unflattened psds are far too unstable to reliably print, there are issues with whether or not the OS or the app running is handling the print before it gets to the print server, etc. One of the worst things is that our software for handling prints restricts you to only using alpha numeric characters. One funky file name can easily back up a server, and our printers get stuck, and then no one else's prints sent after the malignant file can be processed until the print sever is restarted and the file is manually removed by our IT people. we have a lot of international students who operate copies of windows in their native tongues, and who name their files with characters that say, would only be installed and recognized by the Korean version of windows. 6. the most recent offense, one of my friends asked me to make him a web site, for free, adding that it would be great for my portfolio, that I would get great exposure, etc. Then I went through the comments for this acrticle and came across a cartoon expressing this exact situation. I made him watch it, and hopefully it taught him a very valuable lesson.7. I once went home for break and I forgot to bring an extra ethernet cable. I was too lazy and cheap to go out and buy one, so i would just unplug the cable from the family pc when no one was home and plug them back in later. One afternoon, my older sister, who has somehow managed to ruin a 3 month old emachine that she put in her 4 year olds bedroom, and is trying to justify buying a new one, cuz geek squad told her they couldnt fix it, blamed me for her not being able to get online at our house. Even after I restarted the router and pc, like our ISP has told us to do so many times, nothing. I had no idea what was wrong, and I really didnt care, all I knew was that the lights on the modem werent all on, and i have been forced to deal with comcast support and technicians too much.This was just one of many instances of my siblings blaming all of their pc problems on simple things i do on there, like updated itunes, or installed vlc player.The real clincher, my older sister, the one getting suckerd in by geek squad, is a comcast service technitian, who complains to me about people as idiotic as herself. oh, and I cant forget the first time i met a comcast technician. we had just signed up for their internet and cable service, and the only pc in the house was running Win ME (sorry, we had bought it like 6 or 7 years ago, right before xp launched, my god, this story needs another appandage...). Needless to say, it had a lot of things wrong with, possibly spyware and other nonsense. Luckily, i had just bought my first, shiny new ibook G4. sadly, the technician didnt know how to work on macs, understandable, and asked me for help, to which i then had to add, i just bought this thing 3 days ago. it took him an hour to find a buddy of his who was competent in OSX and we were able to get everything straightened outthis rant will end soon, i promise...the first time we ever purchased a pc was back in august of 2001 (you gotta miss pre 9/11 days). naturally, my dad went to best buy. i was the only one with any common sense and had asked my more savvy freinds as to wht i should be looking for. I pick out a pretty decnt machine for about 1700, forgot the manufact. watev, my bratty younger sister cuts me off and proclaims that I am greedy and want everything and instead picks out a compaq cuz it was purple. It had a cd rom and cd-rw, 40 gb hdd, 128 mb ram, s**t graphics card, and an AMD cpu of some sort, anyways, months later, my sister is complaining that our pc wont play this dvd that her freind lent her, therefore its broken. i then threw it in her face that the dvd wouldnt work cuz we didnt have a dvd rom, cuz she was the one that called me out on it, telling me we were never gonna use. she was mainly trying to score brownie points with my dad back then, which ultimately bit her in the assthere, I'm done, but all of this felt good, i nver knew there were so many others out there that had been thru all of this crap
nevinlApr 7, 2007
....or the people that *insist* that WordPerfect is far better than office....
nevinlApr 7, 2007
...then you must have met my family....I can't possibly remember how many times I had to explain the difference between "Save" and "Save As"...Another pet peeve: having an attention span of a gnat when using a computer:me: go to flickr and upload your photos - your friends can view them and not get a 14mb email when they wake up next morning..sister: where is flickr?me: www.flickr.comsister: ok. How do I do that?me: Internet explorer....flickr.comsister (viewing flicker.com): how do I email my picture from here?< cut to 20 minutes later >me: click on the upload link, then double-click on the picturesister: I want the picture of the cat - which one do I click on?< 5 minutes later >sister: I don't know where I saved itme: its on your digital camera - I don't know the filename....I don't know if your camera is the removable drive D: or E:sister: okay - I see the file (double-clicks on the file in Explorer, photo view pops up)(oh, and of course their computer is always at least 2 years newer than yours....)
freerickJul 10, 2007
so true, I can probably think of 10 more!
freerickJul 10, 2007
People assume that just because you know everything about computers, that you *must* be available any time they have any computer-related problem
freerickJul 10, 2007
OH, people who can't tell the difference between a web site and an e-mail address
smonocoNov 23, 2008
These are the exact things i find really irritating about some non-tech savvy ppl.in my school most of the computer "teachers" can just about turn a p.c. - one of them even said she doesn't have a computer and ''life goes on without computers''. i remeber one of the teachers gave us a website as an example of an e-mail address and she asked us to tell her what broadband was despite the fact that she is a computer teacher. i also hate the way people keep asking me to do things like install programmes or remove the fake antivirus programme that they installed or clear out their p.c. out becos there isnt enough "memory"