Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?
Just as the title asks I've noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they're reading.
They'll read it and despite all the information being there, if it's even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it's complete gibberish or indecipherable.
Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it's making me lose my fucking mind.
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I think part of the problem is that so many people nowadays are conditioned to consuming information in bite-sized chunks (eg. tweets), they now just focus on key words and assume they have all the context they need.
It's akin to the problem I see with technical support help desks, be it the IT support team at work, or my ISP or mobile provider.
They read a few words and parrot the nearest response from their knowledge base/AI bot, and call it a job well done.
I'm literally dealing with this at work right now. Three times on my ticket I've been told to undertake a series of steps, which I not only stated I'd done when I first opened the ticket, but I also attached screenshots proving it.
Fucking frustrating.
That may also just be a resources issue. Too many tickets, not enough reps, and the expectation of low average handle time are not exactly conducive to encouraging those deeper dives.
Yeah, I assume when support people do not understand what I am telling them that they cannot afford to understand what I am telling them. Either they need to solve my problem in 30 seconds with a stock response, or else they need to get rid of me as fast as possible so they can deliver more stock responses to other people.
In other words, any text around the keywords is supposed to just be a decoration. Because the purpose of a comment is to choose sides in their greens-vs-reds game, you are not supposed to convey any thoughts, what a thought even is again?..
Had this happen to me taking a marketing course (bleh) the other day.
"The word count is 2000 but I'm close to done with a lot less than that, do I need to have ~2000 words?"
"Hi! You can go 10% over the word count. Thanks! :)"
They also had a glaring issue in a quiz that, apparently, was never noticed by 500 people over the span of two years. Blows the mind.
I've been running into this so much with paid customer support agents; it's been driving me mad.
And the amount of times no matter what you say they just respond "have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling?" 🤬