Do you sometimes lose your patience when dealing with a co worker or friend who is barely capable of using a computer or smart phone?

Mickey7@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 135 points –
83

You are viewing a single comment

Some people have this incredibly annoying habit of seeing anything remotely tech related as magic and they switch off their brain, assuming that they could never understand it.

Them: "My computer is broken"

Me:"Whats the issue?"

Them: "i dont know, i tried to open my email and its got some error message and wont open"

Me:" what does the error message say?"

Them:"err, cannot open email during update, please wait until update is complete"

Me:"is your email app updating?"

Them:"yes.

Me:"wait for it to finish and try again..."

(Obviously tbats not a real scenario, but im not good at examples and just wanted to get the general gist across)

That was something I got tired of saying, about error messages, “what do the words on the screen say?”

Yep, but it does give me job security though...

I had something so similar happen recently where a link on our external site was down. This person calls me and it literally went:

Them: "this link is broken. Can you tell them fix it?"

Me: "there's a banner at the top of the page that says they're trying to fix it. Here's an alternative link."

Them: "well that's from last week so they should've fixed it by now"

Me: "must be real broken then"

Them: "well can you find their email so we can email them to tell them to fix it"

Me: "no, they're fixing it"

Them: "well you're IT can you email them to ask them how long it will be and tell me when it's fixed"

No that's not my fuckin job bud. Here's their general contact page if you're dying for this very non urgent thing.

And they get mad at you when you are trying to help.

I'll say too often interfaces are written for devs and not users.