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.
May I suggest that you don’t get a job in IT?
“I try to do a thing on my computer and I get an error message.”
“What does the message say?”
“I don’t know.”
The story of me helping people with computers.
To be fair, that’s learned helplessness.
How many times have you said ‘yes yes, just click through that, jeeze’?
There is so damn much horrible shitty UX out there; 90% of the time users are just trained out of using common sense, and you can’t blame them for it.
That other 10% though, goddamn. I swear if you moved their doorknob an inch to the left they’d starve to death in their home.
Also one my favourites:
„Nothing works, and this annoying message keeps popping up. I keep closing it, but it just comes back every time. Can you help me?“
Them: “All the PCs are broken”
Me: “ok, cam you see any lights on the monitors or on the front of the pcs”
Them: “i dont know”
Me: “ok I’ll come have a look”
walks down
Me: “Ok show me one of the broken ones”
Them: “ok well its actually just this one”
Me: dont get mad, they are just an idiot
Me: turns on screen
Them: “how did you do that?”
Me AAAAAARRRRHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGG “magic 😀” AAAAAAARRRRRHHHHHGGG
Even people on our fucking helpdesk write up tickets like that.
“Caller can’t log in”
Okay what are they logging in too? What creds are they using? Are they getting an error message? what is it? WHY AM I HAVING TO FOLLOW UP WITH YOU TO ASK THESE QUESTIONS YOU STUPID FUCK.
Well, I’ve had this happen before because the error is half a screen long with a bunch of random (to me) characters, only shows for half a second and it won’t let me screenshot it and isn’t always repeatable because it already showed me the error message, so why would it again?
I hate when that shit happens.
(Kent Brockman voice) JUST TAKE A SCREENSHOT, PEOPLE!!
Aside from reading comprehension, it seems as though people absolutely lack the ability to problem solve. Head scratching is as far as many will go. I can’t count how many times I’ve found inefficient, tedious, or straight up broken systems or out of date info in my office and when I ask people if they’ve ever contacted IT about it or tried to figure it out they just say “Eh, nah, I just leave it and it works itself out.” No. My guy, you’re just doing it wrong/taking an extra 15 minutes to do everything you’re doing because of the workarounds.
“I understand your issue, can you please provide me w, x, and y so I can proceed? Also did you try Z?”
“Sure, I tried Z! Here is W”
I feel this.
What is the actual point of publishing knowledge bases and documentation if nobody reads them?
