It’s not annoying when they can’t do it. It’s aggravating when they refuse to learn to do it and just want you to do the whole thing for them every single time.
Or, they act like they understand when you do show them, but go strait to the boss the next time and complain that you refuse to show them…
I was a cashier at Walmart, once upon a time. The new guy i had to train refused to look at the corner of the screen to read the totals back to the customers. When I pointed it out that he should get in the habit of doing so his response was “I don’t feel that i should have to do that.”
I just… Walked away and got the supervisor to assign him a different trainer. I refuse to train someone above the age of 25 with that attitude.
IT tech here, lack of knowledge/skill does not bother me, lack of will to learn does.
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)
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.
the only time I get annoyed or frustrated is when they don’t read whatever pop up they get and immediately press “ok” or “continue” and it borks everything
Sometimes it’s just a dialog with a single “Ok” button, and they stare at me and ask “now what?”. Like, you literally have only one option, what do you think?
From my exp, it’s asking for validation that what’s happening is expected. Also, sometimes the next step is not to click OK as another process may need to happen first.
I’m all good with people asking questions like that. They don’t have any intuition about what you’re showing them, so they’re hesitant to make assumptions and that’s ok.
This reminds me! At work we often send emails to customers through our ticket system so they are recorded. A new guy got a pop-up asking if he wanted to send the email. He looks at me and says “What do I do?” I say “Well you have 2 options: Yes to send the email or Cancel.” He clicks Cancel and is then confused the email never sent. He quit a few days later which honestly was better for all of us.
Ooh, can I share a sweet story instead, because this made it pop into my head and it’s a memory of a wonderful person that I wish everyone could have known?
I used to work at this small business when I was younger, and one of the employees was an older guy in his 80s who had retired and worked a few hours a week just to keep busy. He loved us teens and twenty somethings and we adored and respected him.
As time went on, the assistant manager left and I ended up being promoted to assistant manager. And eventually daylight savings happened and the clock changed. This employee came in for his first shift after the time change and looked half dejected and half embarrassed and he quietly explained to me that he didn’t know how to change the time on his watch, that the previous assistant manager had always done it for him, so now he was trying to deal with his watch being an hour off. I happily changed the time for him, and after that I changed it for him every time change. Even after he retired for good he would come in during my shift and give me his watch and I’d set it forward or back the hour so it could be right and he’d be thrilled every time.
That’s very sweet. One of the things that got me interested in wanting to work in IT support was that I worked at a breakfast diner where mostly older folks would eat. My regulars would always ask for help to try to fix silly things on their phone and would always be so happy when I could help.
Things are different now, but once in a while you find someone overly grateful for doing something so simple and it’s always a very nice feeling.
I work in software engineering/development. There’s a guy on my team who manually copy/pastes every Linux command he runs, into a fucking text file. He does this so he has a record of which commands he ran. As a result, he has a 12,000 line text file, full of garbage. With few exceptions, Linux stores every command you run, chronologically, with a configurable limit. He knows this, but insists on saving all of them to a Fucking. Text. File.
Watching him work makes me want to rip my eyeballs out.
This one here is for your co-worker only! Not for you, not for anyone else, just for him:
Hmm, I sometimes do this, when tackling a particular problem, along with some notes. It is often nonlinear and branching. I use it to construct a problem-solving script in the end. And it’s markdown file.
Are we OK? ;)
Good lord, you can even ctrl-r to search your command history so even searchability is not a reason to copy into a text file.
This makes me want to rip my eyeballs just thinking about it. Jesus.
I’m imagining when they type, it is at a speed of approximately 100 words per week.
With all the time you save by not copying your commands into a file for your reference, maybe you can invent a machine that will give your superior mental capacity to everyone else.
This was not meant to be a gloating post. I’m simply explaining someone’s terrible and infuriating workflow.
I had a coworker who is actually quite competent and intelligent. We’re still really good friends. But I think he only less than 10 keystrokes in vi: up, down, left, right arrows. x (delete char), i (insert mode) and whatever key sequence he used to save and exit. I use :wq! but he may be a ZZ type of person.
