What are some shocking examples of computer illiteracy you’ve witnessed? 🤔💻 #ComputerIlliteracy #WorstCase #TechChallenges
Unleashing the Worst Cases of Computer Illiteracy
– Have you ever come across someone who didn’t know how to navigate basic computer functions?
– Share stories of baffling encounters with a lack of tech knowledge.
– Discuss the impacts of computer illiteracy on daily life and work productivity.
Join the Conversation
1. How can we combat computer illiteracy in today’s digital age?
2. Share tips on educating and empowering individuals with tech skills.
3. Let’s support each other in bridging the digital divide!
beans in the computer
I was helping someone with a website for their small business.
I told them I put an “alt” tag on some of the photos that would show text when they put their mouse over it, and to try it out.
He literally picked up his mouse and placed it on the screen.
I fell on the floor and almost pissed myself.
A middle aged lady got frightened after being told she needs a mouse to operate a computer. (This was early 2000s)
“Will my laptop still work if I take it upstairs?”
I work in a call centre, and one of my jobs is helping the call centre clients with basic computer troubleshooting.
It is..an interesting task trying to explain to a man who makes more than I do and has been working the same job since longer than I’ve been alive where and what the start button is.
I knew someone who once put their credit card in the floppy disk drive to make an online purchase.
i volunteer as an IT help person in retirement homes. i understand that it is in no way their faults for not understanding computers. they didn’t grow up with them it makes sense that they wouldn’t know what to do. it’s just become incredibly eye opening to see how my life is so different from theirs because computers and phones have been my whole life and i just know what to do on them. i get such simple questions from the people in the homes but when i solve their problem it is as if i solved world hunger in front of them.
Seen actual people immerse a laptop (back when they were not waterproof) in water to clean it
My roommate got a prebuilt gaming PC and when setting it up she spent 45 minutes getting frustrated trying to find the HDMI port her monitor plugged into… It had a port cover on it from shipping. It took me 30 seconds to find. She argues with her boyfriend her discord nickname “Boomer” is inaccurate, I disagree.
I’m still hunting for the “any” key on my keyboard. One of these days I will find the sucker!
My employer hired someone to work for me doing tech support. In the first few days I had to show her how to open Outlook, create a new email, where to put the recipient address, etc. Had to show her multiple times how to open Excel, let alone use it. She never did get the hang of email, eventually we concluded she actually couldn’t read and we had to let her go. This was in the early 2000’s and she was probably in her 30’s at the time.
My mom was trying to move ~200 pictures from one folder to another. Her approach was to open one picture, do Save As, save it to the other folder, and then delete the original. One by one. When I tried to explain that she could click-and-drag the whole thing over in two seconds, she said “that wouldn’t be any faster than the way I do it!”
She would also “save” pictures she found online by copying them, opening Microsoft Word, pasting it in there, and saving it as a .docx file. And she would try to “open” jpegs by right clicking on them, choosing “Open With,” and selecting Microsoft Word.
Growing up in the 90s, I remember seeing multiple adults try to yell commands at a computer screen. They didn’t understand about standard I/O like keyboards and mice because their only concept of computers was from watching Star Trek.
Refused to use adblocker because he thinks it’s unfair to advertisement 🙄 then got ransomwared and took me 10 hours to unlock that shit 🤔
Long ago, a Best Buy employee told me that when his town’s store first opened, an elderly lady came into the computer section, picked up the computer mouse and tried to move it across the computer monitor screen asking “is this how you do this?”
Last year there was a new employee with a CS degree who said they didn’t know how to use Word and wanted to do everything with Adobe instead. This is at a government agency, so redoing all the systems to accommodate one person was definitely not happening.
Sold a computer on craigslist about 10 years ago. Keyboard, mouse, LCD monitor, and cables.
He took it home, and said it didn’t work, the screen would stay blank when he powered it on.
When he brought it back, he was pressing the power button on the LCD monitor, not the computer.
I worked at the head office of a major UK company. They hired a woman as a website administrator and, on her first day of training, asked her to click on something. She just stared blankly, and they repeated, click on it with the mouse. The what? Was her reply. They had interviewed her for the job and it turned out that in 2004 she had somehow never used a computer that had a mouse. I don’t think she made it past lunchtime.
This just happened last Friday. I am a new legal secretary in a small law firm where the partners have been in business for 50 years. Part of my job is to print every email that comes in and of course people always send big fat attachments Friday at 4:55.I had some emails queued up to print and since it was already 10 minutes after I was supposed to be gone I asked the managing partner if he would shut down the computer after it finished printing. He did not know how to shut down a computer.
I’m a graphic designer and it’s fairly routine for me to be emailed photos taked with a phone of a webpage displayed on the customer’s laptop or desktop monitor. They don’t know any of the myriad ways to take a screenshot or copy a url. Some of them can’t send an email from a desktop OS.
I’m a late GenX and I know I should be used to it by now, but the inability of people younger than me to do anything that isn’t on a mobile device continually boggles my mind.
Bonus: If you claim to be a graphic designer, you should understand that you cannot make a 300×250 graphic “higher res”. Please stop sending me 1250×1042 jpgs.
The whole family has used emails for years, the other day I had to send one for my dad, and he said something in the line of “send both files in one email, so you don’t have to pay twice”.
I had someone call me because a message had popped up in their spreadsheet saying that there was missing information in column B and that all rows needed to be completed before he could save the file.
This was a message that I had added to the master template file because I was sick and tired of people not completing the file properly.
I patiently explained that all he had to do was to make sure that all rows in column B had to be completed, and he asked me “Where is column B?”
“Well, Jeremy” I replied “Traditionally column B is located in between column A and column C. ”
Also had someone complain that he wanted to get an average, but every time he clicked AutoSum, it was just adding all of the numbers together.
My mother growing up. She used to lose track of the mouse’s position and would just be so frustrated at the simplest things. IF ANY variable showed up she wouldn’t know what to do. I must of showed her how to check her email a hundred times.. even made short cuts etc but things like loading times just triggered her to click innumerable amount of times and she didn’t understand the limitations of a processor for example. Granted the closest thing she had regular experience with at a place where she lived during her youth was probably a type writer so I mean I can’t blame her. It didn’t mean I didn’t roll my eyes every time I heard her call my name in “That voice”. Ah SOAB where is that coming from… fuck its from the “computer room”… shiiiiiiiittttt
Of course this didn’t help that we were working with windows 95/98 at the time a FAR cry in terms of accessibility. XP though was a pretty damn good OS for its time.
The instructions said to close the door… but it meant the latch on the floppy drive for the Commodore 64.
My buddy got up and closed the door to the room.
My sister places every file she creates on the desktop. She does not understand folders. She cannot move a window around on the screen, she cannot resize a window except by the minimize and restore buttons in the upper right corner. She does not understand if she is using Google and wants to change to a different search she does not have to close and reopen Google but can use tabs.
A user was attempting to connect to the Wi-Fi network by following the documentation.
Upon reaching the step requiring credential entry, the instructions said something like “Enter your username and password in this window,” accompanied by a screenshot of the login window.
The user contacted the help desk, unable to write anything into the window. Eventually, it was discovered that the user was trying to type their credentials into **the screenshot** itself. 🤦
I was watching a Twitch channel that shows a whole bunch of those grift industry “learn Windows 95 in 15 minutes” VHS tapes. If you were around back then, you’d immediately recognize that little video rack at the checkout aisles of Fry’s Electronics and Circuit City. There were hundreds of these tapes releasing every month, it was insane.
Probably the worst offender was a “how to Internet” video that didn’t really explain anything, it just encouraged the viewer to ask the technician to do everything for them. But the worst part was in explaining how to actually *use* the Internet.
The tape basically gives the viewer a list of 10 websites they can go to, like these 10 websites are the entire 1996 Internet. These weren’t even good websites, one was just a horoscope blog called something like “Brittanys-Star-Cat.” But that’s not even the dumb part. The dumb part is it will say “for news, go to h, t, t, p…colon…backslash backslash…w, w, w…”
And on screen: “http:\ww^()w…”
I was so incredibly astonished at the brazen confidence of these grifters, willing to make a video to teach computer literacy, but themselves so poorly illiterate that they were instructing users to enter URLs with backslash instead of slash. I mean, I’ve seen people do dumber things with computers before, but these guys embraced their fundamental incompetency with unwavering certainty, documented it to widely released video, and charged us $19.99 to witness the glory.
I was once trying to teach someone how Windows Explorer worked. For whatever reason, they could not grasp the concept of using folders to store documents. I had to get an actual folder and piece of paper out to demonstrate putting paper into the folder before she was able to grasp the concept.
I once had someone who thought their Wi-Fi was down because their wireless mouse had run out of battery and needed new ones, think that’s my favourite.
During a late 90s “PC training” session at my job, I was in a room full of older employees who’d apparently never even seen a computer before, much less used one.
When the instructor asked us to click on something with the mouse, one guy picked up the mouse and pointed it at the monitor like a TV remote, and then asked the instructor why it wasn’t doing anything.
I worked for a law firm, and one of the administrators would print the PDF of the case from her email. She would then scan it back to her computer because it “downloaded to the documents folder so she could move to the case folder.”
I told her she could just click the down arrow and download it, then move the file, saving hundreds of sheets of paper. She said that was too complicated.
She only lasted a few months before she was fired.
Edit: I thought of another one. Lawyers are not smart when it comes to electronics. Same law firm, a lawyer was afraid the cleaning crew was going to steal her laptop. So she took her trash can and shoved it under her desk. Put her laptop in the trash and covered it with paper towels. Of course, the cleaning crew empties her trash. They find the laptop and put it aside in the cleaning crews supervisor office because they thought it was weird we’d throw a laptop away that looked brand new.
Oh goodness so many stories…
As a student working in college I had the ticket for a computer that wouldn’t boot. Showed up to find over a dozen refrigerator magnets stuck to the outside of the case.
There was also the prof trying to upgrade Windows (he had 3.1) via floppy disk (I forget how many discs, his PC didn’t have a CD drive, but it was a lot) on his 386 that he refused to replace/upgrade.
EDIT: Those are old stories – more recently we had the new hire (19 yo in 2023) that we had to explain what a Start button on Windows was and how and where “File->Save” was and what it meant. Kids that have only been exposed to phones/tablets are the bane of my existence these days.
My grandfather typed “big boobs” as his facebook status like, 15 times in a 5 minute span… I think I understand what he was trying to do…
I’ve been working in IT for almost 25 years. A few weeks ago I had a user tell me their second monitor wasn’t working. I walked over and pressed the power button. Problem solved. IT would be a great career if it wasn’t for the fucking users.
My grandmother took a basic computer class, the first day they learned how to turn on computers…
She still couldn’t figure out how to turn on my grandfather’s computer, ever.
I am studying for a IT education. Some students in my class are just unbelievable. We are supposed to learn a lot of stuff like python programming, using virtual machines, set up networks etc. But a lot of students almost fully rely on chatgpt to do stuff for them. They don’t learn at all.
When I was a kid, probably 4 or 5 years old, we got our first computer — and my mom took out a butter knife to rearrange the keyboard keys to be alphabetical. I told her that the caps were just plastic, and that what she’s doing would not accomplish her goal. But she didn’t believe me until she rearranged the ENTIRE ALPHABET & hit the “A” key only for a “Q” to pop up.
She told my dad that she needed a photo of a real keyboard to know where the keys should be sent back to. So he had to print out a picture of one at work to bring it back home for us to use as a guide.
We got my grandma a computer so she could get emails with pictures of her grandkids. It had a sleep mode button and have with a cover for the monitor.
She diligently would put it to sleep every night and place the cover over it. Sincerely thinking it needed rest and the lights out.