These 18 people wouldn't know a mouse from a trackpad and we can't help but laugh a little at their lack of knowledge when it comes to computers.
Copy and paste
“So, a while back at the company I work at there was this senior VP in the legal division as a patent attorney. This guy was one of the best patent lawyers at our company at the time… Really intelligent and a lot of people looked up to him and there were instances where the fate of the company was in his hands (when the company was young and smaller). Now this guy has to deal a lot with patents and contracts, right? Reading them… editing them… approving them… and so on. So with these documents that are typically around 20 pages but sometimes are up to 50 there is a lot of that involved. The editing process, for this guy, however, was slightly different…. You see, he didn’t know how to copy and paste. So what does he do, you ask? He retypes every single contract and patent as it comes through even for just slight edits. Retypes the whole f_cking thing. Twenty pages….with every… single…document he gets…. He does this for 2 years before someone finds out and introduces him to copy and paste. One of my favorite workplace stories.”
Clicking is hard
“I literally had a boss at my job who did not understand the difference between right-click and left-click, or regular clicking and double clicking. Whenever he needed to attach something to an email (which was EVERY DAY), he called me into his office and I would have to walk him through it. ‘Click on New Email.’ ‘Left click?’ ‘Left click.’ ‘Once or twice?’ ‘Once. Okay now click next to the word TO. To the right — to the right of it — okay, now type in–‘ ‘Do I click again?’ ‘No, just type.’ He tried writing down how to do it a dozen times and gave up every time because it was easier to have me coach him. This was my life for TWO YEARS.”
Welp, that defeats the purpose of email…
“A co-worker of mine printed an email, then scanned the printed email, and then emailed the scanned version of the printed email to a new recipient….”
When Grandma just wants to pay for her movie…
“I was buying a DVD for my grandma off Amazon. She doesn’t have the faintest idea what Amazon even is, so I’ve always said that if she lets me know what DVD she wants I’ll buy it from my account for her. Anyway, we get to check out and I let her know how much it is. She gets the money out of her bag, and then she starts measuring the size of the coins next to the USB and charging ports on the side of my laptop. After about 10 seconds of wondering what she was doing, she informs me she’s looking for which hole to post the money into. She legit thought you paid for items online by posting the money into one of the computer ports.”
The updated website
“My dad got mad at me today because Chase updated their website and I told him there was no way to ‘fix it.'”
The next Steve Jobs
“At a shop I help out at, a group of panicked older women (55 plus) recruited me to ‘fix the computer.’ They were panicked about it being broken and missing important work emails from the head office, and they kept saying, ‘please you’re young, fix it!’ I’m tech-savvy but no expert, so I wasn’t sure I could be much help…until I got to the computer and saw the ‘problem.’ The email was sorted from oldest-newest instead of newest-oldest. That was it. I clicked it and they celebrated me like I was Steve Jobs.”
Fmail
“I had to explain to someone that ‘fmail’ didn’t exist. The idea being that if email and gmail exist, there must have been an fmail at some point.”
The inverted mouse
“I used to work at a college. Teachers are not always the most tech-savvy of individuals, but while I was helping one of them once I noticed that she was using the mouse with the ‘tail’ pointed towards her. I was so WTF’d trying to get my head around how this had come about and why it didn’t occur to her to turn it around (the buttons were under her palm and she had to curl her fingers in to press them, let alone the fact that with that arrangement left is right and down is up) that I couldn’t find the words to bring it up.”
Time to panic…
“One of my former students was trying to print out her assignment. She opened up a new doc, clicked on ‘save as,’ found her actual assignment and proceeded to save over it.”
Printing EVERYTHING
“My grandma would print all of her emails and save them in a folder ‘just in case.’ I guess if you’re super paranoid about bank stuff or whatever it makes sense, but she printed literally everything including all those ‘forward if you love Jesus’ messages and silly sh_t like that.”
RIP floppy disk
“When I was in middle school about 12-14 years ago, our computer teacher told us a story of the time when CD’s were still relatively new, and 1.44MB floppies were still widespread. He had a student who knew jack, and his mother had to help him with everything. Once, when doing a project, he had to do some work at home. It was saved on one of these floppies. When he brought it to school for editing or uploading or whatever, he didn’t know how to load it onto the computer. So he tore open the case and placed the magnetic disc into the CD tray, and tried it that way.”
Always trying to blame the games…
“I was just told the registers at my work broke down because ‘a fan was running and the games on the computer gave it a virus.’ No Steph, the preloaded games by Microsoft do not have viruses and the fan doesn’t affect the computer in any way.”
An influx of technology
“I work with medical software. I once asked a doctor to move his mouse to a certain point on the screen and the guy literally moved the mouse to that part of the screen. The doctor didn’t even have a cellphone until 2012 when the hospital bought one for him. He retired a couple weeks later because of the new electronic health records. He felt frazzled by the influx of technology. Felt for the guy.”
The gastrointestinal menu option
“I was showing a customer how to play DVDs on her laptop. I set up VLC and made it so it would automatically run when she loaded one in. As an example, I put in a medical training DVD I had lying around that was left behind by someone else ages ago but I used it for these types of scenarios. The DVD comes on, and it has a list of different sections so I randomly pick on Gastrointestinal and it plays a training video. Woman: ‘Why did you do that?’ Me: ‘Do what?’ Her: ‘Why…why did you pick gastrointestinal?’ Thinking she was somehow offended by the choice, I said, ‘Oh…sorry, it’s just an example to show you how the DVD functionality works on your machine.’ Her: ‘….’ So I pop out the DVD and tell her she’s good to go when she replies, ‘So to play DVDs I have to choose gastrointestinal?'”
The 30-page PDF
“I once asked a client to email me a 30 page doc as a PDF. They sent me each page as its own PDF file in its own separate email.”
That’s one way to forward an email…
“My professor once took a picture of an email with his phone, and then texted me the picture. He didn’t realize you could forward emails….”
The modem
“Back in the early 90s, we were using ProComm to support users remotely. They just had to have a modem, install the software, and give us the number. Anyways, most of our clients were small non-profit outfits, typically staffed by older folks, and one of them was having issues. We tried, and tried to connect, got nothing. Asked them repeatedly, ‘Do you have a modem?’ ‘Is it plugged in/turned on?’ ‘Is it attached to the phone line?’ ‘Is it attached to the computer?’…etc…etc…all ‘yes.’ So eventually we decided we’d have to make the 2 plus hour drive to their location to help them in person. The modem was duct taped to the side of the monitor with nothing connecting it to the computer…except the tape.”
The tech-savvy grandma
“In the 90s–my husband’s grandma thought you were supposed to use the mouse like a stylus to tap the screen. Can’t decide if she was way ahead of her time or way behind….”