SO TRUE: The pain of watching non geeks use computers…

I don’t know about you guys, but as an IT geek, this is what constantly happens in my mind while watching “normal” people use computers. Hit the jump for the end of the story.

[Via Reddit]




69 Responses to SO TRUE: The pain of watching non geeks use computers…

  2. {laughing hysterically}

    Ummm, I use a track ball… {slinks off into a corner muttering, "but I HATE mouses…"}

  3. {laughing hysterically}

    Ummm, I use a track ball… {slinks off into a corner muttering, "but I HATE mouses…"}

    • That's exactly what I was about to say.
      Also if you have double clicked an application on you desktop and it doesn't open quickly (probably because every toolbar and spyware on the planet has already crippled your PC) re double clicking 17 times is not going to make it load faster… In fact you'll kill it!

  13. Absolutely exactly what it feels like , every time, sadly :)
    Possibly even worse is people using google/a.n.other search engine to get to sites that they use ALL the time…hello.. bookmarks ? or just type it in!

    • I don't want 300 bookmarks for every site I visit regularly. Some websites have unnecessarily long urls I don't want to type constantly. I can easily get to google with one click. Therefore in certain cases it makes more sense to use google to get to a site.

  15. OH MAN!!!

    Soooo true :/

    I tend to race around in circles, muttering under my breath, as the dedicated non-geek takes two hours to clean his browser cache…..
    ::Shudder::

    However, If I politely elbow the aforementioned non-geek out of the way & sit down to help, the non-geek begins screaming that I'm "MOVING TOO FAST!!!" "I CAN'T SEE WHAT YOU'RE DOING!!" or just, "AHHHHH!!".

    Of course, I've just completed the job in 15.359 seconds…..

  16. OH MY GOSH THIS IS RIGHT!!!

    The professor I primarily worked for in college was very much a non-geek. It was awful. He'd be trying to copy and paste something and I'd be keeping my poker face while internally I writhed and shouted "NO! DON'T GO TO THE TOOL BAR! CTRL+C! CTRL+C! AGH!!! NO NO NO! DON'T BOTHER RIGHT CLICKING! CTRL+V! CTRL+V!"

    We did this usually once or twice a day, minimum. And that was the tip of the iceberg – if it weren't for the fact that I genuinely liked him and didn't want to hurt his feelings, I probably would have just wrestled the computer away so I could do it in a quarter of the time.

  22. This is what I hate. LOL I know someone who constantly right clicks the mouse and selects the new window or new tab option. LOL I have told her a dozen or more times she just has to hit control enter or shift enter…and she still uses the mouse.

  23. LOL I know someone who continually right clicks the mouse and chooses either open in new tab or window from the options. I have told her numerous times that all she has to do is press control enter or shift enter to open in new tab or window and she still right clicks the mouse.

    • Eh, I do that just because I don’t like switching between the keyboard and the mouse when I don’t have to, and it’s really not particularly harder or more time-consuming. Is there some other reason not to do it that I’m just not aware of?

    • Eh, I do that just because I don't like switching between the keyboard and the mouse when I don't have to, and it's really not particularly harder or more time-consuming. Is there some other reason not to do it that I'm just not aware of?

  26. Something I've watched my mother do countless times is close the entire web browser and restarting it whenever she wants to visit a different site from the one she's on. In the back of my mind I'm screaming "The address bar is still there, mom! What are you doing!?!" I can't imagine anyone else on the planet doing that, either.

    • Actually, my mom does this too. She just recently discovered Facebook, and if she's on a friend's page and wants to get back to her own, she closes the browser, opens a new one, goes to google, searches for facebook, clicks the link then finally gets back to her page, when all she had to do was click the back button. She's also one to click the button at the bottom of the scroll bar, but she's bad with a mouse, so she dances around the arrow for a minute before actually clicking it. There are many times where I wish my sister hadn't introduced her to Facebook in the first place. I enjoyed the days of my mom just leaving the computer alone…Now she spends every free second on Facebook, and about 90% of her free time is actually spent bugging me to help her with the same things over and over and over and over…….

  30. At least the cartoon is using Google. My favorite coworker uses Yahoo! to search for YouTube videos. Looking in the one inch of browser space left under 86,549 toolbars while it loads an enormous amount of not-what-she-was-looking-for is like staring into hell.

    Violence is imminent

  31. At least the cartoon is using Google. My favorite coworker uses Yahoo! to search for YouTube videos. Looking in the one inch of browser space left under 86,549 toolbars while it loads an enormous amount of not-what-she-was-looking-for is like staring into hell.

    Violence is imminent

  32. At least the cartoon is using Google. My favorite coworker uses Yahoo! to search for YouTube videos. Looking in the one inch of browser space left under 86,549 toolbars while it loads an enormous amount of not-what-she-was-looking-for is like staring into hell.

    Violence is imminent

  33. Cannot stop laughing!!!!

    One time my husband took apart a perfectly good hard drive … to replace the 'belt'.

  34. Also typing something that's clearly not an url in Firefox will usually do the google search for you.

    • if you use el goog's dns servers. if, for example i had left in comcast's i get redirected to their crappy SERPs

  35. LOL I'm just a normal person, and this makes me insane as well. Typically followed by… Uhh mom, could you get me a pepsi and I'll see if I can find this….

    Also a favorite – when you help over the phone and tell them to click on "File" at the top of the screen, and they say, "Ok, it says New Window,New Tab, Open Location, Close window…" "Uh, click new window" (of course we're on speaker phone so she can't hear me) "Save Page As, Save Frame As, …." UUUUGGGGHHHH

    Finally… "Ok, there's a little menu popping up when I click on that.:" LEFT CLICK, MOM!!!! which one? LEFT… the pointer finger, the pouinter finger… OMG!!!!

  37. I hardly ever use quotation marks and still get what I need, even writing grammatically poor search terms, and even way too wordy searches.

    • Don't geeks hate it when the interface gets so simple and effective any neanderthal can do it and they are reduced to being irritated by double clicks?

      Don't worry we still need you to rescue the data from the drive we cooked.

  40. Oh god. This is so true. When I was in 7th grade I taught my 'Computer-Science' teacher more than she taught the class. Now this year I had to show a different teacher how to copy and paste.

  41. Oh god. This is so true. When I was in 7th grade I taught my ‘Computer-Science’ teacher more than she taught the class. Now this year I had to show a different teacher how to copy and paste.

  42. Oh my gosh…toooooooo true. In one of my college classes, we were always sitting there waiting for the professor to go to a website and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. He really had no idea how to use google. And meanwhile, I'm sitting there, using all my self-control to stay in my chair and saying in my mind what I want to scream at him. "No… not that button. Yes, type it in there…no, not there, you were right before… no, no, no, YES! Ok, scroll down. No, that's an add…." Oh my gosh…

  44. I had a teacher who couldn't get USBs to work (for some reason they wouldn't show up in My Computer). Every time the little window would pop up, I'd be screaming in my head "OPEN FOLDER VIEW FILES!!" but of course he'd always freak out at the window and close it.

  45. My god, yes. It's not that difficult folks. It really isn't. Sort of wonder why they bother using a computer at all. Just use the stone tablet with chisel (I'll even sell ya a set) and be done with it.