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I have to admit, I still find it amazing quite how many
people have absolutely no comprehension of e-mail and
various other technological advances.
The place I've just started working (still
the same medical insurance company, name rhymes with
"super") is a fairly
young office - I'd reckon the average age is maybe 25
if you're lucky, and yet the retards in the finance
department sit around me have today asked me :
How an email address is constructed. (i.e.
"what would it be, like, name at hotmail dot what?")
How to open an attachment
How to send the email itself (i.e. "What do
I click on to send the email?" - The answer "click
on the button that says 'send'" didn't go down to
well)
And
- the piece de resistance -
"Is this email
about Bill Gates dispensing his fortune true?"
Oh, and being asked umpteen times "What's
that on your monitor?" - the answer, "It's a
screensaver." just results in "Oh, that's cool
- how do I get one of those?" And we're not talking
about rocket-science, or even downloads - we're talking
about one of the screensavers that actually comes with
Windows. But does anyone else in the finance department
know how to get one? No.
I despair. Utterly, totally despair. Maybe
it's just me, maybe I'm some kind of cyber-snob for
being able to do this. Buit the people asking me these
questions aren't the 40-50year olds in the office -
they're doing fine with this technology. It's the 18-22
year olds who seem to have a real problem understanding
things like email. This is the generation that's supposed
to have embraced technology in all it's forms and glories,
yet they can't send email, find sending an SMS (sorry,
that's me being an old fart, I should call them a "text")
to be too time consuming ( ?!? ), and don't even know
about keyboard shortcuts to make their own lives and
jobs easier. I find it amazing, but maybe I shouldn't
- maybe it's me that's the freak for knowing about this
sort of stuff, for knowing how to deal with emails,
open documents, use TAB to go between data fields, be
able to Hit ENTER instead of moving the mouse to the
submit button on the data form, and the thousand and
one other idiot things I get asked. Even using Cut and
Paste to copy across a file number is beyond the talents
of most of them - I won't even bother with how complicated
it all became when I suggested they use CTRL-C to copy
and CTRL-V to paste.
Another wonderful example of your medical
insurance payments at work - here there's a system called
"pinpoint" where you type the name of a person in the
company, and up comes their details, phone extension
etc. - so why the FUCK do people still keep yelling
across the office "Oi, carol (or whoever), what's
your phone extension?" Then again, this lot can't even
remember the extensions of the people next to them,
or the ones they talk to most often, so I guess I'm
expecting too much from people for them to remember
how to use a piece of software on the intranet.
And it's not even just the Finance department.
The IT department (supposedly the specialists) have
taken 2 1/2 weeks (yeah, weeks, not hours, not minutes,
not even days - but fucking WEEKS!) to set up a User
ID. And what was the password when they finally set
it up? Yeah, no prizes for guessing. It was "password".
I really should mention phrases like "network security"
to them, but I think each word on it's own would confuse
them, let alone use of the words as a combined phrase.
Any money that their administrators password (yes, the
system also still runs (OK, strolls) on Windows NT )
is "god". I haven't dared depress myself (yet) by checking.
What really gets to me in the end is that
I'm forever being accused of being contemptuous of people,
of having little to no regard for their intelligence,
for writing people off as thick, and many other crimes
- yet when I try to maintain an open mind, this is the
sort of examples I end up with, and trying to find a
way to be benevolent about them, to not just save time,
write them all off in my own head as fuckwits and just
be done with it.
Of course, maybe I should worry about linking
to the "Super" site
from this page. The logfiles at super will tell the
system administrators who's linked to their website,
and if they're up to much, they might actually look
at the originating page (i.e. Here) to see why it's
linking to super.
Considering everything else they do though, I think
I'll take the risk. If they do check up, rest assured,
I'll add more stuff to the page...
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