New Sales Guy: “So, what’s the difference between JPEG and PHP?”
Me: “Are you serious?”
New Sales Guy: “Yeah! I mean, if I’m going to sell this stuff I need to understand it, right?”
Me: “Ok. Could you make some time for me to give you some basic lessons?”
New Sales Guy: “No. I’m pretty busy. Could you just email it to me?”
I sent him a link to Google and wished him luck.
He quit a week later.
When working as a computer consultant in college, a co-worker and I were playing around with the NETSEND command in Windows NT. At one point he accidentally sent a message to all the NTs in the lab that said, “Can you see me?” Shortly thereafter, a girl came to our station looking perturbed.
Girl: “Um, my computer is talking to me. It’s asking if I can see it.”
Co-Worker: “Can you see it?”
Girl: “Yes.”
Co-Worker: “Click OK.”
We laughed for a good fifteen minutes after that.
I worked on my manager’s computer a while back. While waiting for an operation to complete, I was idly spinning the cursor around the screen, as many do. My manager asked why techs often seem to do that.
“Oh,” I said, “sometimes you have to spin the mouse around in a clockwise direction to wind it up. You don’t have to do it very often, but we usually do it while we’re working on other things to save time.”
The manager swallowed the story, and my co-workers and I had a good chuckle about it later.
A few days later, another of our guys was working on the same machine. The manager caught him moving the cursor around while he was waiting on the computer to finish something.
“Why are you spinning the cursor counterclockwise?” the manager asked.
Without missing a beat, he replied, “Every so often, they get wound up too tight, and you have to unwind them.”
When I was doing computer support at a local University, there was a faculty member who, while somewhat cyber-phobic, learned quickly. She was up to speed with Office and Windows 95. Then she ordered a new computer.
She was very concerned about losing files, so I made sure not only to backup her stuff but also to replicate the directory structure, the desktop, everything. To make sure that she would be comfortable with the new system, I even kept her old monitor, keyboard, and mouse on her desk, to prevent any “look and feel” changes from throwing her.
Well, two days later, she calls, in tears, hysterically sobbing. She couldn’t use her new computer. I took a look, and everthing was just as it should be. Windows 95 ran, Office was here in all its glory, her documents and presentations (and their shortcuts) were all in place — everything works.
Me: “So what’s the problem?”
Her: “I can’t use this computer.”
Me: “Why not? It has the same programs, the same operating system, the same documents, everything.”
Her: “Yes, thank you very much. But I can’t use this computer!”
Me: “Well what’s wrong?”
Her: “Nothing’s wrong. I just can’t use it. I don’t know how to use new computers.”
For some reason, since this was a new computer, she forgot everything she had ever learned about all the applications she used to be proficient with. She had to relearn everything. There were no exclaims of recognition, either, like, “Oh, this is Word, just like before!” She had to be taught how to use everything all over again. She even asked that all her documents be printed out so she could retype them.
The irony is that she is a well regarded expert in the field of human memory systems.