9 Things The Non-Tech Savvy Do That Annoy Geeks has generated a lot of comments on Digg. So I thought I’d try posting my own (and then self-Digging this post in a pathetic attempt to get some hits. [nb this shouldn’t work])
Don’t get upset, it’s not your fault. It’s the curse of the specialist. Car mechanics could draw up a similar list and b!tching discussion, and grammar fiends do this all the time – hey perhaps there’s a Christmas gift-book best-seller in here somewhere. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to tell you…
(Three from the original article)
1 Getting aspect ratios wrong. DEAD RIGHT it’s top of my list. What’s the point in your nice widescreen telly if you are watching fat hollyoaks or even thinner movie stars. CAN’T YOU TELL IT LOOKS WRONG?
2 Double-clicking all the time. Seriously. Stop it d00dz.
3 Using Word for everything. You sent me an e-mail with nothing in it but a Word file that has three lines of text in it? Couldn’t that have just been in the e-mail. Oh and a Word document with a picture from the internet in it – handy! wah.
(and six of my own)
4 Fixating on ‘www.’ in URLs – The internets has moved on and left you for dead. (sorry Eli)
5 Naming a specific filetype in place of the generic – So any sound file is an “mp3”, any image is a “jpeg”. (The Hoover/vacuum problem of the IT world)
6 Not TABbing between form fields – especially in frequently used forms, like a login screen. Mouse/click/type/mouse/click/type/mouse/click/ARGH.
7 Confusing upload/download – does my head in. Let’s agree on “move” or something. (Not ‘squirt’, Balmer)
8 Storing everything on the Desktop – how do you find a new file? How do you find an old file for that? DO YOU BEHAVE LIKE THAT AT HOME/leave your room in that state. (er, bit of a case of glass house/stone throwing there. Move on quickly…)
9 Asking for technical help when you just want someone else to a bit of your job for you. OK, this is a specific issue here, maybe you don’t do that. DO YOU?
1 thing geeks do that annoy the non-tech savvy.
1: Think we care what annoys them, and indeed if we were told them the vain belief that we wouldn’t do it more, because we LIKE TO ANNOY GEEKS. It is the acceptible face of prejudice.
10. moaning that yr inbox is full when you haven’t deleted ANYTHING for 9 months. “but i might need it” is NOT AN EXCUSE.
Saw over the shoulder on Friday someone who had 32,000 messages in her inbox. But hey, like G-Mail, you can just search for something right? by scrolling down…
I AM THAT PERSON. (To nobody at all’s surprise).
The only one of these I do is #6. But the only way you’d know I was doing this if you were hovering at my shoulder all day. In which case you deserve every hang up you get, you creepy stalker.
B-sides, I have been bitten so many times by the tab key when using Microsoft applications that I do not trust it any more.
Aspect ratios, yes. Specific-generic filenames, no – surely it’s just a Hoover/Biro for the, er, iGeneration?
Especially in long documents: using the scroll arrows instead of the scroll bar itself or the empty scroll bar area. I feel like I am going to jump out of my skin waiting for that. Many people appear perfectly happy to wait three or four minutes with their cursor clamped onto one of those scroll arrows, a 180-page document scrolling by one line at a time. It gives them time to chat, I guess.
The aspect ratio thing drives me absolutely potty, as does the word-as-entire-os approach to life. I am totally guilty of everything in one folder mail management, but even at my last job, when I had several thousands emails in my inbox, it rarely took me more than a minute or so to find the relevant email when I was searching for one.
Also, the A-level version of using Word for everything: using Excel for everything. Apart from word processing obv. No one is that daft. I hope.
“surely it’s just a Hoover/Biro for the, er, iGeneration?”
that’s what I said too, but NO. sadly not even where it matters, like in graphics/sound related industries, do ppl get the important distinctions between LOSSY (mp3, jpg), NON-LOSSY (flac, lzw) and uncompressed filetypes (aif) straight.
But these are important distinctions to the techy geek only. Lossy stuff still sounds OK to me in most of my applications so why should I care. I don’t mind people calling CD’s albums!
“sadly not even where it matters, like in graphics/sound related industries”
For rick: Excel database
but cds *are* albums and also LPs. it would only be the same if people called them 33 1/3s, which i might start doing now….
also “mp3” for digital sound recording device which DOESN’T EVEN RECORD IN MP3!!!!
B-b-but Records are literally records of recordings… (Although this can be complicated by the fact that most records these days do not come from a physical “recording” of anything).
There is SO a follow up thread to this which I am about to post:
Nine reasons we hate out IT guy/gal.
(my plan worked brilliantly then)
where did ‘record’ come into this?
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Hey, why is the trackback text so broken these days :-( – Admin
One thing I always hear at work is people referring to their whole computer as ‘the hard-disk’. Always confuses and annoys me.
“Fixating on ‘www.’ in URLs – The internets has moved on and left you for dead. (sorry Eli)”
Occaisionly I find a site won’t load without ‘www.’ though, or that it loads a lot faster with the prefix than without it. Why dat?
www as a prefix is like the upside down question mark in spanish. It tells people when you are talking about a web address, that the web address has started.