/ Cory Doctorow / 9:15 am Thu Feb 25, 2010

Comedy: the people who expect us to fix their computers

This week's Search Engine video podcast: "The Luddite," a brief, comedic monologue about the people who expect us to fix their computers while they patronize us and ignore our explanations.7

JESSE BROWN: The Luddite (Thanks, Jesse!)

Previously:

55

  1. Needs to be more over-the-top for humor. As it is, it’s too accurate a recreation. Just makes me vaguely angry.

    1. Ditto Lyd, it’s still to close to home.

      I can see the humor in it, and where they’re trying to go with it, but there’s an entire class of people who refuse to learn anything about computers and use other people until they get fed up.

      Hmm.. put me down for the vaguely angry part as well.

      ~I

    2. I had the same reaction. About halfway through I realized funny wasn’t going to happen, it just dredged up the dozens of people I know just like this character and made me want to start wearing a RTFM hat.

      2. Sales guy vs Web dude is possibly one of the funniest videos ever. “I can’t go back, there’s no way to go back, you can’t arrange by p***s” hahahaha

  4. Do you have control of any large funds Mr. Luddite, yes? Oh then the problem is enourmous and we need an entire system overhaul and we need it yesterday 250ks worth of new ‘stuff’

  5. I have a friend, not a coworker that has helped me with my computers a few times. Of course I always give him money for the help. At first I had to insist that he take money for his time, then he got more used to accepting money.

    If I didn’t pay him I would feel like I was just using him like a jerk.

    Of course I’m not a luddite but no where near a computer expert so my issues aren’t about such trivial things as how to get email to work again.

  6. 1. You don’t tell a dweeb like this that he minimized his browse, you say you pushed a button that made it little, and it’s right here.

    2. You tell him, “Next time you owe me lunch at [pick very expensive local restaurant].” When he asks for help the next time, you remind him of the cost. When he laughs, say “In fact, lunch first.” This has always worked for me. Sometimes I get lunch, sometimes not.

    1. A fine plan, except then you are stuck having lunch with someone you would rather avoid. That’s just a recipe for indigestion.

      1. Hi, Milovoo,

        Actually, the ones who decide not to buy lunch OR get the help turn out to also be the ones you really want to avoid. The guy in the video would NEVER opt to pay, he’d call someone else. Do it 2 – 3 times and he quits asking you. Since I’m 61 (surprise!) I’m expected to be more sympathetic to the “uneducated” generation, but my attitude is, “if I could learn it, so can you.”

        Just remember to avoid things that, to the uninformed, sound ike jargon or like technical words and phrases, such as “icon,” “minimize,” and “reorder.” You don’t think of these as obfuscating, but the person you’re helping doesn’t understand what they mean. Minimize = little. Icon = little picture. Reorder = rearranged them or sorted them by…[who they came from/etc.]

        1. To be fair though, dumbing it down that far (icon = little picture) can come off as really condescending.

          Especially at the end of the day when it’s preceded with a: * sigh *

  7. I love Search Engine’s videos. They’re always dead on, and this one is pretty accurate on non-tech savvy people. Though i thought this video would be longer and would feature more stuff about computer problems, not just stuff like minimizing a window.

    Either way great vid. Keep them coming (:

  8. I have a similar conversation with my father-in-law on a weekly basis. He’s not quite that patronizing but he is completely unwilling to learn. “Just fix it, will ya?”

    I’ve resorted to installing remote desktop on his computer just to save myself the gas money.

    Fortunately, I work at a company that is almost entirely comprised of developers, business analysts, and support people. Even most of our managers started out as developers, so the level of general technical understanding is high enough that I haven’t heard an ignorant tech support question in years. It’s lovely.

    On the flip side, I used to work at an Apple retailer doing customer training. THAT was mind boggling, but at least most of them were willing to learn.

  9. I would have found this funny, if I had not worked in the tech industry for nearly a decade. People, the PC has more buttons than your car, but you took lessons to drive you car, take a damn course to learn to use your PC!

    Having managed a small tech support department during my time, here are some notes:

    1) People over the age of 45 had to put up with a media and office campaign of “you’re never going to understand this, your kids will be the ones using computers”. So they have that ingrained in their heads. Telling them “you CAN do this”, and using an example of a mom or dad who learned to use the PC can be helpful. DO NOT use the word “simple”.

    2) People who need an explanation for the same task over and over. Explain it once, then send them to a website to learn for themselves for subsequent incidents. When you explain it, let them know you’re only going to explain it in person the one time. “No problem, I’ll show you how to do it this time, and if it comes up again there is a website you can reference.” They’ll pay more attention the first time if they know there is not more help coming.

    3) MAKE SOME EYE CONTACT! People don’t listen when they are confused. Go slowly, if you have to use a step that can be broken down into sub-steps (like, “just open the dropdown menu”) then make sure they are familiar with the components of that step (“are you familiar with drop down menus?”). Be prepared to take a little time, it will save you time later.

    We had people who didn’t know how to right-mouse-click calling in for SQL server support. It’s not just the “luddites” who are going to try your patience! Good luck!

    -RTM

    1. @11 The “lessons for car”-analogy is faulty.

      Almost everyone can learn how to *operate* a car within a hour. It’s far, far easier than say to operate a carriage, unless one has very dociles horses who walk their way home even if you drop their rains or a steam locomotive.

      What people learn in driving lessons is how to interpret all the rules.

      With the current computer, on the other hand, people are forced to do all the stuff the horse handler or locomotive engineer is supposed to do, constantly adjusting buttons, handles, whistles and stuff which are only secondary to the task they want to accomplish – namely getting through traffic alive.

      My bet:

      If the iPad takes off, a vast majority of home users will use such a device within five years, with a conventional computer as a seldomly used base station collecting dust.
      If the iPad fails, it will be in ten years.

  10. I think this would have been relevant 10 years ago, or showing a much older person, or both. As it is, it reminds me of Dave Barry’s humor. That’s not a compliment.

  11. People who are not willing to learn basic computer skills are the new illiterates. The funny thing is that, like on this video, they don’t seem to mind and think it’s funny.

  12. The thing to remember is that most people are actually frightened of computers. They think that they can’t ever understand it (it’s magic) and thus don’t even try.

    No Imagination • #6 has the best solutions so far.

    My Dad lives for email… but he can’t initiate a message, he can only reply. Of course he grew up in a world without indoor plumbing. His Dad had the first automobile in the county, so just doing email is amazing. People have their limits.

    At the same time, tech people don’t make it easy for computer-illiterates either because the knowledge gap is so extreme.

    Anyway, if you’re still feeling vaguely angry, check the IT crowd’s Roy in action:

  13. The best part is “don’t even bother trying to teach me” – I won’t. Get a typewriter. If you can’t learn, you shouldn’t have a job. The day is coming where this won’t fly…. hopefully soon.

  14. We can’t help it! We are but mere mortals! We bow down and accept your greatness. Gotta laugh though, he’s using a Mac…so rarely a crash but when they do you’re f’d. My spouse thinks I know compoooters, I don’t. I say just keep pushin buttons tell some shit works, that’s what I do…just click around, I don’t know. And if that doesn’t work, turn it off and turn it on again, no seriously, turn it off and turn it on again (said to him on the phone as I sat next to my mother who’d had a quad bypass).

    1. I find asking them to turn it off and leave it off for a minute before turning it back on usually works. It gives me a minute to google whatever the problem is and come back with an intelligent answer when it doesn’t work after they turn it back on.

  15. In my old job as an office junior I constantly had to sort out the trivial computer problems of one middle-aged work colleague. His major problem: his emails would go out of order. I would come in, move the cursor to the Date heading, click it once, and say “You’ve clicked one of these buttons that lets you reorder your emails under different headings. You just need to click on the date heading to put it back in date order.”

    The guy NEVER learned. Then I quit and went to university – yay!

  16. I once had one of these interrupt me in the middle of an explanation to say “That sounds more like a Teresa kind of thing to know, not a Me kind of thing.”

    She got upset when I said “Sure, if you want to be stupid about it the rest of your life.”

    I think her underlying model had been that she was executive track, whereas I was a Morlock. She wasn’t in the market for my alternate model of the transaction.

  17. never do their work for them. if the window’s minimized, tell them what to do to maximize it. they’ll never learn if you do it for them.

  18. /agree with lyd. I could only get through the first 45 seconds or so before having to turn it off because it was so true to life it was just making me angry!

  19. First phrase in my head: “douche lord.” I used to be a tech, and it’s guys like that why I’m not a tech anymore. You can only put up with so much crap like that before you either palm a guy’s head and crush his face into the desk, or you quit. I quit, and I’m glad I did. We all have stress to deal with in our jobs, but at least I earn a decent paycheck now. Most techs don’t earn nearly enough for what they have to put up with.

  20. Sigh. Yeah, I don’t find this funny, merely frustrating. I don’t mind helping people with computer issues, but it’s these types that are completely unwilling to pull their finger out and LEARN that I just give up on these days. I just sit there and watch them scroll through a 200 page document now, rather than tell them, AGAIN, about Ctrl-F.

  21. This seems like an endemic among many baby boomers (not all, but many). They often posit a fax humility about not understanding something, whether that be technology, modern science, or politics. But in reality, they are not ashamed; they feel reinforced by their ignorance of a topic, ascribing their ignorance to an adherence to so-called “common sense” and a simplistic olde-time lifestyle. “How do you find time for twitter…” Spot on.

    Some mechanism of society has endowed ignorance with a strange sort of credibility, I think. I’m not sure if this is a recent development or a product of the information age, or perhaps it has always been this way? I can’t say, I’m only 22 years old. I can hardly remember what the world was like when the internet didn’t exist.

    What I will say is this: Ignorance should be embarrassing!

    2. @meatpigeon I very much remember the world before the internet, cell phones, even video recording devices. Even colour TV, though that was a cost issue when was little.

      In my experience, it’s not an issue of any certain age, but depends on the age of the person. It’s kinda like this:

      * All technology introduced before the 15th birthday is indispensable. That people made without is a historic fact, but quite unimaginable.

      * All technology introduced between the 15th and 25th (perhaps 30th) is progress! OMG, how much better is this compared to when I was in junior high.

      * All technolgy introduced afterwards is view to be superfluous at best, if not dangerous, leading to the downfall of mankind and a general loss of good manners.

      A small percentage will stay in the 2nd mindset even in old age. Even if they don’t actually use the new technology for themselves, they will acknowledge its usefulness or at least right to exists.

      Most will follow that progression, though.

      1. Absolutely insightful comment, it’s spot on. I’m amazed at how easy it is to just shut down to innovation as you age.

      2. I generally agree, as that is the track my father was on, only adopting a laptop shortly before he passed away.

        But he never would have got that far if it weren’t for my mom! She was an AOL Ambassador back to at least 1988, and she got me up to speed on computers.

        So there are some very real exceptions.

        She’s still kicking, and is still p!&$ed at AT&T’s contract on her iPhone.

  22. wow…I can understand groaning at this, but so much anger! Seriously, in tech support, you HAVE to find this kind of crap funny or you’re going to go insane or have a stroke.

  23. To quote Bill Bryson, some of my users have “all the comprehension of a Seagull looking at the Space Shuttle”.

    My favorite questions are the ones that suggest that complex systems are simple, like “why didn’t I receive the email from…” to which I used to reply “if you knew what was neccessary for an email message to get from one computer to another, you’d be surprised that it ever worked”. But if I don’t have time to explain the OSI model, I just go with “it’s just not a toaster”.

  24. I’m surprised, no one broke out the old tech support urban legends. I’ll start.

    “I don’t use icons, they’re against my religion.”
    “The cup holder broke.”
    “The foot pedal isn’t working.”

  25. I had one of these, although she was more of the panic attack variety of Luddite. I was doing some completely unrelated business at her house and she ended up paying me $60 an hour to do things like untangle her cords. On multiple occasions.

    I probably shouldn’t have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, but eventually I told her that the ‘I’m just killing time until I’m dead so I don’t want to learn anything new’ shtick was kind of embarrassing for someone who was running a business coaching people to reach their full potential.

  26. ugh, I’m not tech support and I have to deal with a cow-orker like that on a daily basis. Add 30 yrs, 100lbs, a Louisiana twang (that, like Sarah Palin’s, is only adopted when he wants to sound folksy and dumb), and a pointless interminable story about how computers are useless and a big waste of time, and that’s Hal. And it’s definitely not an age thing, it’s all attitude. “Oh I know I could look it up, but that would be wasting my time, I know you know how to do it.”

  27. I wonder how he minimized his browser. He’s using a Mac. On both Safari and Firefox, the Minimize keyboard shortcut is ⌘-M. The Make Font Bigger shortcut is ⌘-= or ⌘-⇧-=. Those aren’t really anywhere near each other.

    Maybe things are different in Chrome.

  29. I laughed, I cried… I experience this nearly every day. That “Luddite” remark was spot-on; a woman at work uses the same excuse.

  30. peterbruells: Yours was the best comment, which is to say, one of the few which didn’t make me want to throttle the commenter. It’s similar to George Carlin’s “everybody who drives slower than you is an idiot. Everybody who drives faster than you is a maniac.” Human nature is what it is, and the fact is that LOTS and LOTS of people who are (apparently, from your point of view) still alive and working never asked that everything suddenly revolve around an arbitrary device which is not invariably the most efficient tool..just the only one currently available. Let me refer you to the various comedy bits about the incredibly obnoxious creeps who lord it over the other proles in the office because they can fix the God damned computer…the real source of the attitudes you children find so abhorrent.

  31. It’s not just computers. When people find out you can fix things, your spare time gets buried under an avalanche of defective DVD players, blown receivers, stuck printers and smoked power supplies. I never used to lock my car until I came out from a family gathering to find 3 strange pieces of electronics in the back seat with a not to fix them “When you get time”. Sure, and you’re going to rotate my tires and change my oil when you have a minute, right?

  32. This is where mainframe based systems have an advantage. The programmer defines a very limited user interface, makes it bullet proof and everyone who uses that app knows exactly what F1, F3, etc. do. No users dicking around with the whole machine.

  33. The “helper’s” first mistake in this video was not just saying “gee, I dunno, call the Help Desk.” If you’re not tech support, don’t DO tech support. Please.

    If the helper had been tech support, the next mistake would have been not asking “what’s the ticket number, please?” No ticket, no work. Seriously. If they don’t have a ticket number, we’re back to “call the Help Desk”—you don’t get ticketless support just because a tech person happened to be walking by. (Note that this also shifts the PITA balance away from the douche learning to do it himself.)

    Assuming there IS a ticket and you’re there to help, the user should drive. Don’t even touch the computer if you can help it. It’s easier to do this with phone support, of course.

    Then…(given in Windows terms because I’ve never supported Mac) “Just click this little box here. See? Now this button up at the top right, first in a group of three? See how it has a tiny little line on it? That will make the window as small as it can be. We call that Minimized. Oops, see, that’s what you did before. Click it again. The boxes on that row are all labeled like the windows, so you know which one’s which. Now see the next button, all filled up with a square? Guess what that does. Right, it makes it as big as it can be. Now it’s filling the whole screen, and there’s a different button there. It shows two overlapping windows, because that’s what it lets you do. That’s called Restore for some reason; you can ask the bozos at MicroSoft why. Don’t click the X button, or your window will really close, and you’ll have to start over.”

    And anyone who says they’re a Luddite gets this response: “Oh, now, don’t say that. If you were a Luddite you wouldn’t WANT me to fix it!”

  34. In defense of genuinely baffled computer users, personal computers are terrible at most of what we use them for. They’re a bundle of compromises that fits no applications well. Plus, most of them have significant functional and physical problems. This technology has been forced into myriad areas of life and business just because it works at all, not because it does the best job. Those of us who live to see the computer age go on for another 40 years will look back and see 2010 machines for the awkward compromise that they are. Much like my GGF, born in 1887 described Model Ts being used for racing, threshing grain, plowing and powering machinery. Computing is an infant technology and nobody should be surprised when it falls down, can’t talk and messes its diapers.

  35. And “just fix it” gets “Oh, I am. There’s nothing wrong with the computer, it’s just that someone explained this to you incorrectly” (gives them a way to save face) “so I’m showing you how to use it.”

    Perhaps you could tell that a) I’ve worked in tech support and b) I’m in the “not exaggerated enough to be funny” camp. It’s astonishing how faux-humble people can be, while at the same time treating the ones who help them with dismissive contempt.

  36. I don’t know where you got the idea that this doesn’t happen every day of the week right now or what age has to do with it.

    One of the major reasons that there are hordes of these guys is that when computers were initially dumped onto the masses at their workplace the operative word was indeed dumped. The computer, which may or may not have had any capacities that improved their productivity, was running some hobbyist OS like Windows and they got zero training on using it. This is why you find people who have been using computers for decades that don’t know about cut-and-paste yet.

    I was working in a very high-end software development group around then and we were pretty much driven to tears when these things were dumped on us: especially when we had useful systems like VMS or UNIX to compare them to. If you complained about something like, say, the Windows invention of opening and running programs attached to your e-mails without your knowledge or consent you were dubbed a luddite and “not a team player”. I hope the computer illiterates who took that line back then are enjoying their computer viruses, spam and bot-nets.

    I can’t imagine how awful it was for people without technical aptitude – no wonder many were traumatised.

    Still, can you imagine if people carried on like this over owning and operating cars? They’d all have irrevocable impressions of what cars could do from watching “Knight Rider” and “SuperCar”. They’d throw fits when you expect them to remember to put gas or water into the vehicles: “What?! Do I look like a chemist to you?”. If you tried to explain that the car wouldn’t go because the battery was dead they’d cut you off because they didn’t want to listen to any of that “car geek” nonsense: “Just make the damn thing go!”. They’d also refuse to read maps -“I don’t do documentation” – and just phone you up for directions every time they wanted to go somewhere.

  37. The comparison to cars is apt, but the parallels are not exact. Automobiles can be operated with a very basic and standardized interface. This is determined by law and carefully regulated. Otherwise it would be impossible, for instance, to have rental car companies. With the exception of the manual transmission, which is largely vanishing outside of enthusiast circles, anyone who can drive one car can manage to drive any car.
    Automobile controls are an interesting example of leftover compromises. The large steering wheel allowed the user leverage to move the wheels against friction and resistance. Power steering now makes this unnecessary but we’ll always have the steering wheel instead of some other more appropriate interface because it’s established. I sincerely hope the computer mouse doesn’t end up the same way. I hate the mouse.

  38. In defense of Luddites.

    A Luddite is not necessarily an individual who is ignorant of technology, much to the contrary, The Luddite movement was a labor movement in 19th century that was mostly focused on the textile industry, at least at first. While there was plenty wrong with the movement on a few levels, basically the idea was to destroy the machines that added to ones oppression and alienation…whether because of the reduction of the need for laborers in the industrial revolution, unreasonable expectations from employers, unsafe work environments etc. A bit reactionary, obviously, but an important precursor to the more organized (and successful) aspects of the labor movements that were to come…

    Today the term is used to mean someone who disavows new technology because it’s new and they are lazy or uninterested in advancements…which is a real shame.

    All hail King Ludd…and did you check to see if it was plugged in?

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