Yesterday I told someone to X out of a tab, and then sort of shouted "Not that "x"!!!!" As they closed their whole browser. The back button seems to be a challenge too.

Unfortunately, I do not know how to test for this in job interviews where we are unable to perform a skills test. We are told it is illegal, and that I don't believe, but not actually a hill I am willing to die on, because there are only so many hills and I only have so much social capital!

It is also endemic in my job, because there are so many nurses, and they are horrible with the web. So then they hire staff who are also horrible. And the upside is that they think I am Penelope Garcia levels of tech savvy as I zip around, but also, I want to kill them. They are also afraid to delete anything ever, so they save 42 copies of the same document even though we use Box which has versioning. And everything is a mess

If people cannot do basic web navigation they should not have a job that uses a computer. I will die on this hill.

One of the things I love about freelancing is that I no longer work in an office full of people who have no idea how to use computers and think I'm a damn shaman for knowing how to (I am not lying) open a file. My old boss tried to open every file through Word. Even if they weren't .doc files. She would open Word, then go to the menu bar and select Open, and be utterly baffled when she would try to open, say, a PDF and Word wouldn't let her. No matter how many times I showed her to go double-click on the damn icon in the Finder, the very next time she had a non-.doc file format, she'd try to open it through Word again.

Another co-worker had like 5 GB of music...on the server, not his own hard drive. He got busted for that one, and when he was told it's fine to have music on his computer, but it has to be on his hard drive, he asked, "What do you mean, it's not on my computer? It plays on my computer, doesn't it?"

And my favorite was the co-worker who, every goddamn morning, would start her computer and then sit and stare complacently at a completely dark screen for a good 3 minutes (I did time her once) before it would occur to her to TURN ON THE FUCKING MONITOR.

We have a Word navigator too! She could not figure out how to open a pdf! She also took needed to save some pdf fill in able forms to a shared file for review, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so printed them and then scanned the paper copies! But since the boxes were smaller than the essays in them, the people reading could only read the part that printed out.

You have to pay money to talk to a person instead of coming in to our chat support, and I've had people pay the money just to be told "Yes, you need to click on teh Next button to continue the process." I've learned to have sympathy for people with that level of tech terror, but really, it's been over fifteen years since I started my tech support career, why are people still so baffled? And they can't blame their age, some of them are younger than me, and some of the 70-year-olds are pissed because their UNIX skils aren't appreciated anymore.

Who the hell are these people?? Computers have been a large part of the workplace for several decades now. How do they do that? It would make me crazy.

Jesse, I really hope that means you will soon have great but anonymous stories about College Kids these days!!

My pet peeve that I cannot control my tone over right now is that I work with people who cannot use browser tabs or bookmarks or the address bar. So if we navigate away from what they have set as their homepage (like our Learning Management system) the way they navigate back is to close the browser and reopen it. Like, if they need to have the LMS and another thing open at once, it blows their minds and they use two different browsers.

This is why I have so much trouble doing tech support with my mother. She just closes everything all the time! Need to check email? The only way to do that is by clicking on her gmail shortcut on her desktop. Want to look at a second document? Close Word entirely, then go find the new document!

Jesse, I really hope that means you will soon have great but anonymous stories about College Kids these days!!

Me too, but I bet we just talk about picking classes and I don't get the goods.

I found out not long ago that my mother, who does quite a lot of her work on a computer, didn't know how to drag files around or about any right-click options.

Screen shots confuse me. But that's about it.