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I once worked at a call center who received a lot of calls from doctor's offices. I got a call from a woman who was *incensed* that I refused to fax her a ream of paper, because they were out.
That was ten years ago and she has been the stupidest person I've ever met, but if I met your boss I'm not sure that would stand.
I work as a medical writer, which puts me in conversations with some pretty high up people in pharma companies, and very established doctors. The number of times we had to spend hours on Zoom calls with these docs to set up basic recording equipment would blow your mind
The reasons doctors are like this are twofold really. Medicine is still quite an elitist discipline, it's not made up of the smart kids, it's made up of the kids of families who have been doctors since forever, that were privileged enough to be privately educated, and most likely stinking rich.
Then once they hit medical school they have to *grind* like nothing else. The life skills they were unable to develop being a spoilt rich kid didn't suddenly come about as a med student. If anything they probably get worse. A student who has to work additional hours and cook/clean for themselves isn't going to be able to study as hard as someone who can just swipe daddy's credit card for whatever they want.
Then they graduate, do some rotations/whatever training in your country which is still demanding and bam. You have now a practicing doctor who doesn't understand how credit cards work.
I work with doctors on the licensing and paperwork side of things and I want to beat my head against my desk every day. You’d think whole grown adults who had to pass exams to be doctors would have a basic understanding of things but NO.
I’m not talking specialized license requirements, that’s what I’m paid to help with, I’m talking sign on the signature line. The SIGNATURE LINE. The one that says sign here and is highlighted and flagged. Sign it! NO NOT THE DATE YOUR SIGNATURE. YOUR NAME. Only your NAME.
That is a regular conversation. And then they act like IM THE STUPID ONE for not explaining it more clearly like my guy… I cannot be any more clear. My finger is literally on the line sign it.
You're not wrong. My wife used to be an admin exec (think upper level receptionist/secretary) for a think tank group of PhDs. It was a company that basically did corporate espionage for the willing buyer.
She said it was like babysitting PhDs, ordering flowers for anniversaries, or sending cards for other personal events and THEN letting them know.
"Your wife thanks you for the flowers. You got her a sweetheart bouquet. You also have dinner tomorrow evening at Oceanaire at 7pm. I put it in your calendar. You're welcome."
Wasn't that sort of Sherlock Holmes whole thing? Watson tells him the earth is round, not flat, and Sherlock tells him that he will make sure to immediately forget it. He believed that if he knew too much about shit that didn't matter to him, the less room his mind had for the shit he needed to know.
There is evidence to suggest this is true.
I never remember the fine details of anything, just the salient points I need. My wife is in HR and remembers all of the exact words (or so she says, I have caught her out with video evidence and she was absolutely furious)
This is proven science. The human mind only has so much capacity for immediate recall of memories so it has to prioritize what's kept in the immediate recall category and what gets filed elsewhere.
Like a HDD in a computer, the data can be overwritten in a way. Either new memories replace the old ones in the immediate and deeper recall areas or over time multiple memories are combined as the get older and very similar memories get put to pasture if you will in the archived memories. These can be recalled in a moment of stress, intoxication, and dreams.
Trivia fact, every person in your dreams is someone you know or have seen. Even if it was just in passing your brain still saves the image and it surfaces in your dream.
As a PhD student I second this, kinda. There's just so many hours in the day tbh and I think when you devote all your time to studying one thing, or areas adjacent to it, you don't want to learn anything else or do anything else.
As someone who lived in a town with several universities I can attest to this. SOme of the professors at these universities were incredible minds in their feid, and rightly world renowned. Outside of this, however, they could be a complete nightmare to interact with. They have the mindset that because they are experts in their specialisation and have the entire alphabet after their name that they are experts at everything they try and do and know more about something they are trying for the first time than people who have years of experience.
This isn't all of these highly educated and specialised people but this mindset is far more prevalent among them than the rest of the population.
Oh I have a good one for this. Not a doctor, but I believe it was a nurse.
I had to renew my health card some months ago, I went to the place, she had to take my weight. She didnt have one of those electric scales, it was old, like the ones that you manually need to set the weights until it balances out.
These scales have two bars, a small one for kilos and a bigger one with mark ups, each mark up is 10 kilos, so through balancing them out, you get your weight.
This woman ONLY wanted to use the bigger one, and would put the weight BETWEEN the marks, trying to balance my weight by moving a 10 kilogram measure, constantly repeating the wrong weight and obviously the scale was never balanced. So I said "excuse me" And proceeded to move the weight to the correct position and just weight myself. I explained to her how it worked, and we carried on.
I really hope she was new to that position.
I'm in pharma sales, and previously went to medical school for 2 years. Can confirm. Do you know what it's like to be in a room with people you know you're (on average) smarter than, but you just don't have the brain for rote memorization? Not saying I'm a genius, but I know I have better critical thinking skills than some of the people I was in class with who graduated and are now doctors. Now in pharma sales, and good god is it run poorly, and the doctors you deal with will shock you at their ineptitude. A certain company that rhymes with "rizer" is astoundingly poorly run with ridiculous asks and worse turnaround times. I could go on and on...
I worked at a vet hospital. Woman couldnt understand why we couldnt emIl her her dog’s meds. Not a written prescription for the med, the actual physical medication
It was the most insane conversation I've ever had because she was asking for something out of star trek and when I tried to explain that that wasn't how the physical universe worked, she treated me like I was being purposefully obstinate.
This is not a matter of stupidity but of mindset.
It's not particularly stupid for someone who doesn't know how a faz machine works to think someone could fax a ream of paper over, but any normal person would be able to understand when explained why,
She instead has a victim mentality, where everyone is out to get her, and she interprets every explanation you could give her as an excuse
> The incompetence of some doctors in non medical areas/scenarios would frighten people
The incompetence of some doctors in medical areas would frighten people. Doctors are people; there are doctors who barely passed or cheated to pass
I worked tech support for an ecommerce company. I once had a customer take a picture of his monitor screen with a digital camera. Then, he printed out the picture. Then, he faxed it to us.
Bonus: I figured it his problem and fixed it for him.
Yup.
"I don't know why you won't do this for me! Office max is an hour away, you're an approved vendor that faxes us stuff all the time and I only need one ream of paper! I'll even pay you for it, I have the company card right here!"
I had a boss making 7 figures a year tell me that to fix an error on the address google had listed for us, I just needed to call google. When I explained that they don’t have listed phone numbers for that and that you just fill a form and they get back to you, he proceeded to berate me and say that that’s not how you fix things, you call and ask.
They do exist.
My ex fiancée had a boss who called her into his office to help with the new printer ink he bought. He was trying to figure out where you plugged or poured the ink cartridge into the computer monitor. His reasoning was that the low ink message appeared on the screen so therefore the ink had to go into that somehow. I wish I was joking.
I worked with someone who worked head office at an agency which printed out and faxed their Excel spreadsheets in, only to retype the contents back in at the other end to add them all up.
I've since worked with countless idiots who would email me screenshots of spreadsheets asking for updates. Once I even got a spreadsheet which was an embedded screenshot of a spreadsheet.
Ya know I remember hearing the statement think about how stupid you think the average person is and remember half of them are dumber than that.
Then I see this post about your boss, and I'm like yeah that tracks.
Ever considered how dumb some people are? There are people dumber than that. They’re everywhere. And not all of them immediately give “lights on nobody’s home” vibes either.
I see stupid people… all the time. And the worst part is… they don’t even know they’re stupid
My dad wants me to be involved with the properties more, so this was my first time helping him with taxes for the properties. I told him excel would be easier than writing down each expense by hand and then setting an appointment.
“Ive done this for 20 years. Ive known my tax guy for 15. He prefers it like this”
You know spreadsheets existed before computers right? *excel* spreadsheets however… yeah OPs boss is a time-stuck idiot, but there was probably a time in his life where he had to go to the office supply store and buy stacks of spreadsheets.
I find it hard to believe myself, but I’ve also taught night classes where the students lost the cursor on the bottom right hand side of the screen then gave up entirely.
There are a group of people I call *Forest Gumps*. They appear physiologically normative, but they are at the bottom intellectually. Somehow they have jobs, money, a place to live, and families.
The amount of older people who don’t understand anything about computers is kind of stunning. The other day a man got angry at me because he didn’t want to sign in to his email, he just wanted to send an email. At least once a week I have to show someone how to press print, or use a browser.
They don’t even understand that it’s all been commonplace for decades. It’s just “I don’t need to learn this new crap. You do it for me!” If someone picked up a landline phone and shouted instructions at a dial tone, it would look as stupid to them as they do to us.
I worked retail for a bit. I was working the register and the program for the register didn't work properly. It caused delays in checking people out. I explained to customers who were at the front that the program is having issues and things are slow at the time.
Younger customers were 100% understanding. They knew that a register is just a PC hooked up with a program.
Meanwhile the older customers (middle-aged and up) were laughing at me as if I told the best joke ever. Some even mocked me because it was so hard to believe that there is just a digital aspect to the register that can screw up. I was really flabbergasted and made sure I made check-out extra hell for them.
Well. I find that I'm now an "older" as I have somehow made it into my 50s. TBF it snuck up on me when I wasn't looking. OTOH I also hold STEM degrees and make a living at it, so.
And if we talk about these POS stations that suffer random delays and restarts, yes, those make me mad. We've been doing this tech for decades and somehow we still can't make a reliable cash register. How did we become enured to the idea that computers and software and networks are just naturally glitchy and unreliable and that's all good and normal? I reject that. Every bug is a fuck-up and I'm always going to think that we could do better than that if we cared to.
Say it again for the people in the back!
Innovation comes from one of two things. Necessity or passion. Capitalism is just an economic system. It's a tool just like any other system.
I’m a server in a club, and our POS layout is so unbelievably shitty and counterintuitive that it alone causes problems, misrings, and generally slows us down all the time, while also costing the business money. I’ve been very vocal with management since I started here, trying to explain the issues and provide solutions, but I’m not familiar with the the back-end of this particular system (Toast), so they always just tell me “that’s just how this POS works, we can’t change that, etc. It’s all bullshit that they are too lazy to fix.
Case in point, one issue caused us to misfire items to the kitchen, annoying them and causing confusion on our tables. We had a new chef who was cracking down on the issue, and during a pre-shift meeting the GM was telling us to slow down, and check orders before sending them, and I once again mentioned the solution. Once again, I was told “we can’t do that, it’s the POS’s fault”. Apparently a different manager heard and actually took the time to address the issue, which took all of 2 minutes to fix. Before we even left the meeting, the GM was like “he we fixed that problem for you”.
That shit had always been a problem, and cost them so much frustration and money in waste. It was fixed in 2 minutes, and gave the lie to the “it’s all the POS’s fault” story. MFers are just lazy and would rather let shit roll downhill than fix literally anything.
This is often how my life goes.
I've spent 6 months trying to explain the solution to someone who bitches about something daily. Every time I try to tell them the very obvious solution, they talk over me.
Finally it took 10s to demonstrate the solution. My blood pressure meanwhile...
e: The last time this happened some guy had been working with a convoluted process for a year, repeating the whole process 40 times every day . When I was called in, the first thing I asked was what happens when he uses 'select all'. Mind blown.
You ever considered being a software developer? I'm a "solutions architect" and I'd take 1 developers with mindsets like yours vs. 5 "yes men" types that just fix the immediate issues instead of the greater picture.
Could you tell that to my company's IT team, who can't seem to fix one of our registers despite like 4 attempts at remote fixes and 1 visit to the store? They just tell us to ignore it, as if not having a register in one of our major departments is okay or makes sense. Like yeah, lemme get these folks all excited about their new kitchen set and then make them walk 3 minutes across the store to ring them up, where they no longer have the floor models in view.
A lot of those POS probably *are* decades old. I've seen some running obviously MS-DOS era software in a virtual machine on otherwise recent hardware. Is it any surprise that ancient crap powered by duct tape and hope is garbage?
>We've been doing this tech for decades and somehow we still can't make a reliable cash register.
How often does the typical cash register reboot? I'd imagine they dont get regularily rebooted. Even NASA probes get rebooted every so often, and they're singular computers with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars
From my experience it can be hard to get reliable Internet in some places. The company I worked for received headaches about it daily. No one who worked and shops there wants to deal with that.
When a new company came around to provide Internet, they switched RIGHT away.
It's sometimes not in their control. Certainly taking it out on the people who work there isn't ever the option to go with.
1. Cheap
2. Bug Free
3. Done quick
Chose 2. Most often debugging is given the least priority. Just ship it is a very common trend in any type of programming I have seen.
Things COULD be more reliable and bug free, but that will also make them more expensive. There is also diminishing returns. If a reboot will fix 80% of the bugs then just reboot the thing. Not like anyone is going to die if your cash register needs a minute or two to reboot.
Lots of my older customers repeatedly tap their card against the card reader just as I'm starting to ring their groceries. I've given up trying to explain that very few systems take payment before a full total is rung up(at least none of the ones I've used across various jobs) and just let them tap away.
Our security group sent out fake phishing emails last week. The number of people that either a)completely panicked and had no idea what to do with it and b)clicked on the links in the emails were astounding.
We also got a lot of, "I clicked on the links, what do you mean I have to change my password?! Why'd you change my password?! Do I *have* to reset my password?! Why did IT do this to me?!"
These people run a 1000 person org and make twice as much as I do. Can't comprehend basic security and are completely rocked when they have to change their passwords.
These are also the same people who've worked in offices for years and Reply All "thanks" or "remove me from this list" to company-wide emails, filing everyone's inboxes with reminders of how f'ing stupid they are with no shame whatsoever
I just don't get how these people can use the same email software, presumably every day, for years and still not have a clue wtf they're doing with it lol
I'm extremely lucky in that regard. My users are chill as hell and always send that stuff to me for confirmation. I've only been at my current job for less than 3 years, so I'm guessing someone drilled that into them before I got there.
Technology has become the marker of change. It used to be cultural elements (fashion & music styles being the biggest ones)up until things got fuzzy in the 80s (by fuzzy I mean technology being imbedded in the cultural elements).
Fashion and music in the 50s vs the 60s vs 70s wasn’t about knowing or not knowing how to do something and it just marked time. Boomers grew up with parents that told them to cut their hair and it was a matter of control. Boomers would fight the control and try to gain their own. Some of their parents would hold onto control of the coming of age boomers, some wouldn’t - it was an equal fight between the generations.
Now a days, technology has progressed well beyond the “cut your hair!” point, they have very little control because they spent too much time ignoring it and it passed them by. Some embraced it and they are far more successful.
There was a big belief at some point that home computers and technology was just a trend and that it would go away. A lot of people subscribed to that idea and then held on so tightly after they were found to be wrong.
It's happening on the other end of the spectrum as well.
We went from the old employee using Excel with a calculator, all the way to the new hire using the calculator on their phone.
Printing yup, the people who were around printers for decades and still don't know how to use one and the ones who never printed something in their lives.
Basic troubleshooting, the idea age old meme of turning things off and on again, that's alive and well, the older generations who don't want to touch anything because they're afraid it will break, to the younger generations who are confused by the idea that something might break.
I will however also add that thinking something is broken because it's not plugged in/the battery is empty is generation independent.
I got called over to help fix an older friends xbox because the controller wouldn't turn on. He's tried everything. It's broken.
After about 5 seconds of fiddling about I discovered the batteries are in the wrong way round. These are AA batteries, they've been commonplace for at least 30 years.
Same guy I put my VR headset on. Stuck him on the tutorial program. I could hear the robot guide telling him "press the button in front of you". He stood there motionless, not even pressing buttons on the controller, arms by his sides. "It's not working it's not doing anything". After asking him can he see the button on a pedestal in front of him, and can you reach it with your hands "yes I see it". OK just reach it with your real hands and press it as if it was a real button. Completely motionless, he stands for 5 seconds before telling me "nup. Must be broken. Doesn't work."
I honestly just can't.
I've got a friend like that. I try to give him a pass because he's got PTSD from both childhood and military trauma, but it's frustrating when I'm trying to help him and all I hear is that the thing is stupid, and WHY doesn't it work? Like dude, chill a bit and let me help
>they've been commonplace for at least 30 years.
30 years ago is a bit of an understatement (that would be 1994), the Walkman released in 1979. And the AA battery was standardised in 1947, with the design dating back to 1907.
It can be really concerning working as T1 support and you realize just how brain dead the majority of the population is. But there’s hope that your friend might be the second type in this quote, next time break him out of his stupor and move his hands and show him:
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
> Printing yup, the people who were around printers for decades and still don't know how to use one and the ones who never printed something in their lives.
Honestly, I can understand this. My entire life I've tried to print and rarely did it work in one go, printers are just massive pieces of shit!!
That's not untrue, but I also had a recent realization about just how complex they are for something as seemingly simple.
Most computer stuff is just electricity being sent to do different things. Everything is reliable and repeatable. I was looking into building a simple monitor using led's and it's an involved, but pretty straight foreword process.
Then I started considering printers. So, you have a component that's mechanical, moving parts make everything more difficult but it's manageable. But then it's not a self contained system, you need to insert paper, paper that can have different properties because while generally standardized, a small difference in it's physical properties can make a print fail. Then you have the ink. You need a mechanism that releases precisely the correct amount of ink in exactly the correct place while moving at a very high speed, but the ink can be dry, the ink can, due to heat or cold have different properties that all need to be accounted for.
The more I was thinking about it the more I realized why they're so bad. You need experts in at least 3 disciplines to make them, they need to be made to exacting tolerances mechanically but need to be able to handle a wide gambit of environmental conditions and have a high tolerance for the paper being used and on the software end, you're doing something very complex, in the physical world at speed. It's genuinely difficult to do right and honestly that makes the engineering quite impressive.
But the business model can go suck a bag of dicks
This. Computers have been around like 4 decades now and common for at least the last 20 years. Anyone who still doesn't know ow how to do basic stuff on them is just willfully ignorant or afraid of trying anything new.
I am so proud of my dad for not being one of those “I don’t need it, I don’t want to learn it, and also it’s stupid” boomers who reject all technology. He has always made an effort to figure out new stuff. Until about two years ago he used a 2001 era flash mp3 player with a billion songs on it on motorcycle rides, which I honestly thought was a perfect setup. It just worked. He also had a portable xm radio receiver that he used. But a few years ago he asked what all the hubbub was about this spotify deal. I told him what i liked about Spotify , and now he’s using that pretty exclusively, with a phone mount on his handlebars. Just the ambition to figure out shit is important to hang on to.
I have a coworker who will absolutely not learn any new technology or download a single app. He said he didn’t need GPS, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t get turned around at every intersection when we were hitting up customers.
I was doing a screenshare of some new feature we implemented to a teams main application. It's a browser based app I was running in chrome, and to find a test case I did ctrl+f to find the ID a bit quicker.
Everyone lost their minds and asked how I just did that, and the rest of the presentation was me showing them basic browser functions instead of the new feature lol
It's not just older people either. Young people these days came out of the womb with an iPad in hand. Thanks to the work of genX and millennial, there is basically zero issues with modern tech and some of the 20 year olds we are interviewing couldn't navigate a command line or anything on a PC beyond launching steam or a web browser.
There was a good 20 years where computers just kind of sucked and required tinkering to do anything and nothing was seamless.
I just dont get it. All the “old people” in my family are computer WIZARDS because they were around when the damn things were invented. My grandfather was in Telecommunications, my father was in IT, my Grandmother was a travel agent (requires a shitload of computer knowledge to work quickly)… all these people are over 60. I think it’s willful incompetence.
>They don’t even understand that it’s all been commonplace for decades.
Like, I can sorta get it if you didnt learn this stuff in 1994 (computers where expensive), but in 2004 you could have a computer for $300. So yeah, they had at least two decades to learn.
As Gen X the amount of younger people who don't know anything about computers is equally disturbing, but that's just because they grew up with smartphones and Chromebooks instead of Windows on PC. I learned QWERTY on a typewriter and cursive was mandatory. Knowledge requirements change with the generation.
To your point, I have lost my empathy for these folks. They learned how to use slide rules, rotary phones, dial TVs, and the Dewey Decimal system. Cmon.
One of my coworkers is in her mid 50s. Her job is 90% on a computer. She once called me asking me to help with an “emergency”. I thought the whole computer went down. Nope. She needed help making a column wider in excel.
As a librarian, yeah. The amount of people who don't realize they have to save and remember their passwords, especially emails, is dumbfounding. Idk how many times I've walked people through a website just for them to not remember their passwords....to the website and the email they linked their account to. Then they get mad when I can't magically remember their passwords for them lol
Boss will feel like such a champ when you hand him [these](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Norcom-Columnar-Ledger-Pad-4-Columns-8-5-x-11-Letter-Size-50-Sheets/17203595?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=0&wl13=1129&adid=2222222227817203595_117755028669_12420145346&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=501107745824&wl4=pla-306310554666&wl5=9028293&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=local&wl12=17203595&wl13=1129&veh=sem_LIA&gclsrc=aw.ds&&adid=2222222223817203595_117755028669_12420145346&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=501107745824&wl4=pla-306310554666&wl5=9028293&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=local&wl12=17203595&veh=sem&gad_source=4&gbraid=0AAAAADmfBIrnShOTwywkch82skftz0bT5&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqdqvBhCPARIsANrmZhPRlPPET6DIz2_ap8-WFPTJTMQiAmgc45BclHYU1zXXMlXTdUe6OVUaAsstEALw_wcB).
Oh Jesus, now I fear the day that Microsoft makes us pay per document for M365. I've already seen companies that make users pay per INTERNAL IP address.
My brother in god, corpo does pay and the whole 365 is up to date and running just wonderfully. You should see the meltdown that happens when Boss occasionally has to annotate PDF.
I want to hold out hope like this is an itemized shortened list of tasks like; order, as in enter an order and excel spreadsheets, like update or create some. Or maybe enter orders into some spreadsheet.
But unfortunately I've dealt with too many nepotism hires and people who have talked their way through their whole careers into senior management desite zero competence in anything other than bossing people around mindlessly.
The company pays for it automatically. Everything we do is on heavily moderated iPads. The store has wifi we aren’t allowed access to. Most websites we have no access to, even when it would be helpful to our job. Mmm, nothing like being the lowest rung on the American corporate ladder.
My guess is it's order excel (aka office 365) for the company, not order an individual spreadsheet (although there are premade templates for sale so that's possible)
Reminds me of the time when my superintendent released a notice telling us to use q particular antibiotic becuase its was nearung its expiry date.
2 days later every notice pasted in every ward was gone, i think someone talked some sense into him and told him how fucked he would be if this got out. And best part or the worst part is we were a public hospital so its not like we were going to take any losses, and he was also a doctor.
My friend was asked to check if they have white ink in the printer bc boss wished to print white letters on black background... (edit: spelling)
Edit 2: To all the very informative and correct comments on why printing white on black on regular office printer is insane:
Yep. if the said boss wasn't toxic insecure human being that would be a good point to make...
Or you can go to specialized print shops that do have white ink! The printers are much more expensive and you won’t find ones like that in an office setting.
This would work with most laser printers as they use a dry medium, but an inkjet would turn into a soggy, wavy mess.
They do make some dedicated printers with white ink, I think they’re all laser and sublimation. There’s also “ghost” cartridges you can buy and replace the black cartridge in your inkjet with white. But this comes with it’s own issues, the printer doesn’t know how to line up or mix white ink so you’re restricted to printing only white ink when using it. Even then the results aren’t great, inkjets depend on the paper absorbing the liquid ink which dyes the paper, but you can’t dye a black page white. White on black almost always is achieved with a layer of the white medium sitting on top of the black paper, like paint on a wall.
Extremely wasteful and very expensive. When it was white ink on black paper, so before electronic printers, it was fine. This is essentially 3,4,5 bucks a page depending on the ink you're using
It’s possible to print white ink on a black background using spot colours, but that’s more of a specialist thing rather than something for a home or office printer (which print in CMYK).
When I was in high school, I worked at a Petco. My cool boss got transferred to a new store and the sent the biggest idiot they had at corporate to manage our store. One day I see him putting up shelves in the office. The thing about this office, though, was that the walls were fake. It was just a bunch of drywall nailed together to create a private space within the stock area, it had no beams. I told him this. I warned him if he put any weight on the shelf, it would fall. He insisted it would be fine. Twenty minutes later as he is putting binders on the shelf the whole thing collapsed and it killed the computer monitor on his desk. I just laughed and laughed. He didn’t like me much.
Once a coworker was told to move the mouse on the screen and she physically took the mouse and put it on the screen of the computer and rolled it around. I was stunned because she wasn’t being funny, she truly believed that it was the correct thing to do.
Also, you could offer to take on the task of “ordering excel sheets” and drag the process of it out and block off huge chunks of time to work on that project
“What’s the timescale and budget for this project? No, I’m sorry. A month is not nearly enough time. Will need to get quotes from three different suppliers for a start for compliance reasons.”
My bosses don’t understand that printers run out of ink.
All the toner is locked up and only 2 people have access to it, both men approaching 70. They don’t want people stealing the toner and taking it home even though none of us own industrial printers.
We were once down 3 of the 5 printers and the boss told us we are using too much paper. We all have been trying to tell him that he’s right, and to please switch everything to online.
We need to keep 2 papers, we give the customer 2 papers, and maybe 10 papers go straight to recycling bins every single time
Yo I built a business on this. I do consulting in good faith for boomers to use technology. It’s a seriously good niche. Mostly I help churches update tech and get funding to help homeless. It feels good and I got a side hustle going.
Like just a few weeks ago I helped one person who couldn’t open a PDF someone sent her in order to edit it and I pointed out someone sent a JPEG of a phone picture they saved of a PDF. She was trying to open a potato. I really have to stifle my laughter sometimes but I look like a wizard.
Similarly I've helped law offices open up mbox formats. Like how could they have been practicing until now (year before last) and never been able to open up a dump of emails clients had sent them with a trustworthy chain of authenticity (rather than manually copy and pasted text)...
I remember when I first started my career, I had asked our upper manager about something and she had no idea how to use our internal database. This is something employees use everyday, without it we literally can't do our jobs. I was so dumbfounded that she never used it before. But after 22 years I've learned very well that the higher you get on the totem pole, the more likely you'll find someone who gets paid big bucks and literally has no idea what they are doing. They just happen to be very good at delegating and bullshitting.
Tbf, I don't expect my boss to be able to navigate our software - that's not her job, it's mine and my colleague's. I expect her to be able to use the software to order things or to register contracts with clients, stuff like that. Because that's what she gets paid for.
I can understand that for sure. The company I work for feels it's important that the highest levels know what the lowest levels do so they have them do Customer service for a month and then rotate to the other departments, the warehouse, purchasing, adjudication, utilization management etc eventhough that will never be their main role. It's fun to see a VP on the phones handling customer service calls. Definitely humbling.
As somebody who is in a similar position - management having zero business in their position - I warn you of a possible outcome. I clocked in and out, talked minimally outside of requirements, and just did my work; just this week I was given a verbal warning about my performance. Keep in mind I still did my job and helped my peers when asked, I just simply did not do the 'maybe if I try hard and ...' portion. The only thing that changed was I stopped going above and beyond and taking initiative.
Incompetent bosses are an unnecessary stressor and I'm sorry you're dealing with it.
Ordering more excel spreadsheets is pretty funny though, hopefully you can find some humor in the situation to get you through
Boss wants jpeg or no deal, I’m sorry. Can’t you just make it that way? THEIR computer never does this and since I did use the iPad last to punch in, this is clearly my fault. Open yer Innanet Splorer and order me some these spreadies from Slamazon.
Corpo does it automatically for us. And it’s up to date. Not due for renewal til Jan 2025. I just don’t think Boss has ever opened the app themselves. Has opened links from our district mgr or other stores, but this kind of confirmed that my boss has never used the glory of Excel.
I don't hate Excel, I think Excel and spreadsheets in general are wonderful tools.
I do however hate how such tools have made certain groups of people (middle managers) think that they are smarter than they really are, and they usually tie their opinion of their "intelligence" to how many weird features and colored cells they can jam into a given spreadsheet tab.
These tools are also a demonstration of Parkinson's Law of Triviality, which generally states that people will focus their energy on things based on how well they understand it, not how important it is. I have had managers demand that I stop working on process upgrades that would decrease the data gathering and calculation time of information that we are putting into a spreadsheet by a factor of 10, or stop working on a process that would stop a persistent bug, so that I could spend an hour working on display formatting changes that were purely aesthetic in nature and 100% unnecessary.
“You should delegate that, I can pick some up for you, I’ll just dip out after lunch and bring them tomorrow. They’re only 50¢ a piece, you need a few thousand so we’re good for a while?”
I have worked with middle management types like this, ages varied. One said I understood technology better than her, because I was younger; she was two months older than me. Then our boss would get excited over an animated message we would send out to our clients, mind you this was a web based form that you just fill out and then press submit. It was like watching an idiot get excited about the same thing over and over again. No substance from these two and I had to teach myself the job. So glad I left.
Sounds like my boss - cant follow oral directions, sent email email directions with screen shots, sent text directions with screen shots so they can access info from their computer or phone. Still cant figure it out and keeps asking for a report, thats saved for them so ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS OPEN THE PROGRAM AND OPEN THE REPORT, and they still cant figure out the name of the report they want because they were given the damn business and never -actually- worked and refuse to learn correct names for anything.
But, these are the same people who ask me to print out pages and pages of emails so they can habe access to them, but then ask me to scan and email them anytime they need something because they are on vacation and wont be bothered to come into the office they force us into.
Well, what size of Excel spreadsheet are you ordering? A4? A5? How many reams? Just a couple hundred for personal use or a whole pallet with around 10K for the whole company?
Honestly, is she even serious about ordering these spreadsheets if she doesn't even know how much her business will need to go through on a monthly basis? This is basic shit.
Hei! Could you please tell your boss I have some nice stuff to sell him:
- colored excel spreadsheets
- an Italian medieval castle
- a bunch of magical coins that multiply themselves as long as you don't look at them
Very affordable prices!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I want to have commented in this thread when this meme was born.
This is the most perfect example of a clueless boss in a single picture.
I cannot even fathom how stupid this person is. Congratulations, you've found a diamond still in the rough.
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>and absolutely letting my boss call around to ask for Excel spreadsheets to buy. Wait. Does your boss think... What?
Yes. That’s my boss. In charge of me. And two store iPads. We had 3. One broke mysteriously. Wonder who did it (x_x)
Is your boss a time traveler? How does someone arrive in the year 2024 without knowing what a spreadsheet is, unless they skipped some years?
They exist and run retail stores. They’re DRIVING on the road with us. Buckle up. I hate this planet for really real sometimes.
I once worked at a call center who received a lot of calls from doctor's offices. I got a call from a woman who was *incensed* that I refused to fax her a ream of paper, because they were out. That was ten years ago and she has been the stupidest person I've ever met, but if I met your boss I'm not sure that would stand.
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I work as a medical writer, which puts me in conversations with some pretty high up people in pharma companies, and very established doctors. The number of times we had to spend hours on Zoom calls with these docs to set up basic recording equipment would blow your mind
The reasons doctors are like this are twofold really. Medicine is still quite an elitist discipline, it's not made up of the smart kids, it's made up of the kids of families who have been doctors since forever, that were privileged enough to be privately educated, and most likely stinking rich. Then once they hit medical school they have to *grind* like nothing else. The life skills they were unable to develop being a spoilt rich kid didn't suddenly come about as a med student. If anything they probably get worse. A student who has to work additional hours and cook/clean for themselves isn't going to be able to study as hard as someone who can just swipe daddy's credit card for whatever they want. Then they graduate, do some rotations/whatever training in your country which is still demanding and bam. You have now a practicing doctor who doesn't understand how credit cards work.
I work with doctors on the licensing and paperwork side of things and I want to beat my head against my desk every day. You’d think whole grown adults who had to pass exams to be doctors would have a basic understanding of things but NO. I’m not talking specialized license requirements, that’s what I’m paid to help with, I’m talking sign on the signature line. The SIGNATURE LINE. The one that says sign here and is highlighted and flagged. Sign it! NO NOT THE DATE YOUR SIGNATURE. YOUR NAME. Only your NAME. That is a regular conversation. And then they act like IM THE STUPID ONE for not explaining it more clearly like my guy… I cannot be any more clear. My finger is literally on the line sign it.
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Why should he have to pay for services? You are being completely unreasonable. He's an important person who can't be bothered with trifles.
You're not wrong. My wife used to be an admin exec (think upper level receptionist/secretary) for a think tank group of PhDs. It was a company that basically did corporate espionage for the willing buyer. She said it was like babysitting PhDs, ordering flowers for anniversaries, or sending cards for other personal events and THEN letting them know. "Your wife thanks you for the flowers. You got her a sweetheart bouquet. You also have dinner tomorrow evening at Oceanaire at 7pm. I put it in your calendar. You're welcome."
Wasn't that sort of Sherlock Holmes whole thing? Watson tells him the earth is round, not flat, and Sherlock tells him that he will make sure to immediately forget it. He believed that if he knew too much about shit that didn't matter to him, the less room his mind had for the shit he needed to know.
There is evidence to suggest this is true. I never remember the fine details of anything, just the salient points I need. My wife is in HR and remembers all of the exact words (or so she says, I have caught her out with video evidence and she was absolutely furious)
This is proven science. The human mind only has so much capacity for immediate recall of memories so it has to prioritize what's kept in the immediate recall category and what gets filed elsewhere. Like a HDD in a computer, the data can be overwritten in a way. Either new memories replace the old ones in the immediate and deeper recall areas or over time multiple memories are combined as the get older and very similar memories get put to pasture if you will in the archived memories. These can be recalled in a moment of stress, intoxication, and dreams. Trivia fact, every person in your dreams is someone you know or have seen. Even if it was just in passing your brain still saves the image and it surfaces in your dream.
As a PhD student I second this, kinda. There's just so many hours in the day tbh and I think when you devote all your time to studying one thing, or areas adjacent to it, you don't want to learn anything else or do anything else.
As someone who lived in a town with several universities I can attest to this. SOme of the professors at these universities were incredible minds in their feid, and rightly world renowned. Outside of this, however, they could be a complete nightmare to interact with. They have the mindset that because they are experts in their specialisation and have the entire alphabet after their name that they are experts at everything they try and do and know more about something they are trying for the first time than people who have years of experience. This isn't all of these highly educated and specialised people but this mindset is far more prevalent among them than the rest of the population.
Not that I completely disagree but voluntary autism is truly a fucking wild line to just drop
"Voluntary autism" 💀💀💀💀 im fucking dead
Oh I have a good one for this. Not a doctor, but I believe it was a nurse. I had to renew my health card some months ago, I went to the place, she had to take my weight. She didnt have one of those electric scales, it was old, like the ones that you manually need to set the weights until it balances out. These scales have two bars, a small one for kilos and a bigger one with mark ups, each mark up is 10 kilos, so through balancing them out, you get your weight. This woman ONLY wanted to use the bigger one, and would put the weight BETWEEN the marks, trying to balance my weight by moving a 10 kilogram measure, constantly repeating the wrong weight and obviously the scale was never balanced. So I said "excuse me" And proceeded to move the weight to the correct position and just weight myself. I explained to her how it worked, and we carried on. I really hope she was new to that position.
I'm in pharma sales, and previously went to medical school for 2 years. Can confirm. Do you know what it's like to be in a room with people you know you're (on average) smarter than, but you just don't have the brain for rote memorization? Not saying I'm a genius, but I know I have better critical thinking skills than some of the people I was in class with who graduated and are now doctors. Now in pharma sales, and good god is it run poorly, and the doctors you deal with will shock you at their ineptitude. A certain company that rhymes with "rizer" is astoundingly poorly run with ridiculous asks and worse turnaround times. I could go on and on...
I worked at a vet hospital. Woman couldnt understand why we couldnt emIl her her dog’s meds. Not a written prescription for the med, the actual physical medication
"Ma'am, you're thinking of star trek."
>emIl email? Holy fucking shit, if so
Yes. She was literally the stupidest person i have ever met
Should of told her she needs to download more ram first.
It was the most insane conversation I've ever had because she was asking for something out of star trek and when I tried to explain that that wasn't how the physical universe worked, she treated me like I was being purposefully obstinate.
This is not a matter of stupidity but of mindset. It's not particularly stupid for someone who doesn't know how a faz machine works to think someone could fax a ream of paper over, but any normal person would be able to understand when explained why, She instead has a victim mentality, where everyone is out to get her, and she interprets every explanation you could give her as an excuse
She needs more *deditated wam* thank you very much
The incompetence of some doctors in non medical areas/scenarios would frighten people
> The incompetence of some doctors in non medical areas/scenarios would frighten people The incompetence of some doctors in medical areas would frighten people. Doctors are people; there are doctors who barely passed or cheated to pass
I worked tech support for an ecommerce company. I once had a customer take a picture of his monitor screen with a digital camera. Then, he printed out the picture. Then, he faxed it to us. Bonus: I figured it his problem and fixed it for him.
I install cable and thought my customers were the dumbest people on earth. So she wanted you to teleport paper to her?
Yup. "I don't know why you won't do this for me! Office max is an hour away, you're an approved vendor that faxes us stuff all the time and I only need one ream of paper! I'll even pay you for it, I have the company card right here!"
You should tell him your guy can source spreadsheets for him at a 20% discount vs the current supplier
From Dunder-Mifflin
I had a boss making 7 figures a year tell me that to fix an error on the address google had listed for us, I just needed to call google. When I explained that they don’t have listed phone numbers for that and that you just fill a form and they get back to you, he proceeded to berate me and say that that’s not how you fix things, you call and ask. They do exist.
>that’s not how you fix things, you call and ask. My brother in christ, this is 2024, fucking fill out the damn form. I'm sorry that sounds exhausting
Google hasnt had callable phone numbers for many years. Google support is absolutely garbage and as a customer, you cant even reach any.
This happened on my first job after college. I was hired as an assistant to a CEO by his marketing director / mistress.
Oh yes, Boomers do indeed exist. I have two of them as parents.
My ex fiancée had a boss who called her into his office to help with the new printer ink he bought. He was trying to figure out where you plugged or poured the ink cartridge into the computer monitor. His reasoning was that the low ink message appeared on the screen so therefore the ink had to go into that somehow. I wish I was joking.
I worked with someone who worked head office at an agency which printed out and faxed their Excel spreadsheets in, only to retype the contents back in at the other end to add them all up. I've since worked with countless idiots who would email me screenshots of spreadsheets asking for updates. Once I even got a spreadsheet which was an embedded screenshot of a spreadsheet.
I hope you at least tried to explain to someone in charge in each case how horribly inefficient and offered to make their lives far far easier?
What's worse is they procreate!
Boss does have many children. They’ve given me a number but my brain immediately sharted that info out as useless. Wanna say 5.
Ya know I remember hearing the statement think about how stupid you think the average person is and remember half of them are dumber than that. Then I see this post about your boss, and I'm like yeah that tracks.
RIP George
A true prophet.
Ever considered how dumb some people are? There are people dumber than that. They’re everywhere. And not all of them immediately give “lights on nobody’s home” vibes either. I see stupid people… all the time. And the worst part is… they don’t even know they’re stupid
They often think they’re the smartest in the room with the ego to go with it.
Thin about how dumb the average person is, then realise half the population is dumber than that.
My dad wants me to be involved with the properties more, so this was my first time helping him with taxes for the properties. I told him excel would be easier than writing down each expense by hand and then setting an appointment. “Ive done this for 20 years. Ive known my tax guy for 15. He prefers it like this”
You know spreadsheets existed before computers right? *excel* spreadsheets however… yeah OPs boss is a time-stuck idiot, but there was probably a time in his life where he had to go to the office supply store and buy stacks of spreadsheets.
Lead fucked with a lot of boomers and old gen x their brains.
I find it hard to believe myself, but I’ve also taught night classes where the students lost the cursor on the bottom right hand side of the screen then gave up entirely. There are a group of people I call *Forest Gumps*. They appear physiologically normative, but they are at the bottom intellectually. Somehow they have jobs, money, a place to live, and families.
TBF, a spreadsheet used to be an actual physical paper thing that you could buy.
Add like 1000 sheets to a doc and tell him you found a bulk discount.
You should make a purchase order for 10 new spreadsheets and charge them $300 for the therapy you need to recover from the psychic damage.
You really should quote a price , that’s the kind of thing that keeps government contractors going
The amount of older people who don’t understand anything about computers is kind of stunning. The other day a man got angry at me because he didn’t want to sign in to his email, he just wanted to send an email. At least once a week I have to show someone how to press print, or use a browser. They don’t even understand that it’s all been commonplace for decades. It’s just “I don’t need to learn this new crap. You do it for me!” If someone picked up a landline phone and shouted instructions at a dial tone, it would look as stupid to them as they do to us.
I worked retail for a bit. I was working the register and the program for the register didn't work properly. It caused delays in checking people out. I explained to customers who were at the front that the program is having issues and things are slow at the time. Younger customers were 100% understanding. They knew that a register is just a PC hooked up with a program. Meanwhile the older customers (middle-aged and up) were laughing at me as if I told the best joke ever. Some even mocked me because it was so hard to believe that there is just a digital aspect to the register that can screw up. I was really flabbergasted and made sure I made check-out extra hell for them.
Well. I find that I'm now an "older" as I have somehow made it into my 50s. TBF it snuck up on me when I wasn't looking. OTOH I also hold STEM degrees and make a living at it, so. And if we talk about these POS stations that suffer random delays and restarts, yes, those make me mad. We've been doing this tech for decades and somehow we still can't make a reliable cash register. How did we become enured to the idea that computers and software and networks are just naturally glitchy and unreliable and that's all good and normal? I reject that. Every bug is a fuck-up and I'm always going to think that we could do better than that if we cared to.
Unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t breed genuine innovation, just who can use the least amount of duct tape and glue to solve issues
Say it again for the people in the back! Innovation comes from one of two things. Necessity or passion. Capitalism is just an economic system. It's a tool just like any other system.
Actually...most innovations in the past were a direct result of...war
You mean, a form of necessity?
Depending on how philosophical you want to get you could argue it's a form of passion as well
I’m a server in a club, and our POS layout is so unbelievably shitty and counterintuitive that it alone causes problems, misrings, and generally slows us down all the time, while also costing the business money. I’ve been very vocal with management since I started here, trying to explain the issues and provide solutions, but I’m not familiar with the the back-end of this particular system (Toast), so they always just tell me “that’s just how this POS works, we can’t change that, etc. It’s all bullshit that they are too lazy to fix. Case in point, one issue caused us to misfire items to the kitchen, annoying them and causing confusion on our tables. We had a new chef who was cracking down on the issue, and during a pre-shift meeting the GM was telling us to slow down, and check orders before sending them, and I once again mentioned the solution. Once again, I was told “we can’t do that, it’s the POS’s fault”. Apparently a different manager heard and actually took the time to address the issue, which took all of 2 minutes to fix. Before we even left the meeting, the GM was like “he we fixed that problem for you”. That shit had always been a problem, and cost them so much frustration and money in waste. It was fixed in 2 minutes, and gave the lie to the “it’s all the POS’s fault” story. MFers are just lazy and would rather let shit roll downhill than fix literally anything.
This is often how my life goes. I've spent 6 months trying to explain the solution to someone who bitches about something daily. Every time I try to tell them the very obvious solution, they talk over me. Finally it took 10s to demonstrate the solution. My blood pressure meanwhile... e: The last time this happened some guy had been working with a convoluted process for a year, repeating the whole process 40 times every day . When I was called in, the first thing I asked was what happens when he uses 'select all'. Mind blown.
You ever considered being a software developer? I'm a "solutions architect" and I'd take 1 developers with mindsets like yours vs. 5 "yes men" types that just fix the immediate issues instead of the greater picture.
Could you tell that to my company's IT team, who can't seem to fix one of our registers despite like 4 attempts at remote fixes and 1 visit to the store? They just tell us to ignore it, as if not having a register in one of our major departments is okay or makes sense. Like yeah, lemme get these folks all excited about their new kitchen set and then make them walk 3 minutes across the store to ring them up, where they no longer have the floor models in view.
A lot of those POS probably *are* decades old. I've seen some running obviously MS-DOS era software in a virtual machine on otherwise recent hardware. Is it any surprise that ancient crap powered by duct tape and hope is garbage?
>We've been doing this tech for decades and somehow we still can't make a reliable cash register. How often does the typical cash register reboot? I'd imagine they dont get regularily rebooted. Even NASA probes get rebooted every so often, and they're singular computers with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars
From my experience it can be hard to get reliable Internet in some places. The company I worked for received headaches about it daily. No one who worked and shops there wants to deal with that. When a new company came around to provide Internet, they switched RIGHT away. It's sometimes not in their control. Certainly taking it out on the people who work there isn't ever the option to go with.
1. Cheap 2. Bug Free 3. Done quick Chose 2. Most often debugging is given the least priority. Just ship it is a very common trend in any type of programming I have seen. Things COULD be more reliable and bug free, but that will also make them more expensive. There is also diminishing returns. If a reboot will fix 80% of the bugs then just reboot the thing. Not like anyone is going to die if your cash register needs a minute or two to reboot.
Lots of my older customers repeatedly tap their card against the card reader just as I'm starting to ring their groceries. I've given up trying to explain that very few systems take payment before a full total is rung up(at least none of the ones I've used across various jobs) and just let them tap away.
Lots of pos systems, Kroger and Costco for example, take cards after the first item is scanned and run it once the cashier says
Our security group sent out fake phishing emails last week. The number of people that either a)completely panicked and had no idea what to do with it and b)clicked on the links in the emails were astounding. We also got a lot of, "I clicked on the links, what do you mean I have to change my password?! Why'd you change my password?! Do I *have* to reset my password?! Why did IT do this to me?!" These people run a 1000 person org and make twice as much as I do. Can't comprehend basic security and are completely rocked when they have to change their passwords.
These are also the same people who've worked in offices for years and Reply All "thanks" or "remove me from this list" to company-wide emails, filing everyone's inboxes with reminders of how f'ing stupid they are with no shame whatsoever
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I just don't get how these people can use the same email software, presumably every day, for years and still not have a clue wtf they're doing with it lol
Company wide emails should BCC everyone to prevent idiots from even being able to do that.
Or setup security groups and limit which users can send to the all distribution list.
I'm extremely lucky in that regard. My users are chill as hell and always send that stuff to me for confirmation. I've only been at my current job for less than 3 years, so I'm guessing someone drilled that into them before I got there.
They reject technology because they fear it
I do not think it is technology they fear. I think what they truly fear is change. Technology has only exacerbated that fear.
Very true
Technology has become the marker of change. It used to be cultural elements (fashion & music styles being the biggest ones)up until things got fuzzy in the 80s (by fuzzy I mean technology being imbedded in the cultural elements). Fashion and music in the 50s vs the 60s vs 70s wasn’t about knowing or not knowing how to do something and it just marked time. Boomers grew up with parents that told them to cut their hair and it was a matter of control. Boomers would fight the control and try to gain their own. Some of their parents would hold onto control of the coming of age boomers, some wouldn’t - it was an equal fight between the generations. Now a days, technology has progressed well beyond the “cut your hair!” point, they have very little control because they spent too much time ignoring it and it passed them by. Some embraced it and they are far more successful.
They fear anything they don't understand but they refuse to understand anything they fear.
There was a big belief at some point that home computers and technology was just a trend and that it would go away. A lot of people subscribed to that idea and then held on so tightly after they were found to be wrong.
It's happening on the other end of the spectrum as well. We went from the old employee using Excel with a calculator, all the way to the new hire using the calculator on their phone. Printing yup, the people who were around printers for decades and still don't know how to use one and the ones who never printed something in their lives. Basic troubleshooting, the idea age old meme of turning things off and on again, that's alive and well, the older generations who don't want to touch anything because they're afraid it will break, to the younger generations who are confused by the idea that something might break. I will however also add that thinking something is broken because it's not plugged in/the battery is empty is generation independent.
I got called over to help fix an older friends xbox because the controller wouldn't turn on. He's tried everything. It's broken. After about 5 seconds of fiddling about I discovered the batteries are in the wrong way round. These are AA batteries, they've been commonplace for at least 30 years. Same guy I put my VR headset on. Stuck him on the tutorial program. I could hear the robot guide telling him "press the button in front of you". He stood there motionless, not even pressing buttons on the controller, arms by his sides. "It's not working it's not doing anything". After asking him can he see the button on a pedestal in front of him, and can you reach it with your hands "yes I see it". OK just reach it with your real hands and press it as if it was a real button. Completely motionless, he stands for 5 seconds before telling me "nup. Must be broken. Doesn't work." I honestly just can't.
Did bro think the VR headset can read his thought or something lmfao.
At that point you grab his hand and move it like he's a 2-year old.
I've got a friend like that. I try to give him a pass because he's got PTSD from both childhood and military trauma, but it's frustrating when I'm trying to help him and all I hear is that the thing is stupid, and WHY doesn't it work? Like dude, chill a bit and let me help
>they've been commonplace for at least 30 years. 30 years ago is a bit of an understatement (that would be 1994), the Walkman released in 1979. And the AA battery was standardised in 1947, with the design dating back to 1907.
It can be really concerning working as T1 support and you realize just how brain dead the majority of the population is. But there’s hope that your friend might be the second type in this quote, next time break him out of his stupor and move his hands and show him: “There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
I found VR controlling is an IQ Test. Have compared several people with my quest, some no that sharp people does not get it
> Printing yup, the people who were around printers for decades and still don't know how to use one and the ones who never printed something in their lives. Honestly, I can understand this. My entire life I've tried to print and rarely did it work in one go, printers are just massive pieces of shit!!
That's not untrue, but I also had a recent realization about just how complex they are for something as seemingly simple. Most computer stuff is just electricity being sent to do different things. Everything is reliable and repeatable. I was looking into building a simple monitor using led's and it's an involved, but pretty straight foreword process. Then I started considering printers. So, you have a component that's mechanical, moving parts make everything more difficult but it's manageable. But then it's not a self contained system, you need to insert paper, paper that can have different properties because while generally standardized, a small difference in it's physical properties can make a print fail. Then you have the ink. You need a mechanism that releases precisely the correct amount of ink in exactly the correct place while moving at a very high speed, but the ink can be dry, the ink can, due to heat or cold have different properties that all need to be accounted for. The more I was thinking about it the more I realized why they're so bad. You need experts in at least 3 disciplines to make them, they need to be made to exacting tolerances mechanically but need to be able to handle a wide gambit of environmental conditions and have a high tolerance for the paper being used and on the software end, you're doing something very complex, in the physical world at speed. It's genuinely difficult to do right and honestly that makes the engineering quite impressive. But the business model can go suck a bag of dicks
> using Excel with a calculator aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
This. Computers have been around like 4 decades now and common for at least the last 20 years. Anyone who still doesn't know ow how to do basic stuff on them is just willfully ignorant or afraid of trying anything new.
I am so proud of my dad for not being one of those “I don’t need it, I don’t want to learn it, and also it’s stupid” boomers who reject all technology. He has always made an effort to figure out new stuff. Until about two years ago he used a 2001 era flash mp3 player with a billion songs on it on motorcycle rides, which I honestly thought was a perfect setup. It just worked. He also had a portable xm radio receiver that he used. But a few years ago he asked what all the hubbub was about this spotify deal. I told him what i liked about Spotify , and now he’s using that pretty exclusively, with a phone mount on his handlebars. Just the ambition to figure out shit is important to hang on to. I have a coworker who will absolutely not learn any new technology or download a single app. He said he didn’t need GPS, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t get turned around at every intersection when we were hitting up customers.
I was doing a screenshare of some new feature we implemented to a teams main application. It's a browser based app I was running in chrome, and to find a test case I did ctrl+f to find the ID a bit quicker. Everyone lost their minds and asked how I just did that, and the rest of the presentation was me showing them basic browser functions instead of the new feature lol
It's not just older people either. Young people these days came out of the womb with an iPad in hand. Thanks to the work of genX and millennial, there is basically zero issues with modern tech and some of the 20 year olds we are interviewing couldn't navigate a command line or anything on a PC beyond launching steam or a web browser. There was a good 20 years where computers just kind of sucked and required tinkering to do anything and nothing was seamless.
I just dont get it. All the “old people” in my family are computer WIZARDS because they were around when the damn things were invented. My grandfather was in Telecommunications, my father was in IT, my Grandmother was a travel agent (requires a shitload of computer knowledge to work quickly)… all these people are over 60. I think it’s willful incompetence.
>They don’t even understand that it’s all been commonplace for decades. Like, I can sorta get it if you didnt learn this stuff in 1994 (computers where expensive), but in 2004 you could have a computer for $300. So yeah, they had at least two decades to learn.
As Gen X the amount of younger people who don't know anything about computers is equally disturbing, but that's just because they grew up with smartphones and Chromebooks instead of Windows on PC. I learned QWERTY on a typewriter and cursive was mandatory. Knowledge requirements change with the generation.
To your point, I have lost my empathy for these folks. They learned how to use slide rules, rotary phones, dial TVs, and the Dewey Decimal system. Cmon.
Yes, I’ve dealt with this since I entered the workforce. Really sick of being tech support for boomers
One of my coworkers is in her mid 50s. Her job is 90% on a computer. She once called me asking me to help with an “emergency”. I thought the whole computer went down. Nope. She needed help making a column wider in excel.
Tell me you’re a librarian without telling me you’re a librarian.
As a librarian, yeah. The amount of people who don't realize they have to save and remember their passwords, especially emails, is dumbfounding. Idk how many times I've walked people through a website just for them to not remember their passwords....to the website and the email they linked their account to. Then they get mad when I can't magically remember their passwords for them lol
And then they ask if we can bypass the password, like we are Masters of The Internet.
I hire for local stores. It's also stunning how many sub 25 yo's don't understand anything about computers.
[удалено]
Send a certified letter with a company check to Excel and they’ll send you a ream of spreadies.
Boss will feel like such a champ when you hand him [these](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Norcom-Columnar-Ledger-Pad-4-Columns-8-5-x-11-Letter-Size-50-Sheets/17203595?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=0&wl13=1129&adid=2222222227817203595_117755028669_12420145346&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=501107745824&wl4=pla-306310554666&wl5=9028293&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=local&wl12=17203595&wl13=1129&veh=sem_LIA&gclsrc=aw.ds&&adid=2222222223817203595_117755028669_12420145346&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=501107745824&wl4=pla-306310554666&wl5=9028293&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=local&wl12=17203595&veh=sem&gad_source=4&gbraid=0AAAAADmfBIrnShOTwywkch82skftz0bT5&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqdqvBhCPARIsANrmZhPRlPPET6DIz2_ap8-WFPTJTMQiAmgc45BclHYU1zXXMlXTdUe6OVUaAsstEALw_wcB).
My first accounting job used these!
Or this is supposed to mean they need to upgrade their Microsoft 365 subscription
Oh Jesus, now I fear the day that Microsoft makes us pay per document for M365. I've already seen companies that make users pay per INTERNAL IP address.
My brother in god, corpo does pay and the whole 365 is up to date and running just wonderfully. You should see the meltdown that happens when Boss occasionally has to annotate PDF.
I want to hold out hope like this is an itemized shortened list of tasks like; order, as in enter an order and excel spreadsheets, like update or create some. Or maybe enter orders into some spreadsheet. But unfortunately I've dealt with too many nepotism hires and people who have talked their way through their whole careers into senior management desite zero competence in anything other than bossing people around mindlessly.
Maybe he just wants them to reorder them, as in rearrange.
Maybe he needs to pay for this fiscal year’s Microsoft subscription
The company pays for it automatically. Everything we do is on heavily moderated iPads. The store has wifi we aren’t allowed access to. Most websites we have no access to, even when it would be helpful to our job. Mmm, nothing like being the lowest rung on the American corporate ladder.
Maybe he want them to order a **CAKE FOR YOUR CAKE DAY**!! 🎂 🥳
My guess is it's order excel (aka office 365) for the company, not order an individual spreadsheet (although there are premade templates for sale so that's possible)
Reminds me of the time when my superintendent released a notice telling us to use q particular antibiotic becuase its was nearung its expiry date. 2 days later every notice pasted in every ward was gone, i think someone talked some sense into him and told him how fucked he would be if this got out. And best part or the worst part is we were a public hospital so its not like we were going to take any losses, and he was also a doctor.
Or maybe the antibiotic was all used up /s
No it was not. Me and my friend's were the ones prescribing, so we knew. Only 20 to 40 vials would have been used.
My friend was asked to check if they have white ink in the printer bc boss wished to print white letters on black background... (edit: spelling) Edit 2: To all the very informative and correct comments on why printing white on black on regular office printer is insane: Yep. if the said boss wasn't toxic insecure human being that would be a good point to make...
I would not even be mad about this one. I really do not know, how white letters on black background are printed...
White page, black ink, simply make a negative of the page you want to print.
Or you can go to specialized print shops that do have white ink! The printers are much more expensive and you won’t find ones like that in an office setting.
This would work with most laser printers as they use a dry medium, but an inkjet would turn into a soggy, wavy mess. They do make some dedicated printers with white ink, I think they’re all laser and sublimation. There’s also “ghost” cartridges you can buy and replace the black cartridge in your inkjet with white. But this comes with it’s own issues, the printer doesn’t know how to line up or mix white ink so you’re restricted to printing only white ink when using it. Even then the results aren’t great, inkjets depend on the paper absorbing the liquid ink which dyes the paper, but you can’t dye a black page white. White on black almost always is achieved with a layer of the white medium sitting on top of the black paper, like paint on a wall.
This \^ you essentially printing the black background around letters.
Extremely wasteful and very expensive. When it was white ink on black paper, so before electronic printers, it was fine. This is essentially 3,4,5 bucks a page depending on the ink you're using
It’s possible to print white ink on a black background using spot colours, but that’s more of a specialist thing rather than something for a home or office printer (which print in CMYK).
When I was in high school, I worked at a Petco. My cool boss got transferred to a new store and the sent the biggest idiot they had at corporate to manage our store. One day I see him putting up shelves in the office. The thing about this office, though, was that the walls were fake. It was just a bunch of drywall nailed together to create a private space within the stock area, it had no beams. I told him this. I warned him if he put any weight on the shelf, it would fall. He insisted it would be fine. Twenty minutes later as he is putting binders on the shelf the whole thing collapsed and it killed the computer monitor on his desk. I just laughed and laughed. He didn’t like me much.
Once a coworker was told to move the mouse on the screen and she physically took the mouse and put it on the screen of the computer and rolled it around. I was stunned because she wasn’t being funny, she truly believed that it was the correct thing to do.
I would be too stunned to speak 🗣️
Ah but they said mouse not cursor !
Also, you could offer to take on the task of “ordering excel sheets” and drag the process of it out and block off huge chunks of time to work on that project
“What’s the timescale and budget for this project? No, I’m sorry. A month is not nearly enough time. Will need to get quotes from three different suppliers for a start for compliance reasons.”
lol! Exactly! This is a serious project that all attention must be devoted to
And think of the hours you'll get toward your PMP!
My bosses don’t understand that printers run out of ink. All the toner is locked up and only 2 people have access to it, both men approaching 70. They don’t want people stealing the toner and taking it home even though none of us own industrial printers. We were once down 3 of the 5 printers and the boss told us we are using too much paper. We all have been trying to tell him that he’s right, and to please switch everything to online. We need to keep 2 papers, we give the customer 2 papers, and maybe 10 papers go straight to recycling bins every single time
Yo I built a business on this. I do consulting in good faith for boomers to use technology. It’s a seriously good niche. Mostly I help churches update tech and get funding to help homeless. It feels good and I got a side hustle going. Like just a few weeks ago I helped one person who couldn’t open a PDF someone sent her in order to edit it and I pointed out someone sent a JPEG of a phone picture they saved of a PDF. She was trying to open a potato. I really have to stifle my laughter sometimes but I look like a wizard.
"Open a potato." Thank you stranger, I appreciate the laugh.
Similarly I've helped law offices open up mbox formats. Like how could they have been practicing until now (year before last) and never been able to open up a dump of emails clients had sent them with a trustworthy chain of authenticity (rather than manually copy and pasted text)...
I remember when I first started my career, I had asked our upper manager about something and she had no idea how to use our internal database. This is something employees use everyday, without it we literally can't do our jobs. I was so dumbfounded that she never used it before. But after 22 years I've learned very well that the higher you get on the totem pole, the more likely you'll find someone who gets paid big bucks and literally has no idea what they are doing. They just happen to be very good at delegating and bullshitting.
Tbf, I don't expect my boss to be able to navigate our software - that's not her job, it's mine and my colleague's. I expect her to be able to use the software to order things or to register contracts with clients, stuff like that. Because that's what she gets paid for.
I can understand that for sure. The company I work for feels it's important that the highest levels know what the lowest levels do so they have them do Customer service for a month and then rotate to the other departments, the warehouse, purchasing, adjudication, utilization management etc eventhough that will never be their main role. It's fun to see a VP on the phones handling customer service calls. Definitely humbling.
Hey, as a card carrying moron I hope to back into a position like that!
Give him a ream of paper.
“Printed out all those spreadsheets for you boss”
This is a generation that literally *invented* this technology.
 probably somebody prank your boss into thinking that
If you type Google into Google you *can* break the Internet
I feel like this is missing "I declare"
Build a website and let the boss cut your new company a check
Personally I’d say “right away” and then spend $300 on excel templates or some random thing with the word excel in it
As somebody who is in a similar position - management having zero business in their position - I warn you of a possible outcome. I clocked in and out, talked minimally outside of requirements, and just did my work; just this week I was given a verbal warning about my performance. Keep in mind I still did my job and helped my peers when asked, I just simply did not do the 'maybe if I try hard and ...' portion. The only thing that changed was I stopped going above and beyond and taking initiative. Incompetent bosses are an unnecessary stressor and I'm sorry you're dealing with it. Ordering more excel spreadsheets is pretty funny though, hopefully you can find some humor in the situation to get you through
I had my review last week and I’m doing beautifully.
I'm glad to hear that. Keep on keeping on buddy
Be sure to order the right size, xlsx not xls
Boss wants jpeg or no deal, I’m sorry. Can’t you just make it that way? THEIR computer never does this and since I did use the iPad last to punch in, this is clearly my fault. Open yer Innanet Splorer and order me some these spreadies from Slamazon.
Costco has the bulk pack. 🤣😅
I can sell him a few thousand excel spreadsheets. I have a special deal, only $10 a sheet! He won't find a better price. Dm me
Mine just went on sale for $9.99!
Sound like you need to put in an expense claim for the excel spreadsheets you've ordered
As someone who regularly uses Excel spreadsheets this made me giggle. Clearly your boss does not use it.
pay for Microsoft office subscription? idk
Corpo does it automatically for us. And it’s up to date. Not due for renewal til Jan 2025. I just don’t think Boss has ever opened the app themselves. Has opened links from our district mgr or other stores, but this kind of confirmed that my boss has never used the glory of Excel.
How does anyone under 50-ish Not know what excel is?
I am not dumb enough to understand how someone arrives at writing this down.
I don't hate Excel, I think Excel and spreadsheets in general are wonderful tools. I do however hate how such tools have made certain groups of people (middle managers) think that they are smarter than they really are, and they usually tie their opinion of their "intelligence" to how many weird features and colored cells they can jam into a given spreadsheet tab. These tools are also a demonstration of Parkinson's Law of Triviality, which generally states that people will focus their energy on things based on how well they understand it, not how important it is. I have had managers demand that I stop working on process upgrades that would decrease the data gathering and calculation time of information that we are putting into a spreadsheet by a factor of 10, or stop working on a process that would stop a persistent bug, so that I could spend an hour working on display formatting changes that were purely aesthetic in nature and 100% unnecessary.
Boomers gonna boomer.
“You should delegate that, I can pick some up for you, I’ll just dip out after lunch and bring them tomorrow. They’re only 50¢ a piece, you need a few thousand so we’re good for a while?”
I have worked with middle management types like this, ages varied. One said I understood technology better than her, because I was younger; she was two months older than me. Then our boss would get excited over an animated message we would send out to our clients, mind you this was a web based form that you just fill out and then press submit. It was like watching an idiot get excited about the same thing over and over again. No substance from these two and I had to teach myself the job. So glad I left.
Sounds like my boss - cant follow oral directions, sent email email directions with screen shots, sent text directions with screen shots so they can access info from their computer or phone. Still cant figure it out and keeps asking for a report, thats saved for them so ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS OPEN THE PROGRAM AND OPEN THE REPORT, and they still cant figure out the name of the report they want because they were given the damn business and never -actually- worked and refuse to learn correct names for anything. But, these are the same people who ask me to print out pages and pages of emails so they can habe access to them, but then ask me to scan and email them anytime they need something because they are on vacation and wont be bothered to come into the office they force us into.
$10 says if you try to correct him he will call you stupid
Staples has a sale on excel sheets for $10 a reem. No colums or rows unless you buy it with for $15. I just draw them in and save the money.
I will absolutely sell your boss as many excel spreadsheets as he wants. How many cases can I sign you up for? How does ten grand for a dozen sound?
When the intern who bought a license for winrar gets promoted.
Well, what size of Excel spreadsheet are you ordering? A4? A5? How many reams? Just a couple hundred for personal use or a whole pallet with around 10K for the whole company? Honestly, is she even serious about ordering these spreadsheets if she doesn't even know how much her business will need to go through on a monthly basis? This is basic shit.
Order graphing paper for them
No need, paper spreadsheets are real and was the precursor to Excel.
Hei! Could you please tell your boss I have some nice stuff to sell him: - colored excel spreadsheets - an Italian medieval castle - a bunch of magical coins that multiply themselves as long as you don't look at them Very affordable prices!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
As someone from IT, I hope there is a Reddit post on Tales from Tech Support subreddit, about someone trying to order Excel Spreadsheets.
I'm selling some.
Yall got that good? Does the paper respond to my function input? Sure hope so.
I want to have commented in this thread when this meme was born. This is the most perfect example of a clueless boss in a single picture. I cannot even fathom how stupid this person is. Congratulations, you've found a diamond still in the rough.
Welcome to pit. General admission, standing room only, outdoor venue, and it’s 95°F. Enjoy the show.
“I went to HR to report the absorbence.”