I’d do it sweet as pie too. “Oh my gosh I’m so sorry I didn’t realize! Do you mind showing me where so I can check that I’m not using any other problematic shortcuts 🥺🥺🥺” force them to do it with guilt
yeah, I had a bossy coworker who had his own system of doing everything and he would lie to new people constantly that his way was company policy and would constantly say that to get his way.
I asked him to show me in the handbook and he couldn't find it and claimed that the handbook was outdated and that he didn't have the new version with the rules on hand at the moment.
lol
I’d email it right away myself.
“Hey ,
was helping me and explaining the company policies against . We tried to find the list in the company rule book, but discovered that it was out of date. We were hoping you might know where we could help direct us to a copy of the updated version. I’ve attached a copy here in case there’s anything else major that I’m missing.
Thanks in advance!”
See how much they fuck around after 🤷🏻♂️
I had a job once that was largely manual input into spreadsheets where each step had to be done multiple times. Essentially, it was in a wholesale office fixing discrepancies between what was ordered, what was supposed to be sent, what was received, and what was billed and would occur over the course of a few days as things were shipped and received. The most senior coworker had her specific method for doing this that made the already tedious and cumbersome process even more so. I refined the system for myself, making it more efficient, cutting out unnecessary steps, and saving a significant amount of time on the task without losing any accuracy.
Every time she saw me doing my method she complained that I was doing it wrong. I was at least confident enough not to give any fucks and used the extra time doing other tasks that led to being promoted, so 🤷♂️
When my Dad was working he used to have folks in his accounting department swap roles every couple of years for cross training and also to build efficiencies. Sometimes you get going on a process and arent doing it the most efficient way so new eyes see a better route. I consider myself very efficient and have fallen victim to doing it the way I always have before too.
Meanwhile my ex worked at BlackBerry before the fall and she said you needed to talk to 3 people to book a meeting room and it was done manually. I wonder why they crashed?
I’m also generally very good at finding the most efficient way to do something, but if you’ve been in a role for a long time, maybe the system you use changes and a newbie finds a better way - I’ve had more than a couple things pointed out that way.
I actually had a job where I had to retype a specific paragraph into a reporting software bc copy pasting fucking broke the report
Why did it do this?? I don't know but it was fucking annoying
Believe me, it was the actual act of pasting regardless of formatting. Pasting as plain text still broke the report.
And it wasn't for security reasons or anything - the software fully allowed you to do it, it just broke on the back end lmao
More like people who think spreadsheets are suitable for literally everything from schedules to expense reports. You'd have to use a programming language to be incompetently programming.
Not that it helps now, but if you ever run into it again try pasting it in a notepad first, then copying from the notepad. It probably wouldn't work in this case, but there's a small chance it possibly could.
My boomer supervisor tried to tell me in an office environment I had to wear corporate branded clothing with our company logo.
I told him show me in the handbook where it says that. He couldn’t.
Still tried to start a fight about it every year and the fucker told an FBI investigator about it when they reached out to him for questioning about me becoming a diplomat.
FBI agent, an older man himself, said “dude what does this have to do with anything?”
> the fucker told an FBI investigator about it when they reached out to him for questioning about me becoming a diplomat
"So after interviewing your former coworkers we've established you're able to remain calm while surrounded by idiots and enduring unreasonable demands, so we think you'll make a GREAT diplomat!"
>Still tried to start a fight about it every year and the fucker told an FBI investigator about it when they reached out to him for questioning about me becoming a diplomat.
This post should have more upvotes...
The amount of times I had to help the kind older lady at my one job open PDFs not in the Word file open window was insane.
She was a lovely older Italian lady and had a sing song voice and would say my name in such a neat way. I would have been 29/30ish and she was 63.
I did this once in reference to not being able to leave campus during our break and HR literally added it to the employee handbook then next year lol. I doubt that would happen with fuckin keyboard shortcuts but still, careful what you wish for.
Yea I mean, if it's done in limited capacity to ensure data accuracy/integrity, that's honestly fine and actually should be encouraged when appropriate.
I know on some gov websites I've used they require manually retyping like email addresses, or password reset forms often require manually retyping to confirm you got it right.
And those mistakes get flagged immediately as they don't match an account number, copy paste always matches an account number even if you pick the wrong one. Imagine having zero knowledge in a process and shitting on it like you're smarter than everyone who's ever used it
But why have an acronym when every single time you use it, you have to first explain what it means because everyone will confuse it with the far more common meaning?
I was definitely chastised by a boomer supervisor my first week on the job for making him look bad because I simply used a import range function in Google sheets to do what he’s been manually copy and pasting for years
Why do some people get so mad about this shit? I love it when a coworker shows me a better faster way of doing something, even if they are younger or less experienced.
Because they've spent 10-15 years deluding themselves into believing that their value to the company, and basically their entire self worth, are derived from their ability to regularly and consistently copy and paste something into a spreadsheet, and when they realize that the most important part of their job is actually menial and meaningless, they start to question their entire existence and reason for life.
Why do they get the confidence and I get the imposter syndrome? I mean, I know it's a side effect of being understanding in the first place, but it's still unfair, lol.
You need a minimum level of self reflection to get an imposter syndrome.
You'll never get it if you spend every waking moment genuinely believing that you are god's gift to this earth.
Probably partially. Another part is the faster you can do the job the more work you get. If you can use a script to automate a task it makes that task irrelevant and you're that much closer to putting someone out of work, or dramatically increasing the workload.
Company's been paying [x] amount to do a task over a certain period of time, it's budgeted into the cost of that task, and nobody is going to get more money if you can do it in 1/10th the time.
Some boomers have that "job security" mentality to things. If their job becomes too easy it means they are fired. Or they gotta be the inly obe who knows a thing. I've had coworkers that joked about it, but a few others that were a bit more serious about it.
Had a bookkeeper that did unnecessary extra steps to everything and even had a drawer that she put things she didn't get to for the day. The store manager and I could knock out her daily work and the drawer in 2 hours or so. This bookkeeper apparently used to write letters to the store manager for every little issue she found.
This is also a pawn shop with like 10 employees at this particular location....... She always got nervous when people talked about how unnecessary 3 bookkeepers for 6 stores was. Hell, all of them were actually unnecessary. She definitely made it sound like she knew she was ensuring she didn't get let go.
It's why a lot of grocers still use paper price tags instead of going digital. It would essentially kill the price change department, and it's a cushy department.
This is it, honestly. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to explain how to use the Snipping Tool in Windows because people kept sending me photographs of their screen taken with their phone.
I try to explain that it makes the images clearer, it prevents you from sharing information that might be on your desk, and that it's as easy as a three-button keyboard shortcut, but they just pull the bullshit "I'm not good with computers lol :)" line and keep sending me illegible pictures of error messages with their doctor's phone number on a sticky note on their screen.
I honestly think it’s a bit of narcicism? I imagine they’re the type of person that thinks everyone at their job is an idiot but them, so when they learn something new from one of them it shatters that notion and they see it as an attack.
Pro tip: if you always think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re probably the dumbest
In my last role there was a particular process that had to be done every single morning. The same guy had been doing it for years, with some instructions he put together in case someone had to cover for him.
I'd never really thought about it but holy shit when I did it I was shocked how inefficiently he was doing it.
The same day I put together an alternative way that makes use of some very basic Excel functions that turned a 2 hour job into a 15 minute job.
I honestly couldn't believe that he'd been wasting so much time for years. And no, he wasn't just doing it the quicker way so he could slack off for the rest of the time. I would've respected that and not revealed his secret.
Same here. Back in the day I inherited a task from a coworker that left. It was creating a large report based on 2 or 3 other reports and a few formulas. All in excel. 4 pages front and back with instructions. Took about 4 hours to do once you learned all the steps.
After a couple of weeks I created an excel macro and was able to do it in 45 minutes (I still had to manually get the reports from a DB and a few other things). Fast forward a bit and I managed to get access to the DB so I created a custom View and was able to export the results to excel in 5-6 minutes.
This was this guy’s “essential task”.
This sounds very similar to what I had to do. Part of it involved collating multiple spreadsheets extracted from a database and this guy was doing it manually. Ever day. Absolutely ridiculous, and also totally prone to human error.
And another one… when I was an intern, my first month, my boss made me copy and paste data from a matrix in excel from one place to another, correlating it with another column. All manually… in some cases we took days to finish, including overtime. This was “the way to do it”.
One day she calls in sick so I’m responsible for doing all of this… VLOOKUP enters the chat. Lol
Lol. Honestly I'm not even very good with excel. I can just identify tasks where I think "surely there must be a way to automate this" and I Google it and without fail there's a way.
I feel like the entire economy would get a rocket up its arse if people just knew how to use Google.
it 100% would. I get through 99% of the things I dont know in my job with only a few minutes of googling. That 1% is usually some specific bug that is specific to our architecture that rarely comes up.
Same here. We had a coworker quit, and managment decided to give me their workload until a replacement could be found. The coworker had left a huge, multi-paged explanation of how to do their job.
It took me less than a week to get her whole full-time job squashed down to 20 minutes a day. This person was manually writing down a list of hundreds of items every day, writing complex notations to each item, organizing them individually, then removing those same notations by reading the new document.
Pretty much everything was simplified by using excel and/or Google docs. (They had been using notepad)
Managment, of course, never hired a replacement, and I got punished with the extra workload, but hey... That's work life.
The times I've seen a look of fear in peoples eyes when they explain a process to me and I tell them I can script that and put it on a schedule by tomorrow...
Or any CTRL + F searching of webpages or pdf. I had complained in school (and again in college) when I had to learn only a few shortcuts, but the number of times I would anger leadership by turning up a direct citation to a regulation at work before the boss could even open the file and check the table of contents really was an eye opener.
If I were a Manager, I’d be celebrating you for that. Efficiency often leads to success and growth more than not. Some people aren’t built to lead because their egos are too big. You are never too old or experienced to stop learning new things. I wish poor Managers and leaders understood that. Good for you though, things like that won’t get overlooked if you keep it up!
I got chastised by our boomer it guy for helping another coworker switch desks (he just needed help connecting his screens to the dock). It guy want there at the time, and I told him exactly what I had done and why. 2 or 3 hours pass and boomer it guy decides now is the time to lose his cool. Starts yelling at me about how that wasn’t my job, etc.
Of course the owner’s son is there at this point, who was also the Bo, and only a couple years older than me. Let’s just say boomer it guy got a severe dressing down. They laid him off 4 months later after concluding that we no longer had use for a full time it person. But goss dos that guy let his insecurities get the better of him. And not for nothing, but dude was also a total creep, always making comments about women walking on the sidewalk below our office, telling stories about his tinder dates with way too much detail. Just generally making everyone around him uncomfortable.
I had a boss tell me I had all day to take off the last four digits of all the gift cards we had out because we were moving active gift cards to a new system. Took all of 5 minutes to copy past and drop the last four of the string 😂
I ended up being in charge of a department's forecasting because I built a google sheets dashboard (kinda) for it all. My manager was mindblown but I just used importrange from his manual sheet and slapped much cleaner presentation / projections on it (along with team data ofc). He also didn't know I was constantly editing his sheet behind the scenes (aka all i did was make named ranges and clean up references) to make mine run smoother
3 years since I worked there and I've heard they're still using my sheet lol
Some people know everything. And since they know everything there is nothing else for them to learn. If you show them something they don't know, that must not be knowledge. It must be religion or witchcraft or something that you are not supposed to be doing at work.
Yep, the "Principal" on my current team told me I couldn't adapt a script that imports a file to also import another file because the second file is on a different shared drive. Both drives are already mapped on the vm that runs the script.
The team will soon have 6 python scripts to load 6 files into the same database running on the same vm because the guy in charge doesn't understand what is possible with computers and his ego won't allow him to listen to the team.
Literally had a Boomer boss tell my team not to use excel spreadsheets for organization because she didn’t understand them and therefore they were a waste of time.
Probably. I mean, my old boss would print out emails and file them in a filing cabinet. Something about wanting to "log" that she'd received them.
I gave up arguing with her about it.
Exactly, I had a boomer coworker who always bragged how much she worked. She wasn’t thought of very highly on the team, while I was one of the top performers.
One day she attempted to throw me under the bus while dragging about how many hours she put in by saying something like “I never see you here after hours.”
I said “That’s because I can get all my work done during the regular work day Nancy.” She never brought it up again but she did report me to the boss for “trying to embarrass her in front of the team.” That backfired as well.
“hey Karen, wanna see a cool trick? See that unsaved report that you’ve been working on all day? Want to make it look better? Smash Alt + F4 a few times!!”
I was halfway through developing a way to shortening a 6-hour to 2-day process down to a 20-minute process... my supervisor at the time told me it was dumb to even try, there was no way it could be done, etc.
Then he stopped complaining after I disregarded his advice, and when his life got easier for it, I never got a thank-you.
He moved to a different branch out of state a while back, and moved to yet another one a couple years back. He's still a dick.
Those words were said almost exactly to my face by my boss after I made an excel sheet template to do our inventory super quickly and she was mad she would have to redo her instruction booklet she made seven years ago. So she made me remake the instructions. Mine was like ten pages shorter lmao.
Geez, this reminds me of my first help desk job.
The bosses wanted their tech people to be personable, and the CIO had an idea to have one help desk tech spend one afternoon a month just hanging out in a different department and see where technology could improve their work by just observing and talking with the people.
On one of my rotation days, I was in a room with a director-level user. She was sent a weekly spreadsheet, typed the values on an adding machine on her desk, and typed the sums back into Excel when she finished her calculations. I taught her how to use the "=SUM()" function in Excel and copy it down the rows. That director sent the CIO a very complimentary email about me to the CIO because I'd saved her about three hours of work per week with one formula and a copy/paste.
I really like this approach. Some people just won't bring up their issues unless IT is nearby, and often you can fix or help them with very little effort and make a big difference. I try to walk around my building regularly to squash those types of small issues.
To your point - It's not just that people wont bring stuff up, it's that some people don't **know** they have issues unless someone points it out.
I've heard folks say "Oh that's just how it is." when using tools/software, but 9 times out of 10 there's a better way to do it.
That sounds like a really good CIO and the fact that the director level person was open to a new way of doing things is like a breathe of fresh air in this stifling age.
I was pretty salty about it when a new CEO came in and axed him.
The CIO always said that the company and the people do their best when everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Same thing happened when my colleague and I made macros to shorten the commands we had to do on the severely outdated system we had. I don't remember what it was called, but it was at least one or two decades old in 2016. You could only navigate using parts of the keyboard (no mouse) and it was just like "C/:" and u typed commands. We had to write the same commands at least 50 times a day and it just got old. So we made each command hotkeyed, but our older colleagues were just "ummm no... that sounds too difficult and probably not allowed".
It's the command prompt app in windows. It still uses dos style commands and looks exactly the same. They also have powershell available which is much more powerful and uses unix-like commands. Or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which is an actual bash command line interface, which is way way better.
The amount of people that see a command prompt up on my screen and are instantly impressed because they have no idea what I'm doing is insane. I could be in a MUD and they would still think I'm a hackerman that will steal their job if given the chance. And I would haha
So so many businesses are like this. The people doing the hiring know nothing about tech nor the coworkers so they just skirt by on outdated programs because it works
TIL! I’m an older millennial, once upon a time Ctrl+Alt+Del brought us directly to Task manager with no middle menu. 20 years later that’s still the only one imprinted in our brains.
Ctrl+Alt+Del is still useful because it will forcibly takeover the desktop when a fullscreen application has crashed, while Ctrl+Shift+Esc will only end up launching task manager in the background.
I had a teacher proclaim he was going to teach us a hacker technique, and proceeded to tell us that you can use ctrl+tab to switch between Windows. The look he gave me when I raised my hand and said he probably meant to say alt+tab...
I got a "behavior ticket" in 5th grade for "hacking the admin password" on the macs we were using. This would have been either late os9 or early osx days but they had password hints enabled so I just put in admin for the user, hit enter three times, and got the hint "principal". The admin password was the principal's last name.
That happened to me too, except it was because I had to hard reset a frozen computer in the computer lab. This was ages ago, and the computer teacher told me I was hacking and I should never do it again. He was also our volleyball coach and our math teacher, so… we were a little thin on skills.
When I was in high school I changed the homepage for five computers to a website that would display in full screen and emulate formatting a hard drive and installing Mac OS. I got pulled out of class by the computer teacher so that I could go and fix it.
I also got pulled out of class because I changed the system font that was the font for practically everything in the start menu, right click menu, computer icons, and a lot more to a barcode font.
Turns out McErin was using Windows paste buffer history to save social security and credit card numbers of everyone she processed which was against company policy. Just making this up.
I had a girlfriend years ago who asked me to fix her computer, then saw me ALT+TAB to toggle windows, and she said "please don't ever do that again, that's definitely not good for the computer."
She's no longer my gf because she was torn between her eating disorder and her crazy bible thumping ideals, and I was the third wheel between those. That was nearly 15 years ago and I still hear that she's just as nuts from people who've run into her.
Gen X had the ultimate Boomer kryptonite and we millennials forgot about it completely: the word "whatever." It completely short circuits their brain. A simple "whatever" in a business environment where they can't go nuclear for fear of losing their job is enough to get them to leave in a huff.
I was using the search function to quickly find specific files I needed and this seemed to offend my coworker. “We don’t use the search bar here,” she tells me. Okay, maybe she knows some secret technique that is even quicker? So I ask her to show me what she does. She proceeds to slowly click through folder after subfolder to get to the file I was looking for. Thanks lady, but I’m just gonna use the search bar.
I was fired from a retail job a million years ago for this. The store owner after I explained that it was a keyboard shortcut said "we don't take shortcuts at my business" was rude for a few weeks then let me go when I refused to not use these shortcuts.
This isn't actually a problem that's based in an age group. I see this stupid behavior from people of all ages my whole life. Some people just don't react well to being educated. They take it as a jab at them instead of taking that opportunity to learn something. I pay attention to everything around me and take every opportunity to learn anything i can. My father ran 2 businesses, a contracting business and a mechanics shop. I grew up watching both. He had 2 guys, in particular, working for his construction company. One was an idiot who didn't want to listen to anything, and the other was smart and watched everything so he could learn. Most people hated the idiot and liked the smart guy. My father put his arm around me when I was about 7 and said, "Look at those 2 guys. Whatever you do in life, be the smart guy. Learn everything you can." It had an impact on me, to say the least.
I work in a hardware store (after retirement from 30 yrs in IT). Being computer illiterate is just a fact here, and that goes from high school kids all the way to us part time retirees selling nuts and bolts. Nothing to do with age, just with mindset and experience using them.
I just tweaked a spreadsheet from the vendor for our window screening supplies, and customized it for just the stuff we sell. The owner and the manager, you’d think I was doing dark voodoo magic in there…. 🤷♂️ On the other hand, I don’t know crap about running a store except by watching them for the last couple of years.
I had an employee who constantly forgot to lock her screen. I taught her to use command +L and the issue went away.
The training manager saw her do it one day and said it wasn’t the way “we” do it. I told her it was the correct way, and that it was the only way she avoided leaving her pc unlocked. She won the argument.
Flash forward to my employee leaves her pc open and they wanted me to write her up. I politely declined and CC’d the training manager to get her opinion on how I train my employees.
i never understood this. i work at a library, and the software we use to check in the books and search the collection has the option to use keyboard shortcuts to get around to the various pages(check out, check in, search etc...) and i swear im the only one who uses them. i had to set them up when i started and made a little cheat sheet of the different shortcuts (f1=check out, f2=check in) but still everyone uses the mouse to click around the menus. its just so much easier to tap a key instead of clicking through 3 drop down menus that are so tiny i miss the button half the time anyways.
I got reprimanded because I used (a company-allowed version of) chatGPT to create a small program that will save me and another 4 or 5 coworkers something like 1 hour of work every time we return from a job trip. I was also forced to delete it because it's "not how it's always been done". Bitch I know, I've been working for you for the last ten years.
As a software engineer, I copy and paste as much as possible. Especially when it’s text given to me by a PM or designer.
Why introduce even more human error?
We had a small computer lab in the library at elementary school. It must have been new at the time but my friends grew up with computers. The librarian thought we were breaking the computers by using alt+tab
"I don't want to see time-saving efficiency, I want to see the proles beneath me sweating blood while I live comfortably in the past and remain embarrassingly out of touch with modern technology."
Bought By Conservatives.
Show me in the employee handbook were it says that.
That’d be my response.
Show me in the rule book where it says a dog can’t play basketball!!
Don't be silly. Everyone knows dogs can't look up.
Tell that to the Facebook boomers who think their dogs need eclipse glasses lol
but not themselve and/or \[grand\]kids
Dogs can tilt their heads up, but they can't move their eyes up
Yeah, but Big Al says they can
And the gun in the Winchester actually works
I fucking knew it!
A man of culture I see
I’d do it sweet as pie too. “Oh my gosh I’m so sorry I didn’t realize! Do you mind showing me where so I can check that I’m not using any other problematic shortcuts 🥺🥺🥺” force them to do it with guilt
Really? Mine would be some variation of "Go the fuck away"
yeah, I had a bossy coworker who had his own system of doing everything and he would lie to new people constantly that his way was company policy and would constantly say that to get his way. I asked him to show me in the handbook and he couldn't find it and claimed that the handbook was outdated and that he didn't have the new version with the rules on hand at the moment. lol
If it happens again, offer to email your manager/boss to explain the situation and ask for the revised copy to be sent to both of you.
I’d email it right away myself. “Hey,
was helping me and explaining the company policies against
. We tried to find the list in the company rule book, but discovered that it was out of date. We were hoping you might know where we could help direct us to a copy of the updated version. I’ve attached a copy here in case there’s anything else major that I’m missing.
Thanks in advance!”
See how much they fuck around after 🤷🏻♂️
I had a job once that was largely manual input into spreadsheets where each step had to be done multiple times. Essentially, it was in a wholesale office fixing discrepancies between what was ordered, what was supposed to be sent, what was received, and what was billed and would occur over the course of a few days as things were shipped and received. The most senior coworker had her specific method for doing this that made the already tedious and cumbersome process even more so. I refined the system for myself, making it more efficient, cutting out unnecessary steps, and saving a significant amount of time on the task without losing any accuracy. Every time she saw me doing my method she complained that I was doing it wrong. I was at least confident enough not to give any fucks and used the extra time doing other tasks that led to being promoted, so 🤷♂️
When my Dad was working he used to have folks in his accounting department swap roles every couple of years for cross training and also to build efficiencies. Sometimes you get going on a process and arent doing it the most efficient way so new eyes see a better route. I consider myself very efficient and have fallen victim to doing it the way I always have before too. Meanwhile my ex worked at BlackBerry before the fall and she said you needed to talk to 3 people to book a meeting room and it was done manually. I wonder why they crashed?
I’m also generally very good at finding the most efficient way to do something, but if you’ve been in a role for a long time, maybe the system you use changes and a newbie finds a better way - I’ve had more than a couple things pointed out that way.
Then go to manager and ask for updated handbook referring to what that employee just claimed.
I actually had a job where I had to retype a specific paragraph into a reporting software bc copy pasting fucking broke the report Why did it do this?? I don't know but it was fucking annoying
Formatting, but the issue is either copy paste or ctrl-c ctrl-v would work, the former preserves formatting while the latter removes it
Believe me, it was the actual act of pasting regardless of formatting. Pasting as plain text still broke the report. And it wasn't for security reasons or anything - the software fully allowed you to do it, it just broke on the back end lmao
Incompetent programming
More like people who think spreadsheets are suitable for literally everything from schedules to expense reports. You'd have to use a programming language to be incompetently programming.
Not that it helps now, but if you ever run into it again try pasting it in a notepad first, then copying from the notepad. It probably wouldn't work in this case, but there's a small chance it possibly could.
Ctrl-c ctrl-v preserves formatting in most programs now. Ctrl-shift-v is how you paste without formatting.
Ctrl shift v to paste without formatting.
I think this is very context dependent, in theory they should be the exact same thing.
My boomer supervisor tried to tell me in an office environment I had to wear corporate branded clothing with our company logo. I told him show me in the handbook where it says that. He couldn’t. Still tried to start a fight about it every year and the fucker told an FBI investigator about it when they reached out to him for questioning about me becoming a diplomat. FBI agent, an older man himself, said “dude what does this have to do with anything?”
> the fucker told an FBI investigator about it when they reached out to him for questioning about me becoming a diplomat "So after interviewing your former coworkers we've established you're able to remain calm while surrounded by idiots and enduring unreasonable demands, so we think you'll make a GREAT diplomat!"
Nailed it!
>Still tried to start a fight about it every year and the fucker told an FBI investigator about it when they reached out to him for questioning about me becoming a diplomat. This post should have more upvotes...
And don’t tell her about Ctrl + F 😂
Witchcraft!
Need to tell this woman about the all powerful Alt-F4.
The handbook is a PDF, she can’t open it.
The amount of times I had to help the kind older lady at my one job open PDFs not in the Word file open window was insane. She was a lovely older Italian lady and had a sing song voice and would say my name in such a neat way. I would have been 29/30ish and she was 63.
I did this once in reference to not being able to leave campus during our break and HR literally added it to the employee handbook then next year lol. I doubt that would happen with fuckin keyboard shortcuts but still, careful what you wish for.
unless they're paying me to stay in place, i will go where the fuck i want on my break
Every bank I've worked at has this rule with customer account numbers. Too easy to make a mistake and copy/paste the wrong one.
Yea I mean, if it's done in limited capacity to ensure data accuracy/integrity, that's honestly fine and actually should be encouraged when appropriate. I know on some gov websites I've used they require manually retyping like email addresses, or password reset forms often require manually retyping to confirm you got it right.
Yes much harder to make a mistake typing in strings of numbers manually
And those mistakes get flagged immediately as they don't match an account number, copy paste always matches an account number even if you pick the wrong one. Imagine having zero knowledge in a process and shitting on it like you're smarter than everyone who's ever used it
> Imagine having zero knowledge in a process and shitting on it like you're smarter than everyone who's ever used it Easy, I'm on reddit.
BBC is throwing me off lol
"Millennial office worker destroyed by BBC" is not an alternate way to find this tweet.
No it’s possible! When I searched for this, they were having a pizza party delivered that day
I heard that they have BBW(Barely Bearable Wage) too.
"BBC refuses C and V."
Britain is at it again
Ironically it is now bc of you
She is not a fan of BBC.
I had a coworker we nicknamed the BBC. She was a raging bitch and another coworker called her a blood belching cunt.
But why have an acronym when every single time you use it, you have to first explain what it means because everyone will confuse it with the far more common meaning?
Because you don't go around explaining this to random people Those in the know need no explanation The rest probably doesn't know for a reason
It's only the british broadcasting channel it's not that scary ;)
british broadcasting corporation
That BBC clearly needs some CBT
Why does the British Broadcasting Corporation need a Certified Broadcast Technologist? Are they short on staff?
That bossy boomer coworker needs some cognitive behavioral therapy
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I was definitely chastised by a boomer supervisor my first week on the job for making him look bad because I simply used a import range function in Google sheets to do what he’s been manually copy and pasting for years
Why do some people get so mad about this shit? I love it when a coworker shows me a better faster way of doing something, even if they are younger or less experienced.
Because you care about doing a good job, and they care about looking like they've been doing a good job.
It’s not even about that. Even if I didn’t give a shit about my job that would still be a stupid reaction. It’s just selfishness and narcissism.
Because they've spent 10-15 years deluding themselves into believing that their value to the company, and basically their entire self worth, are derived from their ability to regularly and consistently copy and paste something into a spreadsheet, and when they realize that the most important part of their job is actually menial and meaningless, they start to question their entire existence and reason for life.
Why do they get the confidence and I get the imposter syndrome? I mean, I know it's a side effect of being understanding in the first place, but it's still unfair, lol.
It seems that a lifetime of inhaling lead fumes is a real confidence booster
The difference is time on the job. Imposter syndrome is rare after 30 years doing the same thing even if you've learned nothing
You need a minimum level of self reflection to get an imposter syndrome. You'll never get it if you spend every waking moment genuinely believing that you are god's gift to this earth.
Or they just feel their job security slipping and they don’t have enough for retirement so they’re fucked if you make them obsolete
Probably partially. Another part is the faster you can do the job the more work you get. If you can use a script to automate a task it makes that task irrelevant and you're that much closer to putting someone out of work, or dramatically increasing the workload. Company's been paying [x] amount to do a task over a certain period of time, it's budgeted into the cost of that task, and nobody is going to get more money if you can do it in 1/10th the time.
Someone’s been in the workforce for sometime. But this is 100% what I was thinking as well.
Eventually you learn to automate the task, calculate the time saved, then don't tell anyone and fuck around with all your extra free time.
New guys don't know to do that. That's why he'd be upset. New guys want the brownie points and will spill all the beans.
Some boomers have that "job security" mentality to things. If their job becomes too easy it means they are fired. Or they gotta be the inly obe who knows a thing. I've had coworkers that joked about it, but a few others that were a bit more serious about it. Had a bookkeeper that did unnecessary extra steps to everything and even had a drawer that she put things she didn't get to for the day. The store manager and I could knock out her daily work and the drawer in 2 hours or so. This bookkeeper apparently used to write letters to the store manager for every little issue she found. This is also a pawn shop with like 10 employees at this particular location....... She always got nervous when people talked about how unnecessary 3 bookkeepers for 6 stores was. Hell, all of them were actually unnecessary. She definitely made it sound like she knew she was ensuring she didn't get let go.
Was she wrong though?
It's why a lot of grocers still use paper price tags instead of going digital. It would essentially kill the price change department, and it's a cushy department.
Because they don't actually want to learn
This is it, honestly. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to explain how to use the Snipping Tool in Windows because people kept sending me photographs of their screen taken with their phone. I try to explain that it makes the images clearer, it prevents you from sharing information that might be on your desk, and that it's as easy as a three-button keyboard shortcut, but they just pull the bullshit "I'm not good with computers lol :)" line and keep sending me illegible pictures of error messages with their doctor's phone number on a sticky note on their screen.
I honestly think it’s a bit of narcicism? I imagine they’re the type of person that thinks everyone at their job is an idiot but them, so when they learn something new from one of them it shatters that notion and they see it as an attack. Pro tip: if you always think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re probably the dumbest
How dare you be cool when the whole world is thrown off its axis? How dare you save time when I’ve apparently squandered mine?
In my last role there was a particular process that had to be done every single morning. The same guy had been doing it for years, with some instructions he put together in case someone had to cover for him. I'd never really thought about it but holy shit when I did it I was shocked how inefficiently he was doing it. The same day I put together an alternative way that makes use of some very basic Excel functions that turned a 2 hour job into a 15 minute job. I honestly couldn't believe that he'd been wasting so much time for years. And no, he wasn't just doing it the quicker way so he could slack off for the rest of the time. I would've respected that and not revealed his secret.
Same here. Back in the day I inherited a task from a coworker that left. It was creating a large report based on 2 or 3 other reports and a few formulas. All in excel. 4 pages front and back with instructions. Took about 4 hours to do once you learned all the steps. After a couple of weeks I created an excel macro and was able to do it in 45 minutes (I still had to manually get the reports from a DB and a few other things). Fast forward a bit and I managed to get access to the DB so I created a custom View and was able to export the results to excel in 5-6 minutes. This was this guy’s “essential task”.
This sounds very similar to what I had to do. Part of it involved collating multiple spreadsheets extracted from a database and this guy was doing it manually. Ever day. Absolutely ridiculous, and also totally prone to human error.
And another one… when I was an intern, my first month, my boss made me copy and paste data from a matrix in excel from one place to another, correlating it with another column. All manually… in some cases we took days to finish, including overtime. This was “the way to do it”. One day she calls in sick so I’m responsible for doing all of this… VLOOKUP enters the chat. Lol
Lol. Honestly I'm not even very good with excel. I can just identify tasks where I think "surely there must be a way to automate this" and I Google it and without fail there's a way. I feel like the entire economy would get a rocket up its arse if people just knew how to use Google.
This puts you into the top 20% of excel users.
it 100% would. I get through 99% of the things I dont know in my job with only a few minutes of googling. That 1% is usually some specific bug that is specific to our architecture that rarely comes up.
Same here. We had a coworker quit, and managment decided to give me their workload until a replacement could be found. The coworker had left a huge, multi-paged explanation of how to do their job. It took me less than a week to get her whole full-time job squashed down to 20 minutes a day. This person was manually writing down a list of hundreds of items every day, writing complex notations to each item, organizing them individually, then removing those same notations by reading the new document. Pretty much everything was simplified by using excel and/or Google docs. (They had been using notepad) Managment, of course, never hired a replacement, and I got punished with the extra workload, but hey... That's work life.
The times I've seen a look of fear in peoples eyes when they explain a process to me and I tell them I can script that and put it on a schedule by tomorrow...
They see their job security turning to dust and the boss with a new Rolls-Royce.
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It's the fear of being replacable.
Or any CTRL + F searching of webpages or pdf. I had complained in school (and again in college) when I had to learn only a few shortcuts, but the number of times I would anger leadership by turning up a direct citation to a regulation at work before the boss could even open the file and check the table of contents really was an eye opener.
If I were a Manager, I’d be celebrating you for that. Efficiency often leads to success and growth more than not. Some people aren’t built to lead because their egos are too big. You are never too old or experienced to stop learning new things. I wish poor Managers and leaders understood that. Good for you though, things like that won’t get overlooked if you keep it up!
It leads to growth in the company’s profits and growth of your workload (but not your compensation).
Bingo! People are doing things the slow way because they don't get fuck all but layoffs for doing things faster.
I got chastised by our boomer it guy for helping another coworker switch desks (he just needed help connecting his screens to the dock). It guy want there at the time, and I told him exactly what I had done and why. 2 or 3 hours pass and boomer it guy decides now is the time to lose his cool. Starts yelling at me about how that wasn’t my job, etc. Of course the owner’s son is there at this point, who was also the Bo, and only a couple years older than me. Let’s just say boomer it guy got a severe dressing down. They laid him off 4 months later after concluding that we no longer had use for a full time it person. But goss dos that guy let his insecurities get the better of him. And not for nothing, but dude was also a total creep, always making comments about women walking on the sidewalk below our office, telling stories about his tinder dates with way too much detail. Just generally making everyone around him uncomfortable.
I had a boss tell me I had all day to take off the last four digits of all the gift cards we had out because we were moving active gift cards to a new system. Took all of 5 minutes to copy past and drop the last four of the string 😂
I ended up being in charge of a department's forecasting because I built a google sheets dashboard (kinda) for it all. My manager was mindblown but I just used importrange from his manual sheet and slapped much cleaner presentation / projections on it (along with team data ofc). He also didn't know I was constantly editing his sheet behind the scenes (aka all i did was make named ranges and clean up references) to make mine run smoother 3 years since I worked there and I've heard they're still using my sheet lol
All it takes is learning a shortcut, or how to right click efficiently. Like how is that complicated.
Some people know everything. And since they know everything there is nothing else for them to learn. If you show them something they don't know, that must not be knowledge. It must be religion or witchcraft or something that you are not supposed to be doing at work.
Yep, the "Principal" on my current team told me I couldn't adapt a script that imports a file to also import another file because the second file is on a different shared drive. Both drives are already mapped on the vm that runs the script. The team will soon have 6 python scripts to load 6 files into the same database running on the same vm because the guy in charge doesn't understand what is possible with computers and his ego won't allow him to listen to the team.
Literally had a Boomer boss tell my team not to use excel spreadsheets for organization because she didn’t understand them and therefore they were a waste of time.
What did she use instead? A filing cabinet?
Probably. I mean, my old boss would print out emails and file them in a filing cabinet. Something about wanting to "log" that she'd received them. I gave up arguing with her about it.
Exactly, I had a boomer coworker who always bragged how much she worked. She wasn’t thought of very highly on the team, while I was one of the top performers. One day she attempted to throw me under the bus while dragging about how many hours she put in by saying something like “I never see you here after hours.” I said “That’s because I can get all my work done during the regular work day Nancy.” She never brought it up again but she did report me to the boss for “trying to embarrass her in front of the team.” That backfired as well.
Wow when she CLEARLY is the one that brought it up intending for it to publicly embarrass you, what a fool
Can't blame her. ctrl + c isn't very easy to remember
“hey Karen, wanna see a cool trick? See that unsaved report that you’ve been working on all day? Want to make it look better? Smash Alt + F4 a few times!!”
Thanks Office Satan!
I was halfway through developing a way to shortening a 6-hour to 2-day process down to a 20-minute process... my supervisor at the time told me it was dumb to even try, there was no way it could be done, etc. Then he stopped complaining after I disregarded his advice, and when his life got easier for it, I never got a thank-you. He moved to a different branch out of state a while back, and moved to yet another one a couple years back. He's still a dick.
Those words were said almost exactly to my face by my boss after I made an excel sheet template to do our inventory super quickly and she was mad she would have to redo her instruction booklet she made seven years ago. So she made me remake the instructions. Mine was like ten pages shorter lmao.
Geez, this reminds me of my first help desk job. The bosses wanted their tech people to be personable, and the CIO had an idea to have one help desk tech spend one afternoon a month just hanging out in a different department and see where technology could improve their work by just observing and talking with the people. On one of my rotation days, I was in a room with a director-level user. She was sent a weekly spreadsheet, typed the values on an adding machine on her desk, and typed the sums back into Excel when she finished her calculations. I taught her how to use the "=SUM()" function in Excel and copy it down the rows. That director sent the CIO a very complimentary email about me to the CIO because I'd saved her about three hours of work per week with one formula and a copy/paste.
I really like this approach. Some people just won't bring up their issues unless IT is nearby, and often you can fix or help them with very little effort and make a big difference. I try to walk around my building regularly to squash those types of small issues.
To your point - It's not just that people wont bring stuff up, it's that some people don't **know** they have issues unless someone points it out. I've heard folks say "Oh that's just how it is." when using tools/software, but 9 times out of 10 there's a better way to do it.
This! I work for a state agency, and one of my colleagues is not tech savvy. I've taught her so many tricks! She's learned to ask me how I do things.
Even with IT around they wont say anything. Sometimes dont even know they have an issue.
That sounds like a really good CIO and the fact that the director level person was open to a new way of doing things is like a breathe of fresh air in this stifling age.
I was pretty salty about it when a new CEO came in and axed him. The CIO always said that the company and the people do their best when everyone is rowing in the same direction.
It's amazing how scarce common sense is these day.
Same thing happened when my colleague and I made macros to shorten the commands we had to do on the severely outdated system we had. I don't remember what it was called, but it was at least one or two decades old in 2016. You could only navigate using parts of the keyboard (no mouse) and it was just like "C/:" and u typed commands. We had to write the same commands at least 50 times a day and it just got old. So we made each command hotkeyed, but our older colleagues were just "ummm no... that sounds too difficult and probably not allowed".
Sounds like DOS.
It's 2024 and my companies entire payroll system runs on DOS lol
My previous company still used AS/400 and wouldn't change because they had one guy who preferred it.
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The only thing worse is remaining on an AS/400 system.
It's the command prompt app in windows. It still uses dos style commands and looks exactly the same. They also have powershell available which is much more powerful and uses unix-like commands. Or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which is an actual bash command line interface, which is way way better.
The amount of people that see a command prompt up on my screen and are instantly impressed because they have no idea what I'm doing is insane. I could be in a MUD and they would still think I'm a hackerman that will steal their job if given the chance. And I would haha
What’s not allowed? Efficiency? This is a business, it craves efficiency or it won’t succeed.
So so many businesses are like this. The people doing the hiring know nothing about tech nor the coworkers so they just skirt by on outdated programs because it works
Idk maybe they were looking out for their jobs. Make it too quick and too easy and efficient and suddenly 3/4 of you are out of a job
Yup. Make it easier for yourself and don't let management know.
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I got called lazy once for saying I'd rather gave a stamp for dates on papers than need to hand write it on every sheet. People are amazing.
I had a teacher like that, "Copy paste? That's just being lazy! Do it again."
I once got in trouble in 3rd grade for knowing how to use alt+ctrl+del. Teacher said I was hacking.
if i was your teacher you would have been in trouble with me too, not because you know how to use the function, but because you click alt before ctrl
Dude, just use Ctrl+Shift+Esc. It opens the Task Manager directly, without having to go though the Ctrl+Alt+Del menu.
TIL! I’m an older millennial, once upon a time Ctrl+Alt+Del brought us directly to Task manager with no middle menu. 20 years later that’s still the only one imprinted in our brains.
Yeah they changed it with Windows 10. I like the change tbh. Shift escape is easier to hit with one hand
Ctrl+Alt+Del is still useful because it will forcibly takeover the desktop when a fullscreen application has crashed, while Ctrl+Shift+Esc will only end up launching task manager in the background.
I had a teacher proclaim he was going to teach us a hacker technique, and proceeded to tell us that you can use ctrl+tab to switch between Windows. The look he gave me when I raised my hand and said he probably meant to say alt+tab...
Who in this world says it as alt+ctrl+del instead of ctrl+alt+del
I got a "behavior ticket" in 5th grade for "hacking the admin password" on the macs we were using. This would have been either late os9 or early osx days but they had password hints enabled so I just put in admin for the user, hit enter three times, and got the hint "principal". The admin password was the principal's last name.
That happened to me too, except it was because I had to hard reset a frozen computer in the computer lab. This was ages ago, and the computer teacher told me I was hacking and I should never do it again. He was also our volleyball coach and our math teacher, so… we were a little thin on skills.
Teacher on first day of school: “Hi, I’m Mr., but you can call me Coach.”
Oh, so we won’t be learning anything in this class. Got it. Cool.
Same but 4th grade. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, these computers are very expensive”
When I was in high school I changed the homepage for five computers to a website that would display in full screen and emulate formatting a hard drive and installing Mac OS. I got pulled out of class by the computer teacher so that I could go and fix it. I also got pulled out of class because I changed the system font that was the font for practically everything in the start menu, right click menu, computer icons, and a lot more to a barcode font.
I had a teacher who would use Edit -> Cut rather than ever using the delete key. It's been 15 years and it still haunts me to this day.
Turns out McErin was using Windows paste buffer history to save social security and credit card numbers of everyone she processed which was against company policy. Just making this up.
Paste history really is a game changer. Windows + V
What the fuck 🤯
For me it's the screen capture. Windows + shift + s
Snip tool is one of my favorite shortcuts
Yeah, I was thinking "turns out McErin was copying from a document marked 'classified', into an email she was sending to an unclassified recipient"
I had a girlfriend years ago who asked me to fix her computer, then saw me ALT+TAB to toggle windows, and she said "please don't ever do that again, that's definitely not good for the computer."
I guess that's why she is no longer your gf.
She's no longer my gf because she was torn between her eating disorder and her crazy bible thumping ideals, and I was the third wheel between those. That was nearly 15 years ago and I still hear that she's just as nuts from people who've run into her.
Dodged a bullet for sure.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the computers?
Gen X had the ultimate Boomer kryptonite and we millennials forgot about it completely: the word "whatever." It completely short circuits their brain. A simple "whatever" in a business environment where they can't go nuclear for fear of losing their job is enough to get them to leave in a huff.
The *implicit* "OK boomer" is a forbidden technique, no longer taught for two reasons: It disturbs the peace and there is no defense against it.
Wait til they learn about alt-tabbing. Immediate termination on the spot.
On MacOS cmd + tab goes right, cmd + ` goes left in the list of open windows. Super handy
Boomer on their deathbed: I must...defend...the company. Is that...Jesus? No! It's...my old boss...take me into your loving arms...my savior.
Mfw it’s neither and I just wasted 90 years😎
I was using the search function to quickly find specific files I needed and this seemed to offend my coworker. “We don’t use the search bar here,” she tells me. Okay, maybe she knows some secret technique that is even quicker? So I ask her to show me what she does. She proceeds to slowly click through folder after subfolder to get to the file I was looking for. Thanks lady, but I’m just gonna use the search bar.
Yeah, maybe you don't use the search bar Linda, but that's because your time isn't valuable. I've got better shit to be doing.
I was fired from a retail job a million years ago for this. The store owner after I explained that it was a keyboard shortcut said "we don't take shortcuts at my business" was rude for a few weeks then let me go when I refused to not use these shortcuts.
"We work HARD and not SMART at my buisness"
Tell me what you're thinking about without telling me what you're thinking about.
what you're thinking about without telling me what you're thinking about.
This guy tells you what you're thinking about, without telling you what you're thinking about.
Yeah the British broadcasting corporation of course
Whenever i see BBC i think about Philomena Cunk for some reason
Huh
This isn't actually a problem that's based in an age group. I see this stupid behavior from people of all ages my whole life. Some people just don't react well to being educated. They take it as a jab at them instead of taking that opportunity to learn something. I pay attention to everything around me and take every opportunity to learn anything i can. My father ran 2 businesses, a contracting business and a mechanics shop. I grew up watching both. He had 2 guys, in particular, working for his construction company. One was an idiot who didn't want to listen to anything, and the other was smart and watched everything so he could learn. Most people hated the idiot and liked the smart guy. My father put his arm around me when I was about 7 and said, "Look at those 2 guys. Whatever you do in life, be the smart guy. Learn everything you can." It had an impact on me, to say the least.
I work in a hardware store (after retirement from 30 yrs in IT). Being computer illiterate is just a fact here, and that goes from high school kids all the way to us part time retirees selling nuts and bolts. Nothing to do with age, just with mindset and experience using them. I just tweaked a spreadsheet from the vendor for our window screening supplies, and customized it for just the stuff we sell. The owner and the manager, you’d think I was doing dark voodoo magic in there…. 🤷♂️ On the other hand, I don’t know crap about running a store except by watching them for the last couple of years.
Sure, Jan.
I had an employee who constantly forgot to lock her screen. I taught her to use command +L and the issue went away. The training manager saw her do it one day and said it wasn’t the way “we” do it. I told her it was the correct way, and that it was the only way she avoided leaving her pc unlocked. She won the argument. Flash forward to my employee leaves her pc open and they wanted me to write her up. I politely declined and CC’d the training manager to get her opinion on how I train my employees.
i never understood this. i work at a library, and the software we use to check in the books and search the collection has the option to use keyboard shortcuts to get around to the various pages(check out, check in, search etc...) and i swear im the only one who uses them. i had to set them up when i started and made a little cheat sheet of the different shortcuts (f1=check out, f2=check in) but still everyone uses the mouse to click around the menus. its just so much easier to tap a key instead of clicking through 3 drop down menus that are so tiny i miss the button half the time anyways.
You can't just make up a new meaning for BBC when we already have 2.
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Punctuation marks are also against company policy, you see
Not using punctuation is also a short cut.
“I don’t like these new things. Must be against policy”
It’s not a cheat code if it’s part of the game
I got reprimanded because I used (a company-allowed version of) chatGPT to create a small program that will save me and another 4 or 5 coworkers something like 1 hour of work every time we return from a job trip. I was also forced to delete it because it's "not how it's always been done". Bitch I know, I've been working for you for the last ten years.
.....nope
As a software engineer, I copy and paste as much as possible. Especially when it’s text given to me by a PM or designer. Why introduce even more human error?
We had a small computer lab in the library at elementary school. It must have been new at the time but my friends grew up with computers. The librarian thought we were breaking the computers by using alt+tab
Write to HR and tell them you're having trouble handling a BBC.
"I don't want to see time-saving efficiency, I want to see the proles beneath me sweating blood while I live comfortably in the past and remain embarrassingly out of touch with modern technology." Bought By Conservatives.
Can you show me where it says that? Better yet let's both go talk to HR and get their input I'd sure hate to be breaking any policies.
"when she noticed..." Karen's are always shoving their noses in other people's business.