Control

I had a friend once come over and was trying to do something on my computer, and it wasn't working. I tell him exactly what to do, and it doesn't work. I watch him do exactly what needs to be done, and it still doesn't work.

I take control, doing the exact same thing we tried 3 times already... and it works.

I'm convinced electronics just hate some people and refuse to work for them.

watching my boss shut down the front desk computer at EOD:

"you know, instead of clicking the X on 5 windows, you can hit ctrl+shift+Q once and save all that wasted time clicking. AND it saves me time tomorrow by opening all the windows at once, instead of only the last one you closed"

"oh, thanks! you know all the time-savers"

next day:

back to clicking every X

Edit: Cut

Edit: Paste (back in same spot so you don't use the original)

Start Menu: Microsoft PowerPoint

File:New Slide Show

New Slide

Edit: Paste

File: Save: Presentation943.ppt

File:Print

Printer: Microsoft Print to PDF

Save: Presentation943.pdf

Start Menu: Microsoft Edge

Bing Search:Google.com

Google.com search:Yahoo Mail

New email

To:chiliedogg

Subject: link

Message Text:

C:\Users\Windows\Jimmy\Desktop\Presentation943.pdf

Over the years I've become accustomed to a highly customised, privacy centric, keyboard-driven workflow that makes heavy use of tiling and modality.

I'm also "the technical one" in my family and friend group...

So when people sit me down in front of their bloated, ad-powered, AI "enhanced," stock laptops, and ask me to, essentially spend an hour learning about an obscure Windows problem space, then debugging and implementing the fix, I don't blame them for not realising the pain they cause me.

Seeing people with respectable typing speed using just their two index fingers. What a waste. They could have been great.

Go on a older person's phone. Whenever I have to do anything on my mom's phone, it gives me a headache. Everything is too bright and big and unorganized and has so man notifications! And her phone is much newer than mine and it's still hard for me.

I try not to judge people....unless I see them right-clicking to copy and paste. Ew.

Every single time anybody has had to take remote control of a work computer while I watch feels like a violation and/or some sort of supernatural haunting.

Looking over someone's shoulder while they clearly engage the interface wrong I have a much easier time doing. It's the disembodied element that gets me.

When I'm in the passenger seat, I push on the imaginary brake. When I'm watching someone on a computer, I'm pushing shortcuts on the imaginary keyboard.

But on the flip side. If you tell somebody something they don't know like:

'You can open links in new tabs by klicking on them with the mouse wheel.'

Or

'You can reopen closed tabs by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T'

They look at you like you've just shown them the meaning of life. Bonus points if you see them using it later.

Watching somebody scroll to the bottom of a very long list by clicking the arrow button under the scrollbar is my idea of hell.

there is a reason i use i3wm on linux.

You cannot use my computer, it is impossible.

i am okay with this during the few instances where they do things in a better way than i would have. like utilizing some extremely rare/custom keybinds for certain tasks in IDEs. those experiences are eye opening and humbling.

most of the other times though, yeah it's pretty rough

Inputs login, grabs the mouse, clicks on the password field, inputs password, grabs the mouse again and clicks OK

Watching my mom do anything on the computer is a true exercise of patience. She found something neat on the internet? Open LibreOffice Writer, copy-paste the article title. Funny picture? Copy-paste it to that same doc. Youtube video? Copy-paste the video title to the doc.

She complained more than once that she couldn't find those things some time later. I told her not to rely on titles, especially on Youtube, and to save the whole address instead. Of course, she ignored me and still saves titles and pictures in a .doc

Having spent many years in tech support and also being my family tech support, this post pains me.greatly.

I get to see other people ways of using the computer daily.

yep, not using scroll wheel but clicking on the up/down arrow in the side bar, or, especially in Windows, when the remote IT guy go through start menu and type "control panel" and go here and here and here and you are wondering how this guy knows so few?!?

Oh my goodness... my job requires me to work with a team on some fairly industry specialized software (steaming and broadcast television); the way my coworkers have their shit set up is so weird. It's like we are all speaking the same language, but with wildly different dialects.

I had to teach my little brother how to download a exe yesterday. Like just the simple every software or game type of installation:
click download on website -> click windows version on GitHub list -> extract folder -> find exe
Quite honestly im impressed he's been using a computer for like 4 years without ever encountering a .zip file

And don't get me started with my highschool teachers. One of them got SUPER excited because I showed her how to enable looping on a YouTube video because she kept clicking replay every 3 minutes when the song ended (she plays Spanish music before class starts)

Ugh it’s the worst. Every time I remotely connect with Social Security support, there’s always such a delay while they click around. Thankfully they help me understand how many viruses I have by running some weird command called Net Stat or something idk. I see the screen flash and it’s scary. They’re even so helpful that they even help me login to my bank and transfer funds to get rid of the net viruses! I only wish they would scroll the mouse instead of clicking on the arrow bars. They’re helpful, but man do I hate when they yell and curse at me when I don’t have money and can’t pay them until next week. But I guess it’s worth the small computer struggles, but boy does it bother me when they don’t scroll the mouse wheel!

There's an older guy at my work that defies all stereotypes. Hes in his 60s, but everytime I watch him share his screen, I learn something new.

I had to watch someone use emacs today.

There's an application we use at work that I used to be an admin for at a previous job so I know all of the keyboard shortcuts, watching people use a mouse for navigation makes my skin crawl but I've been teaching some of my coworkers so it's getting better.

Um have you ever tried to debug something over a zoom call on a *nix shell cli? This person’s nightmare is my Tuesday morning before I get coffee.

Watching my partner play a FPS game has the same energy

Worst I had was guiding someone through some install process in bash. They didn’t know how to use Tab. And made a lot of typos of course. And spoke in an accent heavily different from mine.

Those are the times you have to mute yourself while watching…

I'm pretty savvy but I have learned a few tricks from others. Although some people make me grind my teeth down to nubs

Sorry that I'm not used to having all windows in the same context, differently sized by default, needing to manually arrange them again and again to do anything.

I hate stacking WMs, especially Windows.

completely agree

YAYYYY

I'M GONNA USE YOUR COMPUTER TO STEAL YOUR IDENTITY

It's the same reason I can't watch people play games.

If I'm watching a let's play, I'm yelling at the screen inside 5 minutes because the player missed the SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS SLIGHTLY HIDDEN DOOR GO BACK AND GET THE LOOT YOU MISSED OH MY GOD

and if I try to watch someone play in-person, I'm still screaming, it's just all internal.