Now I've heard it all
Way back in October 2005, I published a series of posts entitled 'The new IT training'. One of my central arguments was that IT applications training was becoming largely redundant because such a large portion of the population was now IT-savvy (probably more because of their engagement with computers at home than through any efforts on behalf of their employers).
Obviously I was jumping the gun. I ran a workshop this week with six IT trainers working in the National Health Service. IT trainers usually have great stories, but these two really startled me:
- One IT user complained because the lead on their foot pedal wasn't long enough to reach the floor (the foot pedal being, of course, their mouse).
- Another complained that every time they pressed a letter 'A' on the keyboard, they got a letter 'Q' on the screen. Apparently, this person had found it confusing working with a QWERTY keyboard, had taken the cap off every key and simply rearranged them in alphabetical order.
If you can beat these stories, I'd love to know about it.
posted by Clive Shepherd @ 5:48 PM #
6 comments
links to this post
6 Comments:
When I was in charge of a LearnDirect centre, one user was moving the mouse on the screen (then he improved : he was hovering it over the table) while another had to be stop short erasing a mistake with tipp-ex...
My husband works for the help desk for a certain library software, so he mostly talks to school librarians and media specialists. He had a call a while back from a woman who complained that the battery was running low on her hand-held scanner. He explained that the scanner had to be plugged into an outlet to charge; it could recharge the battery just be being plugged into the computer through the USB.
She said she didn't think she had anything she could plug in, so he asked her to describe what she had in the box the scanner was shipped in. After all, he thought it was possible that the adapter didn't get shipped.
Her response, "Well, I have this thing with two metal prongs. Is that what needs to be plugged into the wall?"
The TTA reported several teachers getting stuck in an endless loop by repeatedly aswering NO to the prompt 'Are you sure?'
When asked why they didn't click 'YES', they invariably replied, 'I'm not sure about anything!'
All from my last job:
- a woman who I was coaching on Word use amazed by "cutting and pasting": previously she'd written item a down on paper, changed to document b and typed it back in (after at least two years of working in civil service administrative jobs with minimum IT competency requirements)
- staff member jamming their CD drive with a 3.5" floppy
- field investigator creating documents that may be used in criminal investigations who had only a handful of saved files: he's simply open up the last one, edit it and save it and close, overwriting the original
- highly paid consultant from our IT "partner" complaining our projector wasn't working which was solved when I plugged the monitor lead in to his laptop.
You just have to keep your sense of humour!!
Oh. My. God. This post (and the comments) has had me , quite literally, crying laughing.
I can't quite summon up anything as spectacularly stupid as those comments from the world of IT, but I spent a few years working in museums in Ireland and was once asked (in complete seriousness) when leprechauns 'had gone extinct'. No prizes for guessing the nationality of the person asking the question...
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home