Tech Illiteracy: Your Stories

[Team Fail]

I can assume that a lot of us know how to use technology. And there are people that just cannot. What kind of stories do you have about people, technology, and the stupidest moments they had? Here's my little collection:

Hopefully if I get a job at a computer store, I'll have more stories like these to one day tell.

I just remembered another though. When I was in Grade 4, our school had the awesome Apple computers with the colored tops. Like these:

Spoiler:

Anyways, at this point in time, I wasn't really computer-literate, but I knew that if it did weird things I normally wouldn't see from the other students using the computer, I knew something was wrong. And one day, we all came into the lab and sat at our stations. This one girl turned on her computer, and it made the most twisted sound I've ever heard a computer make in my entire life. It sounded like fingers on a chalkboard, but MUCH worse. Only after the teacher hears that does she tell her NOT to sit there because the computer crashed.

And 2 years later, all the schools in the district were switching over to Windows XP computers. At this point in time, I was really good with Windows and knew the ins and outs of it rather well. We were having a small discussion on the computers and to not go overboard because they were still being set up. She then went on to mention that we'd have to go through some kind of "training" on how to use these computers. Thank god we didn't. But she said, that she'd have to teach us some keyboard shortcuts. "All of the Windows shortcuts are similar to those of Apple computers.", she said, "And I'm pretty sure that Ctrl+S is for saving, and Ctrl+Q is for quitting." I then raised my hand and said "Uh, quitting is Alt+F4 on a Windows computer." She looked at me and said "I'm pretty sure it's Ctrl+Q." I said to her, "No, it's Alt+F4. I own a Windows computer and I know how to use one." She still denied it.

And another 2 years later, in Jr High at a different school, we still had the crap of Windows XP computers. The network they were on was simply awful. Some days, it'd take about 2 minutes to log you in, but on a bad day, it could take 15 or 20 minutes. Just awful. But anyways, one day, a student was having fun playing around with his friend's account on one of the many computers in the school. What he did, was set the background as a tiling image of a woman with the worst shirt on, and she had rather large cleavage. Like, reeeeeeeeealy large. As he was logging off, a teacher was walking by, so he yanked the plugin from the wall. Which was a really bad idea. He got in crap for undoing the computer, but the teacher also wanted to know what he was doing that required that act of desperation. So he had to log back in. And show them the background. And the fact that he damaged the fragile connection the computer had to the server. It took 15 minutes of logging in, 15 minutes of that background, 15 minutes of having a teacher watch him as he fixed the persons account, and after that, he lost computer privileges for the rest of the year.

Here's a fun page for your pleasure too: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/

Gogogogogogo

[droomph]

I don't know if this counts, but my school crashed their e-mail server without a backup for about two or three days, making it harder for everyone to contact their teachers. And they're probably so slow on these things that the teachers apparently still can't log into their e-mail, though they do have their e-mail addresses.

[Hybrid Trainer]

I've seen quite a few cases of IT literacy, one of which came from my secondary IT teacher. Basically we were about half way through a module for our coursework, one that would make up a pretty big chunk of our final grade. It was web design so it was pretty complicated, we had to draw up page layouts and site maps and all that jazz before even touching something like dreamweaver. We were coming to the point now where we'd spent about two months on this module and we were finishing our sites and just adding to them to get a higher mark, when one day the teacher tells us that something went wrong and we have to scrap this module and start a new one.
Obviously everyone was pissed since we'd all put a lot of time and effort into this project, and for a change the majority of us were enjoying it too. After a while of us complaining to him we gave in and finished up the lesson by starting another module based around using presentation software.
At the end of the day I get a message saying that the teacher wants me to come to his room after school. Assuming I'd left something in there, which turns out I had, I went along and spoke to him after my last class. He waits until everyone has left the room before opening up dreamweaver and begins to explain why we had to drop this module. Turns out he didn't know how to implement CSS stylesheets into web pages and without that we couldn't get any higher than a grade D. So I spent the next half an hour showing him how to do it and then leaving him to it to play around with the software while I ran off to try and get to a college interview on time.
Needless to say telling that story to the guy who was interviewing me pretty much sealed my place on the course.

[F1refly]

Well, in our small little town we have a lot of farmers. They only know hat Flat screens are better, Wi-Fi is better and so on. Yet, one day a farmer comes into the local Computer guys shop, I'm there buying games and stuff, and the farmer brings in this old, beat up computer from the 80s and asks the guy to upgrade it's hardware and install Windows 7 on it. The computer was some old IBM commonly used in offices and such. The farmer could not understand why the guy wasn't able to do the stuff he asked and eventually conceded and just asked for maintenace to be done to the PC.

True Story

[Trainer Matt]

I once had a girl on my college course complain that the PC she was at was broken in some way. After resigning myself to investigate, I discovered that she'd been spending the past 5 minutes pushing the Dell logo, rather than the actual power button.

A different girl from the same course spent 10 minutes expressing her annoyance (quite loudly) at another PC. She'd been switching it on and off constantly, checked the various connections, pulling cables out and thrusting them back in place. The problem? She'd not turned on the monitor.

I could probably fill a book with similar stories. It was a long year. '

[Otter Mii-kun]

Back when I was in 8th Grade, when my school district received a major technology upgrade as part of a bond issue passed two years earlier, I was in a computer class, where I learned about Microsoft Office applications and keyboarding skills. In that class one day, the teacher called me up to review my progress, and I saw her scrolling using the scroll arrow buttons, which she gave a feeling of it being too slow. I then told her about the scroll wheel in the center of the mouse, and showed her how to use it. She was amazed to find out that the center button/wheel even had a purpose in the first place!

A few years later, in 11th Grade, when I was attending my regional vocational center, I took a class there which was supposed to be about computer network security. In this class, instead, the students were being taught the basics of Windows, including window controls, commands, and also basic hardware concepts (such as hard drives, optical and floppy drives, motherboards, processors, RAM, and expansion cards) for much of the school year. At one point, the teacher had said that I knew more than he did!
Sad to say, the class never really got into computer network security. Worse, the vocational center was (and still is) run by a big-city school district (Flint Community Schools) constantly plagued with financial, safety, and student achievement problems. (When my dad attended that center back in its early years, he took carpentry, and things were so problematic (even the teacher), that he eventually told me that he ended up teaching the class, as he had learned basic carpentry and building trade skills from his dad.)

[⊗Slenderman⊗]

For the longest time, I had to post my mom's pictures on Facebook for her because she didn't know how. She can now, though.

I'm not exactly advanced in my knowledge of computers, but I know basic stuff (sort of).

So yeah. I've become the tech support for my family.

[Brendino]

My aunt is pretty clueless when it comes to using her computer, so I've had a lot of... interesting stories with her. One example included her complaining that she didn't have Google on her desktop, even though her homepage was Google, and all she just had to click on her Internet Explorer icon (trying to explain the difference to her between different internet browsers took me way too long). I eventually just renamed the IE shortcut to Google, and she was much happier. A more recent example is that she insists on playing Spider Solitaire on a sketchy website, despite it being one of the pre-installed games on her computer. Long story short, I can't convince her to use the version on the computer, but she figures as long as she runs her anti-virus 4 or 5 times in a row after she's done playing, it'll be okay.

And now I have to buy her a new mouse, because she figured it would be a good idea to take her old one all apart to get the dust out of it. It can't be cordless, though, or else the mouse and the computer might not talk to each other...

[Insomniac]

Originally Posted by Brendino

My aunt is pretty clueless when it comes to using her computer, so I've had a lot of... interesting stories with her. One example included her complaining that she didn't have Google on her desktop, even though her homepage was Google, and all she just had to click on her Internet Explorer icon (trying to explain the difference to her between different internet browsers took me way too long). I eventually just renamed the IE shortcut to Google, and she was much happier. A more recent example is that she insists on playing Spider Solitaire on a sketchy website, despite it being one of the pre-installed games on her computer. Long story short, I can't convince her to use the version on the computer, but she figures as long as she runs her anti-virus 4 or 5 times in a row after she's done playing, it'll be okay.

And now I have to buy her a new mouse, because she figured it would be a good idea to take her old one all apart to get the dust out of it. It can't be cordless, though, or else the mouse and the computer might not talk to each other...

I think you just about take the cake, here.

My story:

My grandma is 70, and she recently got a new mac desktop computer. She automatically assumed that you can just type things and it would just work.

She spent at least 30 minutes typing "google" in a notebook in her desktop trying to get it to search.
She showed me her huge notepad full of the repeating phrase "google chicken recipe google chicken recipe". :C

I had to click on google for her.