Man in TICKET OFFICE (crossed out and replaced with INFO HUB): OK, one more time: Go home and log on to our website from your computer, create an account and purchase your ticket with your credit or debit card, download the ticket to a smartphone, then come back at the allocated time... Just what part of “easier and more convenient” don’t you get?
I won’t get a Kindle because everything you highlight is immediately visible to the entire world. Translation: There’s an option to share highlights on Facebook.
I won’t join Facebook because it was set up by the CIA to keep tabs on us. (More of a conspiracy theory.)
I don’t want to get a computer because I’m afraid of spam and viruses.
I won’t join Twitter because I don’t want to get trolled by a Nazi.
I don't want any of my information stored in a database because the whole world can see it. (This was in the days when databases lived on one computer that wasn’t connected to anything and were not much more than a card index. Oddly, many believed in the internet before it had been invented. When it arrived, some wouldn’t buy anything online "because villains might capture my bank details as they wafted through the ether".)
Many think technology sprang into being the moment they discovered it. They don’t want to know its history. They don’t want to think there were years in which their friends knew about this stuff and they didn’t. There was a moment when rather grand people finally got a computer and managed not to see that their friends were ten or even 20 years ahead.
Staffers thought the machines would make their jobs more difficult – not more easy. (And there was a moment when it looked as if we'd never get men to touch a keyboard.) But when they couldn’t avoid computers any more, they treated them with disdain, refusing to learn the terminology so that it was hard to tell them how to do anything. I even think that class came into it – computers were machinery, and somehow beneath people’s notice, like typewriters and sewing machines. Surely they weren’t expected to operate machinery?
Word processors existed in the early 70s, but even by the late 70s most offices didn’t have them. I temped in an office where there was one word processor on a stand. Most of the time it sat idle. Only certain designated people were allowed to touch it. It didn’t even have its own chair! Very occasionally someone would come in and fiddle with it.
Typing into a computer was known as “inputting” – or to some, “imputing”. I did a couple of WP courses, and worked out that WP jobs paid a lot more than the genteel book publishing roles suitable for a nice young girl that I’d been pursuing. So I got a job in the media and ended up as a journalist.
Them: And what do you do?
Me: I work on a computer magazine.
Them: [with look of utter terror] I'm afraid I know nothing about computers!
Me: Oh, neither do I! I just put in the jokes!
Them: [even more terrified, were that possible] How can you make jokes about computers????
Now we all have a computer in our pocket we've forgotten those days. Back then, a computer boffin told me "Typist? Speech to text will put you out of a job by next year!" Speech to text is only just catching up and it's still not very good. It only took a few decades longer than he foretold. In fact I’d done a different job for years, and retired, before it happened.
I’m at the “click on everything and see what it does” stage with Bluesky. When computers entered most people’s lives back then, some never reached this stage. And they still haven’t.
You’re doing something on the computer at work (like renaming a file, or moving it onto the desktop) and a colleague is watching. They don’t know what you’re doing, or how to do it, or even that it can be done – but they don’t ask questions. So they don’t find out. (Probably not so common now.)
The hardest people to teach are the ones who think you expect them to know something you haven't told them yet, so they guess wildly. And then they don't listen when you do tell them because they're too busy flapping and bluffing and being defensive. They think that what they know is all there is to know because they can't bear the idea that you might know more than they do. Also they don’t know how to find out anything (look it up, ask somebody – but then they’d have to admit ignorance). “How to find out how to do things” was the first thing holdouts needed to learn. But they didn’t. (Plus “I don’t need to know that”. Or, worse, “Shut up, she doesn’t need to know that”!)
New users were terrified of “losing their formatting”, perhaps because style was mandated by the company, and it had taken them hours to work out how to apply the formatting in the first place – and they didn’t know how to create a template. So makers of WP programmes stuck formatting to text with superglue, making it difficult and complicated to cut and paste and pick up the format of the document you are pasting TO – which is what you usually want to do.
I’d see people deleting a line letter by letter. They didn’t want to be taught tips that would make their jobs faster and more efficient – they didn't want anybody "typing them out of a job". And then it became possible to send text over the phone from one computer to another – it was the managers who didn’t want to know, initially, mainly because they couldn’t understand the process. And surely there was always someone to retype the text?
Help desks were staffed by one young girl who had had no training and knew precisely nothing. I once rang BT’s comms help desk to ask how to send a file to another user and got the reply “Weeeeeell, you need a modem and comms software...” Perhaps firms had been sold the systems by salesmen who claimed "It's all self-explanatory!".
I once asked a colleague for an updated paragraph, and he made the change in the article and re-sent me the whole thing. Me: I just wanted that one paragraph. Him: I never cut and paste because I did that once and my whole article disappeared and I hadn’t saved it. He was a tech journalist.
Another colleague wouldn’t search and replace because she’d once wanted to replace back with black and had to go through the entire article looking for “blackwards” and “black to the drawing-board” – or similar. She didn’t know about “whole words only”, or even “undo”. Both about 30 years ago.
“I just want my computer to go back to the way it was!” There’s been an upgrade, it’ll never happen. On the other hand, you can customise the software. You can even customise keyboard shortcuts in Word. (I was the kind of person who found the list of InDesign keyboard shortcuts and learned them.)
A colleague was furious that another co-worker became a bit of a tech whiz, while she refused to learn more than the minimum. Guess who was made redundant when the time came?
I recently sent colleagues a leaflet they'd asked me to write, asking for comments. One man sent it back with changes. I couldn’t see what he’d done and asked him to email suggestions. Did they think they could all change the Word file and send it back and the different versions would somehow merge? (This is possible, I'm told.) Did they think they were amending the master copy remotely? Next time I’ll send a PDF.
I know of someone who has an Instagram account on which she posts one photo a year.
I remember in the early days, a colleague typed a letter himself on the WP, handed it to his boss to sign and the boss wanted to make a change. So he handed the whole letter to his secretary who re-typed the whole thing, not realising they could just change the file. (PD)
The mantra of software engineering is always be automating your own job. (@Pavel_Asparagus)
There are two types of tech workers, one type automates everything down to the curtains, and the other has a single fax machine in one tinfoiled room of the house with a shotgun ready if it makes a funny noise. (DW)
My wife hates computers. Why should she learn to use something she has no use for? Except she's quick enough to ask me a question I need to look online for the answer to, for something printing, and the latest one: type out her memories of village events in Silver Jubilee year and email it to the church & parish magazine. (KD)
I am reminded of the time I emailed a friend who lived about half a mile away. She was fairly new to home PCs. She printed off the email, hand-wrote her reply on the bottom of the paper, and got her husband to post it through my letter box. (MG)
Americans tend to see any new technology and ask "Will this take away my position in society?" instead of "How can I use this to make a bunch of money?" (@Noahpinion)
I didn't bother with Computer lessons during my 'options' c. 1984. I concluded I'd never need to use one. (@ChiefScrobbler)
Like 5 years ago, a very famous academic paid me $200 (in cash) to download a couple dozen PDFs off of her own course’s moodle page, put them on a flash drive, and mail her the flash drive. This was the best job I ever had. (@pourfairelevide)
Having a work meeting where we're talking about some changes needed to a database and only like two people in the conversation understand what a database is while everyone else is talking about it in terms of the UI in which they view that database is... deeply frustrating. (@dayv)
In my last job I had to assist coworkers ranging from 25-75 years old with basic computer skills like printing to PDF or using Outlook. (@forestgoblin.bsky.social)
It’s 2022 and my company still employs people who are still doing REPLY ALL to an accidental company-wide emailing 48 hours later. (@kilbswhitecrow)
Anyone else so afraid to lose a version of a story that might be better than what you're about to change it into that you save Version 1, Version 2, Version 3, Version 4, etc. in separate files until your desktop is covered in little terrified versions? (@Thorntonforreal. Turn on "track changes". And put all your files into a folder on your hard disk.)
"Having problems with your computer? Clear your history!" they say, and the trouble is – I don't usually want to clear my history. There's stuff I sometimes need to easily find again. Can't somebody design a web browser with a longer memory? (Says a man on Twitter)
I reply that he should bookmark favourite sites and put them in the toolbar.
That would become really unwieldy very quickly, though. And also, I don't always necessarily know that I want to refer back again. You're right, there's possibly an admin task here I'm not doing, but the History menu is brilliant for searching for old bits of research.
You can put bookmarks in bookmark folders with different titles.
In truth though, very often I'm reading an article about some obscure Merseybeat group on a tiny website, and I have no idea I'm going to need to return to it six months hence. The History folder is great for that kind of stuff. A simple search just pulls everything up. You can't bookmark everything though, surely?
Yes, you can.
I think that depends on how much of the internet you consume and how much admin you really want to undertake. And if there were an easier way of doing things, I’d welcome it.
I’ve just told you the easier way of doing things.
An automated process would be lovely.
I think you need a secretary.
(Another Twitter user told me I was “barbaric” for suggesting he bookmarked sites instead of keeping 100 tabs open permanently.)
What would happen if I just nuked all of my tabs. Has anyone actually done this on purpose, just BAM everything gone, scorched earth? (@gptbrooke)
TWITTER
I don’t mute words either – didn’t even know that was an option! (@ikesharpless. Another Twitter user wails “If only there was some way of muting words you don’t want to see!”. Twitter doesn’t make it easy – the facility is buried in sub-menus.)
It’s September 2023 and I’ve just told someone to reply to her own tweets in order to create a thread.
It’s October 2023, about 17 years after Twitter appeared, and some people are still apologising for being on “this hell-site”. All the Twitter alternatives are selling themselves on exclusivity (hooray!). Don't they mean echo chambers (boo!)?
I read fiction to escape the flatness and dumbness of Twitter, not to swim in it. (Susie Goldsborough, Times, 2023. I was going to tell her she was following the wrong people – but she doesn't have a Twitter account.)
Delivering your message in 280-character chunks is good for style. Some writers tweet briefly and wittily, and then you read their books: long, wordy, rambling sentences with the clauses in the wrong order. Some despicable villains publish pirated “summaries” of popular non-fiction books on Amazon. Would readers buy a shortened, edited version of a popular science book with bullet points at the ends of chapters?
It’s 2021 and you can’t search and replace inch marks with curly quotes in Word. And you can’t use italics or bold in FB or Twitter.
It's 2022 and a friend just went to A&E with a doctor’s letter. He held it up to the window at reception and the receptionist copy typed it into the system.
It's 2023 and some are still "refusing" to use Facebook, as if someone was forcing them to.
It's 2022 and Zoom doesn't make "show controls permanently" the default. ("You need to mute yourself!" "How?" "Click on the microphone symbol!" "Click on the what?" "Hover over the bottom left of the screen!" "Do what?")
M&S wouldn’t accept credit cards until 2000. And do you remember firms whose website was just a showcase? You could ring a number to order the clothes, but couldn’t buy them through the site, because the company was too refined or something. That changed. But I miss printed catalogues – you could get an overview of fashion trends.
My local (excellent) hair salon doesn't accept card payments.
When they designed the system they "forgot" to include ANY process for "the customer has died". Their bloody computer sent my poor mum 17 letters (all addressed to my dad) about the issue, each one even more insane than the last. (AJB)
I don't want to download the effing Ticketmaster Ticketbastard effing app just to get the effing tickets that cost me an effing fortune. The Ticket[redacted] [redacted]. (@fenlandgent)
More here, and links to the rest.
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