Here we are, boldly striding forward into the information age, and although I am sure that there are many e-inspired geniuses out in the world, I have yet to come across many who really have the capability to cognitively think about this box on their desk in front of them called a computer. Mind you, I do not count myself even remotely a computer whiz, and I am not all knowing about computers. However, my interactions with society and my workplace continue to show me that there is a large majority in this country who are going to be left further and further behind because of so many businesses, services, and transactions that are now being performed electronically. I’ll take just a few moments to go over some totally fictional happenings. Events have been changed for illustrative purposes and all names have been omitted to protect the ignora….I mean innocent. Any similarities between my workplace and the completely fictional illustrations are total coincidence.
The first electronically challenged souls are those who are easily stumped by email. They do not know the difference between Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live or any clue as to the email service that they utilize. These people will tell you things such as, “I can’t get my email that is in my office to work on the PC in the hallway,” “I keep getting an error on my email,” or my favorite “I don’t know what happened, I pushed a button and all my emails disappeared.” Although I can look back on these things and smile, it is only because it hurts too much to cry. I understand that I probably hopped on the internet and email curve a little ahead of my time, but I just have trouble understanding people today that have an email address and have no clue what to do except type and hit “Send/Receive”. (Flashback to an old Happy Days episode of where the Fonz can’t believe the cute girls that have no clue how to take care of their car, they just put gas in, crank it up, and drive!) As to the first quote, I tried to explain how email accounts don’t magically go from computer to computer, but I think the explanation fell to rocky soil. The one concerning the error box started in a way that many brain hemorrhages are bound to start. “It’s saying something that I don’t understand.” “Well, what does it say?” I asked. “I don’t know,” they replied….. (Thought but not said, “Is it in English?”) So, I had to get up and walk to the back of my office building to interpret the hieroglyphic message that stated that the email address she was sending to had rejected her email. I still don’t know why she couldn’t read the screen to me. Here’s where it gets even sadder….I told her to open her outbox and delete the email that was giving her the send error. She did not know how to find her outbox. I guess I speak in code and do not communicate clearly, but my impression is that I feel some basic computer training is in order. The “I pushed the button and everything disappeared” is always a good one. However, it is a hard one to fix, because they usually can’t tell you what button they pushed, what program they were using, or what in the world it was that they lost. My standard reply is usually, "Push another button and see if it reappears."
The next wearisome soul is the person who can’t enter data into a screen because they don’t realize that their number lock is off, the window that they are trying to type into is inactive or that they need to click with the cursor inside of a dialog box. (I won’t even run down the rabbit trail about left click, right click, double click, single click and drag….) Please people, your computer goes to a lot of trouble having nice boxes, colors and letters and words to communicate what it wants you to do on each screen. Read, comprehend, and try something! Don’t get to stage of complete surrender because you do not understand what it going on. Click something, look at your keyboard, and for goodness sake, think a little. Again, this may be more my fault for hiring this person or not further training them, but I think the CPU had them at “START.”
My last wonderful computer type that I’ll cover is the anti-navigators. Their accomplishments of navigation through a website or registration online would make a Dad on vacation seem like Einstein on “Who’s Smarter Than A Fifth Grader.” Our retirement plan now has so many wonderful things online for participants to utilize, but I cannot tell you how many times in the past 3-5 years where I have had employees come to me because they can’t navigate the site. My first impressions of this were that the site must be difficult to access. Nope, this is not the problem. One of the "best" accessing errors was that the person was misspelling ING retirement plans, although the registration instructions given to them plainly spelled out the website. Another one could not figure out what their user name was to enter on the registration page, although again the instructions plainly told them that they would have to construct a user name of 6-12 alphanumeric characters. As it turns out, alphanumeric was a little too large of a word for them to handle. “Make up a name using letters and numbers, “I instructed. “I don’t know of any names that have letters and numbers in them.” (How soon is happy hour?) This same enrollment process gave a summary page after each page was completed that indicated that a section was either complete or incomplete. After creation of the user/pw part of registration, the webpage opened up to this summary page. Over 50% of the employees and doctors ignored the five sections and their complete/incomplete status and clicked “Finished” at the bottom of the summary page. All of these employees kindly emailed or called me stating that the system wouldn’t let them complete their registration. Wow – I can’t even repeat the things going through my head at that point.
So, where am I going other than spewing the rantings of a 50+ grouchy old man? I am getting to the point of this lengthy complaint. Some people it seems just cannot learn how to use a computer. Training is good, but nothing beats reading comprehension and a little common sense. Sure, there are many whiz kids out there that can run their X-boxes, smart phones and Wii’s all day long, but I am growing to learn that there are many young and old that will be left in the dust of progress if something is not done to prepare them and educate them in some very basic ways. In the meantime, it’s happy hour in about twenty minutes and I’ll try to anesthetize the electronically challenged away until tomorrow.