Ready for a stupid user story...

[HomeBrewerDude]

My wife is a director of student services at a state university... She has an employee who was at one point the acting director (until they hired my wife)... This employee was in a tizzy today because someone sent her an Excel spreadsheet that was incomplete because one interval of data was not summed.

She was close to tears b/c she was adding the columns on her calculator and she was having a hard time scrolling without losing her place on the spreadsheet.



Lets here some more!

 

[Ns1]

lulz

 

[Anubis]

..........
wow

 

[Kelemvor]

Sounds like a real winner. I'd just print it out and do the math longhand. Harder to get lost that way.

 

[BeauJangles]

Haha, I've seen that before.

My company's clients are hospitals and I've seen administrators drafting summaries, reports, whatever in excel, calculator in hand.

 

[pyonir]

hahahahahahahahahahaha....

Wow...

 

[Tiamat]

haha, what an idiot.

 

[nakedfrog]

"You'd think in the 21st Century the software would be able to do this FOR you!"

 

[trmiv]

An actual ticket received yesterday:

"Perhaps you will notice the slow speed on my laptop. If you can lubricate the drive or tune up the motherboard I would greatly appreciate it."

 

[FoBoT]

S

 

[amdhunter]

This was probably my favorite helpdesk moment.

 

[AnnonUSA]

Abacus

 

[TwiceOver]

Just helped a user enter the password to a communal computer. The username and pass are written on a piece of paper, attached to the monitor. "Login incorrect". I came over, typed it in, good to go.

Turns out Num-lock was off and she was using the key pad.

 

[KB]

Its not that they are stupid its just that users are uneducated on how to do things.
When I joined a company that was used to doing everything on paper, I found out that they were printing out excel spreadsheets and handing the paper off to someone else who would then type the numbers into another spreadsheet because they didn't realize they could email it to each other.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Yeah, this isn't as rare as you think. Lots of people think Excel is just Word with ready-made tables.

 

[Throckmorton]

Originally posted by: KB
Its not that they are stupid its just that users are uneducated on how to do things.
When I joined a company that was used to doing everything on paper, I found out that they were printing out excel spreadsheets and handing the paper off to someone else who would then type the numbers into another spreadsheet because they didn't realize they could email it to each other.

LOL

 

[FoBoT]

the thing is, the spreadsheet was invented in 1979 :Q

29 years isn't long enough for peoples to figure out how to use it?

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

Had a call earlier from employees in the field who couldn't get their laptops on the Internet. They forgot to turn on the power to the power strip the router was on.

 

[5to1baby1in5]

Originally posted by: amdhunter
This was probably my favorite helpdesk moment.

What's an A Drive?

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Originally posted by: 5to1baby1in5

Originally posted by: amdhunter
This was probably my favorite helpdesk moment.

What's an A Drive?

Floppy disk, as a general rule (or were you being facetious?).

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Originally posted by: AnnonUSA
Abacus

Dude you know how crazy some people are. They get like 20 lines of crazy dollar figures and sum it up in about the time you can type =SUM(A1:A20). Ok no. It's more like 20 seconds but still that's insane stuff.

 

[Kelemvor]

Floppy disk? Disks aren't very floppy... Surprised most people even know what a floppy disk is any more...

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: DLeRium

Originally posted by: AnnonUSA
Abacus

Dude you know how crazy some people are. They get like 20 lines of crazy dollar figures and sum it up in about the time you can type =SUM(A1:A20). Ok no. It's more like 20 seconds but still that's insane stuff.

Yeah, when I was in elementary school, this abacus wizard came in when we were learning that stuff. He solved every problem on his abacus faster than any of us could do it on a calculator.

 

[Syrch]

when i was doing PC support i had a user call in saying their mouse didn't work. I walked over there and opened the mouse up and almost vomited. There was caked on hair and just about everything else. I told the user they needed to clean the mouse. I then proceeded to the next ticket and after that went to the bathroom. As i walked in I saw the user that I told to clean the mouse over the sink. I didn't think anything of it and went on and did my business. As I walked over to wash my hands i saw the guy with his mouse submerged in water scrubbing the outside of it.

 

[BrownTown]

Lol, its funny to make fun of the computer illiterate, but I'm sure alot of people here have the same problem but in other areas. I can just see on Myspace or something people making fun of all of us for being "socially illiterate", I mean I have known people who were incredible with computers but couldn't name a single NFL team, to someone who is a football fan that might seem like you are incredibly retarded too, but only because that is such a big part of their life and no part of another's persons life. Same with Excel, I remember my dad teaching me in ELEMENTARY school how to do all the functions and stuff in Excel and so I literally cannot remember a time when I didn't know how to do something like sum up a column in Excel, same with programming Basic, I learned that in elementry school too, so someone not knowing how a loop or conditional statement works seems crazy to me. But of course I was the one way out of the norm in terms of knowledge there not everyone else, and the same can be said about these sorts of things, people on AnandTech probably use Excel on a daily basis (I know I do), but for 95% of the people around its not something they have much if any exposure with.