Comment by hans_castorp

The thing I always remind myself of, when I think “isn’t this obvious?”, is a conversation I had with my mum about 15 years ago. She gives me a call, and after the usual chitchat…

  Mum: “they had some computer training courses at work, the other day. We learnt great thing, dragon drop”
  Me: “that’s great, I didn’t realise you didn’t know about drag’n’drop”
  Mum: “yeah, we were talking about why it’s called dragon drop, and I thought you’d know”
  Me: “mum, are you saying ‘dragon’, as in the mythical creature?”
  Mum: “yeah, why is it called that, we’re all stumped”
  Me: “it’s not the creature, it’s the shortened version of drag… and… drop - drag’n’drop”
  Mum: “wow, that makes so much more sense. I can’t wait to tell everyone at work”

Now mum definitely isn’t a power user, but by the time of this conversation she had been using computers daily for 20 odd years, since the late 80’s.

I try to remind myself of this fun little anecdote as much as I can.

During my M.Tech in Comp. Sci, I was requested to volunteer to be a lab assistant in a diploma course in programming in C for non-technical people. A Ph.D. in Philosophy was complaining that his program was not compiling. He wrote "exist(0)" instead of "exit(0)". I found this so interesting. Existentialism was on his mind, I guess. The program clearly exits by not existing any more? Can't argue with that!

I corrected him and went on my rounds. I remember that a bank manager was the best of the batch. By the time I circled back to my philosophy friend, he quietly changed "exit()" back to "exist()" and the program was not compiling again! This anecdote stayed in my mind.

I remember that a lot of older folks had trouble understanding when to use a single click and when a double click. Clicking twice rapidly was also difficult for them, and they would consistently jerk the mouse and drag things around. Having every part of the interface in earlier windows draggable and reactive made this even more frustrating, since for them things would just disappear from the desktop.

I worked tech support in the early 90s and we received more than one letter in the mail from customers asking about where the "any" key was on the keyboard.

There were plenty of stories back in the day about assistants being asked to copy a floppy.

Some used a photocopier.

"which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers."

I disagree.

Even someone with no experience with computers understands, generally speaking, that the mouse is tracking the surface of the desk somehow. I have had this conversation many times (or did, back in the 1990s when mice were more novel for most people). Nobody picked it up.

The ones who do in these anecdotes are, IMO, examples of the sort of people who absolutely shut their brains off in protest when asked to work with new tech. I have been blessed in that I have only very, very rarely been asked to work with or even know such people.