Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

oh jeez really?

We had a crusty old "plaza" page on our ISPs website for years that has in it a search box, news, weather etc.

When the website was updated and made more business-focussed, that page was basically hosed. And the amount of old whiners who called up and said I CANT GET TO MY NEWS/EMAIL/YAHOO was amazing. These people only know how to do things how they do them. I've worked with people like that in civil service jobs.

Veg: yeah for whatrver reason that blog's article made it appear as (first?) result on google for "facebook login" or something.

So.. yeah. Hilarity ensues.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php

still so awesome

These people only know how to do things how they do them

One day I'm gonna be like that with whatever new 3d straight-into-brain technology and kids will roll their eyes, of course.

Here's another coz why not. Back when you had to use a Win95 DOS window to log into your ISP, I did phone support with a woman who couldn't log in. I kept asking her to type her username and password but nothing was happening. We even went to the point of checking the case of every single letter she was typing. After about 20 minutes of this I said something about the enter key and she said 'what is an enter key?'

We bought my father-in-law an ipod shuffle a few years back - he scowled at first and thought it was silly, but once he figured out how to use it he'd sit upstairs playing around with his Itunes playlist and was happy as a clam.

My Mother in law liked it, so we gave her one too. Night and freaking day. Every single time we went to visit, my husband would be cornered into showing her how to take things off her playlist and put other things on; and every time we visited he would show her the exact same thing. She'd ask his brother, who lives next door to her, and he'd show her the exact same thing. The last conversation I remember was my husband and my brother in law standing in the kitchen and they were almost crying like, Mum! We don't know how else to tell you how to do this!
Meanwhile my father in law looks on with amusement and says he doesn't know what her problem is.

It's kinda lol & sad.

But she is the worst. She'll get lost on Amazon and have you show her how to get to where she was and she'll lean over your shoulder and point at the screen and say 'SEE? THAT THING. DOESN'T THAT MAKE YOU CRAZY?"

Computers are really really hard for people who aren't good at information hierarchy. Or who connect info from one piece to another by "themes" or some similarity that only they understand.

also: old ppl

every time i got crabby at my mom/dad for lol family holiday tech support i have to remember that i was using a mac when i was 8yo, and that my mom was living on a farm in rural ireland with no running water or electricity

Six of one, 5 + 1 of the other

Mum was kind of scared of computers when they first showed up, but she was an office manager and she had to learn it for her job. She ended up taking some night classes and things just for herself, not through work, and she's really comfortable with them now...fools around with desktop publishing, burns cds for me and scans pics for the covers, stuff like that.

My mother in law is about 30 years older, and I think even though she did have to use a laptop in the last years of her teaching career, she really only just learned to use what she had to, and she was far too intimidated by it to ever really relax. She has that approach where she thinks she's going to break something if she does something wrong, like it's the end of the world...and its really hard to break that mindset, unless you sit beside her and pep-talk her all day.

Speaking of PCs and parents and angry, I hate it when I'm visiting my folx and I'll be on FB or ILX and mum will wander into the study, sit by/behind me, and ...watch what I'm doing.

"who are you talking to? Whats this page all about?"

GAH GET AWAY FROM ME.

whe i was 8 i was wondering why my mac wouldn't work in my rural farm in ireland with no electricity

Grrrl: If it's frustrating for them because they really do try, it's fine; if they cbf trying and just rely on other people to do everything for them it's acceptable to get all ia at them. I don't know how many times I told my father his iPod doesn't need to be switched off by force. He did it so often that he actually broke something and complained to me when it didn't work.

Sort of on this topic but definitely an ia thing: If you're at my parents and you want to watch television, this is what you have to do:

1. Flick on the mains switch at the wall (behind the TV cabinet and not easy to reach)
2. Turn on the set at the switch
3. Retrieve the remote from a cupboard in the TV cabinet
4. Take the remote control out of the plastic bag it came in (which is covered in sellotape from years of wear and tear)

Every single time.

I had an ANZAC in Alaska! It was A DELIGHT!

Sorted my dad out with a computer, spent a few days explaining and showing him stuff and making short cuts to make it all easy. He phones me one day and asks how to get "earth google" on it. I nearly pissed myself laughing. He phoned me the other day and said i can't see all of the internet, i was baffled and went through a few scenarios over the phone, he eventually had to bring it round to me, don't know how he did it, but he'd minimised the window really small to the bottom right hand corner. I find it really hard not to laugh, but i forget he's sixty odd and it's his first ever computer.

I've had so many calls from him asking stuff it's unreal.

it makes me irrationally angry that my dad always asks how my 401k is looking

Mum was kind of scared of computers when they first showed up, but she was an office manager and she had to learn it for her job. She ended up taking some night classes and things just for herself, not through work, and she's really comfortable with them now

Mine has not touched a computer since before Win 3.1. I am not kidding. The last thing she used on a computer was a really crap text-interface (as opposed to GUI) word processor for DOS 2.x. She's not old or disabled, she's just stubborn and ridiculous. Even now she'll call me to find out the words to a poem or something, marvel at the 0.000012 seconds it takes me to find it on Google, then refuse to use a computer again.

xp ahahahaha 'i can't see all of the internet', meme material imo

I've had so many calls from him asking stuff it's unreal.

I used to have that problem, but then I convinced my dad to switch to a Mac, and now he never calls me. I'm no Mac evangelist, but Jesus Christ, I can't recommend this strategy enough to people who constantly get computer questions from their parents. xp

My father-in-law thinks I can fix every computer problem he has because I work in IT. I write business requirements and user manuals, I have nothing at all to do with bloody Windows XP, but no, he hears 'IT' and stops listening.

btw the number of times I've told him to just get a mac grrr. All he does with it is forward email jokes to everyone he's ever heard of 500 times a day.

res otm. Mother in Law's school gave her a Macbook when she retired, and I agree, as far as usability goes you couldn't ask for much better for someone who isn't that comfortable with computers. She can look stuff up online pretty well. It seems to be the ipod that gives her the most problem.
Apparently they hooked her up with the kindle app, and she's been downloading some books and things okay, so I don't think she's anywhere near as computer-illiterate as she could be for her age.

I should add, my comment doesn't belong on this thread as it didn't make me angry.
It's quite funny actually that he's spent nearly £400 on something that he just uses for "earth google" (his words) to look at where he used to live and wiki & dictionary.com for helping him with the crossword.

To be fair, I once boght a fairly pricey desktop pc purely so I could play Sims2...

I got an iphone apparently just so I could spend all day on Zing Touch so...

While we're being honest, i spent £1200 on my laptop because i knew it'd handle "the battle for middle earth" on full res'
It's still running and it's over 4 years old so i can't complain.

a sound investment imo

I bought an MBP because I got sick of Ubuntu doing weird and confusing things and I refuse to use Windows unless I have to. It did cost two grand but most of the time it does what I need it to and stays out of my way.

iPads make me ia, not due to the fact of iPads being iPads but because most of the people who buy them try to do everything they would normally do on a laptop. That's not what they're for. You can't even type properly on the things.

Also people who refer to Apple products as though they're people ('I has bought iPad! Now I am going to plug it into MacBook and play with iPhone')

does anyone seriously do that?

All the time. Now that I've drawn your attention to it you'll notice it everywhere now, odds on.

http://blog.geeksaresexytech.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/computeruse1.gif
http://blog.geeksaresexytech.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/computeruse2.gif

oops, resized:
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2010/09/20/so-true-the-pain-of-watching-non-geeks-use-computers/

OMG hahahahahhaa.

Completely innocuous but makes me see red: recently at Whole Foods express checkout, which is tiny, I put a basket of items on there and the cashier asks me to take the things out of the basket. 1) the countertop is *no way* big enough for a basket, the items AND a place to pack my bags and 2) it's already at chest height so reaching over the top of the basket is actually really annoying especially when you're carrying other shopping over your shoulder, a wet umbrella etc. Other supermarkets have a lowered area for baskets so it's at normal level and doesn't take up the whole counter, and usually an area to pack the stuff into a bag. And this is the *express* counter where ppl are more likely to have baskets than trolleys.

And very often the proper checkouts with conveyor belts are nearly all closed so these are the main ones. Grgrgr.

"the Google" lol

Here's another coz why not. Back when you had to use a Win95 DOS window to log into your ISP, I did phone support with a woman who couldn't log in. I kept asking her to type her username and password but nothing was happening. We even went to the point of checking the case of every single letter she was typing. After about 20 minutes of this I said something about the enter key and she said 'what is an enter key?'

Can you all come up with some sort of safeword the rest of us can use so you know you're not dealing with an idiot?

IT OP: Okay, Mr. Baker, if I can just get you to find a paper clip and the small hole in the back of your –
ME: "Balustrade"
IT OP: Oh, I'm sorry. Let me check for any IP discrepancies in your area...

^^^fwiw whenever i've been on the phone with apple tech support i try to make it clear from the outset that i am a "superuser" (ugh) by using as many safewords as i can, and it usually works.

I used to work for an educational publishing company and a lot of our authors were high school teachers. Most of the stuff we got from them was hard copy but those that did try to send us electronic manuscipts...zomg. Timeframe: 1998-2001. Our office was entirely Mac based. Off the top of my head I can remember tearing my hair out trying to convert manuscripts created with: Claris Works, LotusWord Pro, WordPerfect, Word 6.0...or just a pile of unusable pc-formatted floppy discs. Ugh.

- Lyricists who rhyme 'table' with 'able'

xps
http://xkcd.com/806/

people who are atheists who feel the need to perpetually remind people that they're atheist, perhaps in some shitty attempt to feel intellectually superior

Oh man. Add to that list militant atheists who brazenly go hard at religious people just for being religious. I'm 104% atheist but ffs if people are minding their own business just leave them alone.

Lately, I've encountered an ungodly (see how i did that?) number of atheists who seem to absolutely relish the idea that they are being discriminated against in their daily lives by some kind of repressive theist hegemony. I'm not actively religious or atheist, but these people need to STFU.

Mmmm, pretty clear that religious people who lean on their religion to enforce nutbar segregational laws are doing so because they are bigots, not because they are religious. I know plenty of religious people (numerous religions) who don't fall in with that shit, and I know of at least one atheist who is an enormous bigot.

Ugh, this x 1000. My brother in law is like all rargh rargh fundamentalists rargh but is a total douche about anything remotely religious to the point where he harasses anyone who says they go to church or believe in fucking anything. Dude is like a freaking fundamentalist atheist! Leave people & their personal beliefs the fuck alone. Seriously pisses me off.

The main reason they piss me off is that they intensify (and justify imo) the greater attack on atheists like me who want everyone to just be nice and get along.

Agreed. I don't doubt that there are theists who hate the idea of atheism, but on the whole I have not found atheists to be more or less assholes on average than theists. If anything, I think I've found atheists much more vocal about bringing up their beliefs (yes, I think it's a fucking belief-- fuck that 'it's a non-belief' shit) than religious people. I'm just tired of hearing about it. Whatever your belief is, just shut up and keep it to yourself. No one cares!

Okay I'm pulling you up on the 'atheism is a belief' thing because it's not. Not a discussion for this thread though.