Are You Making Your Family Technologically Illiterate?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I think it's the other way round. In households where one person is tech savvy there is a tendency to tinker, fiddle, experiment and ultimately break things. The non-IT person then has to either wait for it to be fixed, or give up waiting and fix it his/herself.
Or in the case of my house (both growing up and after getting married) -- whoever doesn't do the technical work starts trying to fix it themselves, and soon they become proficient at doing at least some level of tech work -- even if they only do it for themselves.
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Wow.. you two live in a wonderful world! I'm sure if I had kids, the kids surely would try to fix their own problems, but my wife doesn't care about how it works, only that it does work... and will instead of trying to fix it, choose to do something else until I'm available to repair/resolve the problem with whatever is wrong.
I completely agree with where this article (and Scott) are going with this, and I see the trend every day in my office.
When I called upon to resolve problems, I try to educate the individual who is having the problem on what was wrong and how they can fix it in the future. This is especially true of common tasks, rebooting a computer, putting paper in a printer, etc. While I do show them the other much less common things, how to set a signature in Outlook, but also follow up with, I'll understand if you don't recall how to do this in the future since this happens so infrequently you probably won't remember."
What frustrates me though, is that even on the common tasks, how to unjam a label Dymo Labeler, how to change their default printer (something most have to do daily because they work in two plus environments) is that they just don't care to learn it, even after asking 10 times and learning it would get them resolved in half the time or better. -
@Dashrender said:
Wow.. you two live in a wonderful world! (snip)
I did have a relatively good childhood, lol. No major catastrophes struck, and I learned a lot from my old man. 8-) My kid is only 4, so he's not quite ready to start fixing his own problems yet. But I still let him try and teach him to ask for help when he needs it!
I completely agree with where this article (and Scott) are going with this, and I see the trend every day in my office.
(snip)... is that they just don't care to learn it, even after asking 10 times and learning it would get them resolved in half the time or better.By and large, especially in a corporate setting, i will agree with this as well. I hilighted the real problem... Most of the time they just don't really care to learn anything outside of their job.
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What's sad is that they don't really need to care - instead they just need to realize they can make their own lives better by learning a few of the things we try to teach them so they aren't just sitting around waiting for something to be fixed. It's not like we are a bunch of union workers and are going to fine them for taking our work away.
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@Dashrender I'd upvote that comment 10,000 if I could.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm sure if I had kids, the kids surely would try to fix their own problems
Yeah, I sometimes get support calls at work from my 10 year old: "Dad, I can't get Minecraft to work". He's already better than half of my users in that he always tries turning it off and on again to see if that fixes it before bothering me with a call
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@Dashrender said:
we try to teach them so they aren't just sitting around waiting for something to be fixed.
Sadly, I think a lot of people like sitting around waiting for something to be fixed. For them, it beats working.
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My brothers (all adults) have figured out if they call me my first 2 questions are going to be did you turn it off and then back on again and did you look it up on google before calling me. Now one of them never calls me anymore.
We homeschooled so I never really just answered a question for @Mike-Ralston he always had to go find the answer himself, if he still needed help after that then I would help but never on the first go around.
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I didn't realize @Mike-Ralston was your son.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I think it's the other way round. In households where one person is tech savvy there is a tendency to tinker, fiddle, experiment and ultimately break things. The non-IT person then has to either wait for it to be fixed, or give up waiting and fix it his/herself.
How often do you think, though, that an IT person will break something beyond the point of them being able to fix it and then the non-IT person can just "figure it out?" Seems like a pretty rare thing.
Although to be fair, how many IT people actually tinker at home in a way that impacts others? Most people need very little beyond their network and wireless working. Sadly very few IT people seem to care about even tinkering at that level that I've seen
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I think it's the other way round. In households where one person is tech savvy there is a tendency to tinker, fiddle, experiment and ultimately break things. The non-IT person then has to either wait for it to be fixed, or give up waiting and fix it his/herself.
How often do you think, though, that an IT person will break something beyond the point of them being able to fix it and then the non-IT person can just "figure it out?" Seems like a pretty rare thing.
Although to be fair, how many IT people actually tinker at home in a way that impacts others? Most people need very little beyond their network and wireless working. Sadly very few IT people seem to care about even tinkering at that level that I've seen
Coming from the guy whose home network is always saturated with issues... lol
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@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I think it's the other way round. In households where one person is tech savvy there is a tendency to tinker, fiddle, experiment and ultimately break things. The non-IT person then has to either wait for it to be fixed, or give up waiting and fix it his/herself.
How often do you think, though, that an IT person will break something beyond the point of them being able to fix it and then the non-IT person can just "figure it out?" Seems like a pretty rare thing.
Although to be fair, how many IT people actually tinker at home in a way that impacts others? Most people need very little beyond their network and wireless working. Sadly very few IT people seem to care about even tinkering at that level that I've seen
Coming from the guy whose home network is always saturated with issues... lol
Because I actually constantly test new gear and stuff. Which few people tend to do.
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Yeah, I'll stick with a network that just works.
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I used to test things all the time, but I did try to do it on a different segment so the rest of the house worked as normal.
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I will break anyone's fingers that tests in my day to day environment. That get's done in a lab situation or on something that I don't use
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@art_of_shred said:
Yeah, I'll stick with a network that just works.
Same. It's fun for a little while to test stuff but then it just gets annoying when I just want it to work.. Plus I tend to get nagged if the home network isn't 100% working right.
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counts non-broken fingers
I'm not lucky enough to have a real test environment at home. I've got a Windows 8 system that I use to run a couple of Hyper-V VMs... but that's about it.
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@Minion-Queen said:
I will break anyone's fingers that tests in my day to day environment. That get's done in a lab situation or on something that I don't use
That's my network, so they would already have broken fingers by the time you got to them.
