27 April, 2010

I swear, I'm not making this up.

Nor am I even lightly embellishing it.

Ted E. just dragged a tech over to his desk to help him with a computer problem, and it culminated in the tech demonstrating the awesome power of CTRL+A. Ted's now agonising over the conceptual leaps involved in being able, with a single keyboard shortcut, to select everything at once.

He reached this dizzying state of revelation after repeated failed attempts to right-click on some files (one at a time, presumably) and copy them to another location. "Copy" wasn't coming up as an option, though, so clearly there was something terribly wrong with his computer.

In fact, as it turned out, it wasn't appearing as an option because he was only right-clicking on empty space near the file.

Ted's now grappling with the terrifying implications that by invoking CTRL+A, he now has the near-godlike power to inadvertently perform the mass deletion of files. He's already begun muttering about how it's useful to know, but he thinks he'll stick with selecting them individually from now on, thank you very much, because this is all too new.

Don't ask. Really. Just ... don't ask.

On a related note, he was also quietly scheming with another tech this morning to get some lessons in how to set up clients' computers. He's realised the techs get paid substantially more than he does and, when he moves interstate at the end of the year, has ambitions of talking his way into a better-paid, part-time job at a similar organisation on the basis of his mighty computing skills.

1 comment:

Sevesteen said...

I briefly worked with a Ted-type who was supposed to train me. A huge part of what he was training me on was cutting and pasting from spreadsheets, almost entirely with the mouse. He was completely confused when I started doing the exact same thing, except with keyboard shortcuts--ctrl-a, ctrl-c, alt-tab, ctrl-v was just way too much.