Contractor/Corportation Software - How boomers ruin easy work.

[Doctor Tracksuit]

So I work for a major national arborist company. We do tree trimming for electrical utilities along power lines and have recently, within the last 3 years, switched from paper maps to iPad GPS software that displays job tasks and geographical information around the region. Everything on said Ipads is pretty foolproof and easy to understand. But I'm the only guy out of 7 other foremen that can operate this stuff. And I've been designated by the utility to teach these boomers how to update and secure their information. What are your horror stories or frustrations with similar situations?

 

[Chongqing]

I'm looking forward to a former military person regaling us with that one time they hit the wrong building.

 

[Doctor Tracksuit]

I'm looking forward to a former military person regaling us with that one time they hit the wrong building.

I know a retired air force vet who shelled a CO's private cabin in Alaska on purpose.

 

[President Joe Biden]

How about teaching a guy twenty years older than me how to send a fax? Not really a horror story, but more of "how do you not know this?" frustration. Showing pretty much everyone keyboard shortcuts to do stuff, really simple stuff. Ctrl+v simple. I think a lot of people hate computers because they never learned how to make their lives easier with them. As soon as I got my first dot matrix I put the typewriter in the closet and never looked back.

Everyone who owns an iPhone seems to have problems with them, but they come ask the guy who hasn't bought an apple product since the video ipod came out. When you tell them to Google it, they get mad. When I was in the corporate sphere, a lot of businesses would give you a phone, so they have people on payroll to ask these questions. Got so much worse with forced diversity, that by helping these people, you enabled them to keep being shitty. If you show someone how to do it, they will never learn, if they have to learn to survive, they will prosper.

When we graduated high school my friend started going for an engineering degree, and before he even graduated, he was already promoted off of the job site. He was 20 years old making more money than guys in their 40s, because he used his free time on the job to read the equipment manuals and took the free class the company offered to get a certificate that allowed him to operate that specialized piece of equipment. This was something offered to everyone, but people were fine with just digging ditches so to speak.

I hope you got a pay raise as a designated instructor. You can learn at any age, people just choose not to.

 

[White Devil]

Everyone who owns an iPhone seems to have problems with them, but they come ask the guy who hasn't bought an apple product since the video ipod came out.

Oh, this is a special kind of hell. I've not used an Apple since the eMac (and only because those were what the editing stations in TV Production class were), my dad gets one of those iPhones a few years ago, hes in his late 60s, and expects me to know how the fucking thing works despite never using one. Telling him to read the manual it came with only made him mad.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

no excuse really, boomers invented the world wide web

And yet they're absolutely terrible with technology, as well as zoomers despite growing up with it.

 

[On a toilet]

no excuse really, boomers invented the world wide web

Also Apples and Androids

 

[Chaos Theorist]

no excuse really, boomers invented the world wide web

The US Army invented what would become the internet through ARPANET

 

[Basil II]

so boomers with B52's

older than that, iirc a lot of the guys involved with the actual groundwork for the internet were born in the 20's.

 

[Pissmaster]

Oh, this is a special kind of hell. I've not used an Apple since the eMac (and only because those were what the editing stations in TV Production class were), my dad gets one of those iPhones a few years ago, hes in his late 60s, and expects me to know how the fucking thing works despite never using one. Telling him to read the manual it came with only made him mad.

Understandable because modern Apple's manuals are worthless. Here's the literature that came with my iPhone 5S:




Those are just single sheets of paper. The second one is thinner than Bible paper, but the all-important stickers are ever present. (I used one as tape in a pinch)

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Oh, this is a special kind of hell. I've not used an Apple since the eMac (and only because those were what the editing stations in TV Production class were), my dad gets one of those iPhones a few years ago, hes in his late 60s, and expects me to know how the fucking thing works despite never using one. Telling him to read the manual it came with only made him mad.

At least he didn't do it over the phone, right? It is extra painful when someone calls and asks how to get a bluetooth-peripheral working on an iPhone, or ask how to get it working again. Bluetooth is a fickle bitch under normal circumstances.

I always tell people to just type what they want to do into google, that's what I do to help them, and I don't think anyone has ever even tried.

 

[Never Scored]

I am the designated guy under 40 who knows how to use computers at my company of 15-20 people. It's as bad as it sounds.

 

[Twitter Hate Mob]

I had to spend over 80 minutes trying to get a co-worker to authenticate MS Teams because they couldn't understand "point your phone's camera at the big symbol" to activate a QR code.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

It honestly seems like the paper maps would have been better and more resilient than a fucking iPad.

 

[Coolio55]

The title of this thread made me think that it was for internal coding horrors but the actual content is more "Boomers who can't use the software at work".

Should I make a specific coding horror thread?

 

[Doctor Tracksuit]

It honestly seems like the paper maps would have been better and more resilient than a fucking iPad.

They were. Everyone had their own copy and we met once a week to outline our completed lines. Now we've got multiple crews visiting a single address at different times for different tasks. It's a clusterfuck.

The title of this thread made me think that it was for internal coding horrors but the actual content is more "Boomers who can't use the software at work".

Should I make a specific coding horror thread?

I wouldn't mind adding those into this thread. Because believe me, the people coding our software on both user and server side don't know what they're doing. I'm not a professional, but my level of experience is beyond what their IT dept has on hand. I could get more in depth, but I don't want to powerlevel more than I already have. PM me if you want more detail.

 

[Coolio55]

Can't say much about my environment for security reasons but it's a mess, not exactly a bad mess though. It's a nice place but for reasons I'll get into later it isn't as casual as I'd like it.

I won't name the offending language everything is programmed with but in my mind I can see the founder googling "business programming language" circa 2002 or so without realizing why that's a beginner's mistake and finding the turd that would become the company's single biggest source of technical debt. It's a proprietary COBOL knockoff that doesn't have proper array support and all the tools except for the very newest (Which is all poorly configured open source software) was clearly written for pre 2000's windows machines. The syntax creaks and groans from 40 years of chasing the zeitgeist and trying to market it as "just like natural language!". There are so many instances of very specific reserved keywords that are used to pass arguments to precisely one function it makes my head hurt.

Obviously the place I work for runs an extremely important service that would ruin lives and cost shitloads if it fucks up so no pressure, right? (The stolen open source stuff probably helps in that department lol)

I can also give away that a lot of power and water plants up and down the country run on some unholy 256 colour windows 95 visual programming language with dials and machinery that resembles maxis widget workshop. It's possibly some ancient version of EBSILON or Simulink or ripoff thereof.

 

[HumanHive]

Understandable because modern Apple's manuals are worthless. Here's the literature that came with my iPhone 5S:

View attachment 1549685
View attachment 1549686

Those are just single sheets of paper. The second one is thinner than Bible paper, but the all-important stickers are ever present. (I used one as tape in a pinch)

Fuck I miss thick user manuals.

 

[George Orson Welles]

Fuck I miss thick user manuals.

This is the most boomer shit I've read all week, and I love it.

 

[Orange Rhymer]

Complaining about useless boomers and the tech they can't use?
Why would you complain about an easy job for life?

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King"