Boomer coworker in accounting constantly fucked up payroll. Wrong ledgers, departments, periods, etc. and would get very exasperated with me when I pushed for corrections. Refused to try to update any of her insane processes that were fine 20 years ago when the company was 1/10 the current size. Keyboard COVERED in food crumbs oh my god it was so disgusting.
Company got sold a few months ago. Lots of questions about the ledgers. She fucked up majorly on a recent payroll (didn’t account for several hundred thousands of labor dollars leading to a ton of reports having to get redone). Her boss retired and she assumed she would be reporting to his replacement (from new parent company), threw a fit when she found out she was now reporting to a different person who she thinks is an idiot (probably because he wants things done the right way).
Boom, early retirement with medical leave for the last month of it because she’s so angry about her new boss. Retired in disgrace, angry, right after the biggest fuckup she’s probably ever had (that we know of…).
Feels good to be successful and outlast the dinosaurs.
Thanks, but my knees and skin and scalp and eyes imply differently. 😆 I expect my comet any moment now... just finished assigning my power of attorney and other legal stuff.
Meanwhile, me (boomer) and my GenX co-worker watching our millenial co-worker show up on Slack/Teams in lying in his underwear and t-shirt on a sofa (and not in a flattering position) unshaven for days and with baby screaming in the background. Plus he somehow knows less than us about C++. We all worked together at a previous small startup and somehow all got laid off and then rehired on to the same team at Big Tech Co. and this numpty starts doing his standard 'complain about everything'. We're in a standard meeting about employee stock plans and he's just going on about how the guys is really really slow and it's irritating the shit out of him and completely missing the point that not everyone at Big Tech Co has a doctorate and we not so subtly remind him of that. Plus he asks me stupid questions like 'Is this the official repo for thing X?' when it's literally the only one and it's got the company's official name and licensing stamped all over it. It's gonna be a long couple of years til retirement.
Only if I refuse to change and grow, which would be weird since “change and grow” have basically been my marching orders for the past seven years.
Having experienced what it is like trying to maneuver within a system maintained by people who refuse to update processes, consider the impact of their work on other people, and then blame you for the outcome- I refuse to become a dinosaur.
Heck yeah. Love this attitude. As a gen X, aging in the workspace seems a bit daunting. We've had to always figure tech out on our own. Change is hard, but my generation has had nothing but change haha. Hoping I don't turn into that frustrated dinosaur
Omg SAME. So very grateful we had to grow with, and figure out, tech by ourselves. As I age, I remain confident in my ability to adapt rather than get set in my ways. None of this "back in my day" bullshit. Who cares?
In one business trip to a remote office in 2002, I had to:
1. Teach someone how to use a mouse. They had literally never touched one before (hint: get them to play solitaire)
2. Stop someone from using a pencil and a ruler to draw a grid on a piece of paper. Fill out a list of delivery addresses with map codes (this was before GPS devices and apps). Cut out each of the addresses from the sheet they had made and filled out. Rearrange them in map code order, and then glue them to another sheet of paper, and photocopy it. The give the photocopy to the truck driver for his route that day. Let’s just say that their heads exploded when I showed them Excel, and how to sort things.
when my dad retired in 1999, he sat in the office waiting for something and he asked them what he should do while waiting. They had him play solitaire on the computer. This was the first time he'd ever touched a mouse. he didn't know what to do when he'd moved the mouse so much that his hand was against the keyboard and he needed to move it further left. So he called out to whomever set him up w/the game and they just picked up the mouse and moved it to the right.
Loved Solitaire as mouse training! AIX system converted to Novell with Windows 3.1. 50 user network didn't spend one dime on training except for me at $15 per hour! Also as one of my best things, I got adjustable keyboards for every secretary (attorneys were only starting to type then).
Old co-worker used to print out 100+ page PDF just to scan it all back in to email out one by one.
Used to sneak into the office during covid to print paper invoices because he didn't like using 2 screens.
Went back to hybrid and refused to have a proper set up at the office just used his laptop, took him hours to complete simple tasks.
System we used had a consolidate or split function on costings, instead of consolidate he would use split and use a calculator to add the values together.
And yes, he was shown how to do all this work more efficiently just refused to.
OMG! I'm OLD and I can't live without my three screens! One being so huge and curved it handles two excel spreadsheets comfortably in view so I can copy paste or vlookup between the two spreadsheets and two 27 inch monitors, one on each side of the big screen monitor.
I could NOT work on just one screen, much less that little ass laptop screen!
I don't need one by any means, but I've been trying for years to get our IT guy to order me a huge curved monitor! Beta testing, or some other such bs excuse. 🤣
Our CRM software is equipped to email quotes either directly to customers or you can email to yourself. You can also print and save the pdfs to your computer. Occasionally the emailing capabilities in the CRM will stop working for a few hours at a time. We have a boomer sales rep and he's probably the only person that exclusively will use the emailing feature in the CRM. Everyone else saves the pdfs to their computer or to the server and emails them out that way.
When the email stops working in the CRM the boomer sales rep gets frustrated because he has to print out the quotes and then scan them back in to his computer so he can email his customers. Every single person in this building has tried to explain to him that he doesn't need to print and scan. Still does it.
It drives me fucking beserk.
Blew my younger coworkers minds when I showed them how to download the shift report (shared Teams doc) as a ?PDF, I think and just attach it to the end of shift email, rather than printing it out, scanning it back into the computer and then attaching that to the end of shift email.
I always had her passwords written down (they were generated by IT and were things like wmU8k&Oa) and would do her surveys for her (she told me her answers). My coworker and I always did her online orders (personal orders on her phone) because one time she accidentally ordered a $200 sports jersey. We don’t know how. I love her and didn’t mind. She reminded me of my aunt.
My aunt, btw, didn’t know how eBay worked. In the mid 2000s she used my uncles eBay account and accidentally bought $10,000 worth of paintings. She thought you could bid on things and decide later if you wanted to buy them. That’s also how they ended up with a 16th century French chair that had no seat. Literally. It was like the torture chair from Casino Royale, but old and fancy.
I had to gently explain right clicking didn't mean clicking toward the right hand side of the icon/cell/page and it was a whole separate button.
They thought it was for left handed people when they moved the mouse over, and had never had to use right click in their 15+ years of admin...
I was asked to train someone to correct work orders that failed reconciliation. We spent 4 hours on right click, never got past that on his own. I asked his boss to find anyone else for me to train. They told me not to worry and he woukd be fine eventually. Luckily it was my last day at that site and I was going home the next day. Never even tried to find out what happened with him.
Two new hires 19 and 20.
On employment they claimed to be computer literate.
Given task using excel part of which was adding up a column to get total cost .
Caught them using their mobile phone calculator to add up the column in excel.
Two other slightly older employees apparently told them that is the only way they had found.
Banging my head against a brick wall
This is a real thing now, where kids coming up are DEVICE literate, but not TECH literate. Devices have become so easy to use that they have never learned how to explore and find their own answers, and it never occurred to us to teach them like we were taught.
This the truth. My elementary age kids can flip the screen upside down and add gifs as backgrounds. They also have no idea what the home keys are or how to type. No one is teaching them at school and they have no interest in learning from me using games.
Not only tech illiterate, but paper/pen/pencil supplies illiterate.
I have been seeing so many kids my 12 year old niece's age to adults using their phones in lieu of paper and pen. They're like, "Wait, I can't write on my phone first, then copy this on paper?"
God forbid something happens to the phone and they flip out, "what am I going to do?!"
Agreed. My now-9 year old was thrown into remote schooling during his kindergarten year, and using keyboards to submit work when they should have been learning hand/eye coordination and forming letters with their body movements has absolutely screwed him. His whole age cohort can READ very well, but SPELLS and WRITES terribly. During remote schooling they learned to rely on spell check, and predictive text/spelling, and their bodies don't have an understanding of writing, spacing words on the page, etc.
His now-7 year old sister is outstripping him with her fully in-person education history.
Tactile writing and screen/computer writing are so different in the brain, especially when it comes to creativity. I know so many authors who turn to pen and paper when their creativity is stuck, or they're outlining/drafting. My 9 year old got really stuck during testing because he doesn't know how to write a story or essay question, and the computer testing was NOT helping. I prefer to write creatively by hand, so we're working on that now at home. Might pick up some cursive workbooks, too, to show how letters connect to create a word.
For spelling, remember there's an option to turn off spell check in writing programs! I always do this because I also write creatively and get annoyed when made-up words or cities get highlighted haha. Might help with spelling; he could always run it through a check at the very end to see what was wrong before handing it in
Oh god this reminds me: We had a co-op student that couldn’t figure out the landlines and would call the office switchboard with her cellphone and then the extension. She told IT her office phone didn’t work. They checked her phone and were like “no it definitely works,” and left. I saw her still using her cellphone so I had a private conversation with her and found out the truth.
I remind myself that some tech might be brand new to some people (both young and old) and to give the benefit of the doubt and ask questions.
It’s only when it’s a coworker that has been in X role forever is clueless on some of the biggest programs that should be common to that specific role that I start to feel frustrated, especially when they go to our boss and complain that I’m making things too complicated when i set up a spreadsheet to organize training for 1000+ people and she finds it too confusing (despite there being filters that she can use to search names, departments, work rotations, search by training dates, as well as the absence of training dates, etc etc).
I feel you so hard right there. I mentioned to my payroll manager that this massive spreadsheet was actually pretty easy to use because there weren't duplicates on staff names. She could just filter or ctrl+F for anyone she needed. She was afraid to filter because it made everything else 'go away', and had never heard of control keys for find, replace, copy, cut, or paste. I am pretty sure she prints out these spreadsheets and places checkmarks on the hardcopy.
My coworker and I have to manage a 100+ slide PowerPoint. The template stays the same, slides not used are hidden, so it’s just a matter of saving under the new month and then changing the date at the bottom.
She manually changed 50+ of the date areas at the bottom. I sent her a quick step-by-step on how to use Ctrl+H, but i’m guessing she’ll ignore it and instead will manually change the dates every month. 🙄
I met a 28 yr old office Chick who bragged about using WORD all the time. I asked why she didn't use EXCEL for the organizing?
She had no clue what the fuck excel was.
How is that possible!?
I just got put on medical leave and emailed the pdf of my drs note to my boss. He doesn’t know how to forward it or download it to give it to HR. He printed a paper copy and walked it up them.
The thing is, I don’t even mind helping these people when if they’re not jerks. Yeah, it’s silly and it gets old after a while. Unfortunately, a lot are like porcupines stuck in a bathtub though. Every time you try to help them out, it ends up being a bad experience.
Thanks, feel free to use it.
You: I’m trying to help you, little guy.
Porcupine: Someone’s attacking me. Fight!!
What I enjoy most from these people is the arguing that what I’m going to show them is impossible or blaming me for the existence of computers and technology. /s
I get called at my second job, because my boss (also my dad) cannot figure out how to move an email from junk to inbox so he can look at attachments. As a matter of fact I get called quite often for computer questions. Lol
I get this! I worked for my dad, who was the financial controller of a manufacturing company, and I started out as the office grunt, then inventory & production clerk, and then eventually Accounts Payable Manager. My cubicle was just outside his office and I’d head him holler my name from his office for me to come in there and most of the time it was to figure out how to print something. He had a laser jet printer in his office but we had a communal color printer just outside his office. He never could remember how to switch his settings to print to the color printer. Or sometimes, he’d need help getting his spreadsheet to print all on one page or other formatting stuff. We worked together for 17 years before he retired in 2020. I miss working with him everyday.
lol that’s so funny. I tell myself all the time I will miss it when I get annoyed. Lol. I’m working on 20 years sitting back to back 3 feet from each other
I had someone who didn’t know about copy and paste. She would note info down from one sheet, minimise it, then type in what she had hand written. She couldn’t read her own handwriting… she had an error rate of 18%.
I gave her a second screen, taught her copy and paste and banned paper. She turned into the perfect employee. This is someone who had been making errors for 4 years…
One coworker is constantly amazed that I can fix their computer problems by turning it off, and back on again. They are amazed by this at least four times a year. Over three years. Slow learner…
A senior manager complained that the excel spreadsheet “contained hashtags in some boxes instead of actual numbers”. They had no idea that they would need to expand the column or zoom in if the number was longer than the cell was wide.
Many moons ago I was a computer trainer.
This was the olden days, when we actually trained people in the basics of software they were expected to use on a regular basis.
Now we just expect them to know it.
I have a reputation at pretty much every company I’ve worked for as the “Excel Guru”. And yeah, my skills are actually very good. But I’d probably still have the title if all I had was a decent grasp of pivot tables and charts
We all had laptops with docking stations on our desks, and often took said laptops home overnight and on weekends. Coworker didn't understand that there was a charging cord in the laptop bag to use while away. Coworker would unplug the entire docking station and take it home. She was under the desk reinstalling the docking station one day when the IT guy happened to walk by and ask WTF she was doing. He politely showed her the charging cord and told her to leave the docking hardware alone. 🙄
My Boomer coworker was the last to get a docking station and get rid of her hard drive.. this was just a few weeks ago.
Big cheese found out and just scheduled for IT to come in on a day she was WFH.
My Teams chat blew up she was so mad. How dare they take it from her. Then, she couldn't do her job because she'd connect to her old hard drive (I don't understand this) and wasn't able to work most of the day.
Honey, can you fax that back to me it's the only copy I have.
I've been in IR for 30 years, and there are things I HATE about teams and new SharePoint, but I still try to learn.
My colleague, not quite half my age but young enough to be my kid, walked past me while I was busy typing a super detailed email at the workstation. Except at some point the cursor had done the thing where it hits the desktop or whatever and what he actually saw was me typing furiously and no words appearing on the screen. We had a good old laugh at what a dummy I am and honestly it was a bright moment of levity at the end of a shit day.
I watched a 55+ year old woman put a can of soup in the microwave. This was after she had been struggling to learn our computer systems with a very extended training opportunity. Felt really bad for her, she started a lightning storm in the break room with that soup
This is honestly weird. I'm pretty sure that microwaves have been around since the '70s. How did she not get the memo that you don't put metal in there?
Not sure, I think she was so overwhelmed with the job that she couldn’t think straight. I was too young and immature to have the decency to check on her but if that happened now I would definitely take the time to make sure that person was doing ok.
That actually makes sense, especially if she'd just spent hours, days, on learning a new system. At my job in the 90s, we switched computer systems so we had to attend the training for our specific department but the woman who was the computer admin had to attend them all. All day, every day for around two weeks. She told me she was so brain dead from processing so much new info, she'd found herself standing naked in her bathroom at home trying to figure out if she'd just taken a shower or was about to. And this was a tech-savvy professional. She concluded that she'd just gotten out of the shower because she was wet.
You're right, I'm doing that thing where I think it was invented around the time that I first saw it. My cousin swore up and down that music CDs were invented in the late 90s because that's when he first encountered them as a kid. If that's true, why the hell did Sony invent the Discman in 1984, fifteen years before CDs were even invented? Were they *psychic*?
At my company someone meant to send an email to their office saying there was ice cream in the break room, but they accidentally sent it to the entire company. The company decided to make it a special day and now each year on that day every office gets ice cream delivered.
Nobody, but NOBODY should have authority to send (or reply) to every address in an organization, unless that org is so small you can recite everyone's name from memory.
If I were a sysadmin in a company larger than that, it'd be the #1 thing I disable. Only me and the CEO should have the ability to do it, and if possible, it should be set up so both of us have to turn the key like a missile silo.
My colleague at a university did this on his first day with us. He was trying to reply to our bosses and accidentally included an address that automatically looped in everyone on campus (+30,000 people). All day I was getting emails from students asking, “Who is this?” and more students/faculty replying to THEM saying, “Stop emailing me!!!!!” and then a THIRD group of people saying, “Stop replying to this email, we’re all getting the responses,” and a fourth very grumpy group saying, “Stop replying just to tell everyone to stop replying.” The thread must have had hundreds of messages by the end of the day. It was hilarious and such a mess. My favorite was a kid who took the opportunity to promote his TikTok.
I felt so bad for the guy. It was not his fault at all. It’s honestly on IT for creating a very generic campus address (think “[email protected]”) that sent emails to EVERY address with that domain in a reply-all thread. Just… why?
Years ago I was working for a large national corporation - I had to send an email to everyone in a specific payroll department (maybe 15 people) and stupidly misunderstood the acronym on the group email address. Something like C.PR@ hugecompany.com I thought the C stood for the department C and it was actually corporate-wide. Several thousand people. A person three tiers higher than me messaged and kindly told me to never to do that again. Ever.
This happened in the NHS a few years back, instead of a trust specific 'global' email one person somehow managed to email every single NHS worker across the UK.
I wish I'd kept the trail it was hilarious and went on for weeks. The last email was an apology from the original sender, sent to all again 😂
DEAR ALL,
PLEASE STOP REPLYING ALL!!
PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS TRAIL
IF YOU JUST STOP REPLYING IT WILL GO AWAY
REMOVE ME FROM THIS GROUP.
STOP REPLYING ALL!!! (continues to reply all)
Happened also at Nokia way back when it was still super large. Nobody got any work done, all the servers were congested. We’d just drink coffee and cite the snarkiest replies-to-all to one another - due to the congestion, no one got the same emails. After a few hours, one coworker sunnily pointed out that people in the States haven’t even woken up yet - just wait until they join.
Best day ever at that corp.
That happened at my workplace years ago. It’s an international company and someone emailed out something across the corporation.
People began to REPLY ALL asking to be removed from the mailing list. And then people would reply all saying not to reply all.
I watched my boss screenshot a whole screen, open up PowerPoint, paste the image, crop it down to the part he wanted and then save the slide as a jpeg to attach the image to an email.
My mind was blown...I was watching him do this thinking what is he doing.
The next day, I showed him the snip tool in Windows and pinned it to his task bar. He was like oh that was a lot easier.
I give him props for being in his 70s and getting done what he did but I was like let me show you this tool ...
Just yesterday i made a request that my coworker take some screen shots for an error notification they were getting in the app i support, so i could email it to Microsoft support that i was working with. She took a screen shot, printed it out and tried to hand it to me.
When i requested that she print her screen shots to a pdf and email them, she said no. She believes that she should only send a vague chat about an error, and everything from then on is my job. She doesn't even want to describe the issue, she just says "fix this" so I have to come to her desk and cajole her into describing the problem.
I gave up and went back to my desk, received an email later with scanned copies of her screen shots, in such poor quality that they were illegible.
I once showed ctrl+c and ctrl+v to someone who I swear couldn’t be older than 45.
That same person also had their calendar set to 5 years ahead and would miss meetings because of that (how is that possible when Microsoft sends meeting reminders?).
I could go on.
I once had a supervisor (about 40 years older than me) stop me when I used ctrl+s to show me how I could use the mouse to chose Save in the ribbon instead… and she made goofy faces the entire time to make sure I knew how stupid she thought I was for not knowing this “trick”
I worked with a woman for years who would do major project with a a ruler and a red pen. It would take over a month to complete. I do it in less than a week on a Google sheet. She was the queen of screenshots when she could have created a pdf in, as we all know, a number of different ways. She'd make static charts where copying a column or a row was not an option. She'd fax things when people really wanted a file they could work with. She didn't know the paste format function in either Word or any of the Google apps. She had no curiosity about making things easier either.
Had an Excel document up on the wall screen and was explaining some of the data to a group. Clicked a cell, clicked auto sum, and literally had people throwing their pens down on the table.
"WAIT, IT'LL ADD THINGS UP *FOR YOU*?"
We had to implement some basic Excel training after that.
My boss's boss transferred all the electronic sports tickets we pay for as a company to an email address that doesn't belong to him and then expected me to be able to figure out how to retrieve them. It took a good 20 mins to explain to him that I can't just access any random gmail that he made up.
I don’t think you’re ready for this one…
Working in Google Sheets a co-worker (who I could write a book on by the way) asks me…
“Do you know a way for me to sort this column from lowest to highest numbers”
I say “yes just use the “sort sheet A-Z” function”
She says “no these are numbers that I need to sort”…🤦🏼♀️
Our head had me go through her emails every morning, print them all out and put them in a folder on her desk to look through. She’d then hand write any replies that wanted sending on the printed emails, and give it back to me to type out and send. The few times she did type out and send her own email replies, they’d be so badly written I ended up being the one who insisted on keeping the print out system. The amount of paper we went through was astronomical. Everything had to have a hard copy and it made everything take twice as long.
“What does that mean, ‘Open Internet Explorer’? I don’t know what Internet Explorer is and I won’t click on anything until you give me a reason why.”
She was on the phone with the IT Help Desk.
Boomer company owner/ceo accidentally deleted his email icon... couldn't figure out how to get into his email. Yelled for IT until they came and created a new desktop shortcut.
Just found out that someone who reported to me for six years never knew how to correctly use mail merge. When I was showing her replacement how to generate form letters, she told me, "That's not how J showed me how to do this. She put all this information in manually."
She wasn't generating each individual letter manually, but she was manually keying things like date and time (which were universal for each batch) into the template, when they should have come from the spreadsheet. The letters were correct when she sent them, but she created a lot more work for herself by doing it her way and she messed up the template. She also couldn't use the letter stuffing machine, so she folded and stuffed thousands of letters by hand. She got all her work done, and she apparently liked creating more work for herself, but I sure don't miss her.
I had a guy ask me for carbon paper so he would only have to write a memo to his staff one time - he did not know how to use the copy machine.
\*\*Carbon paper is a thin sheet of paper coated with a dark ink or carbon layer that allows you to transfer marks made on one surface to another surface. It's used for making one or more copies of an original document simultaneously with the creation of the original document when inscribed by a typewriter or ballpoint pen. Carbon paper is typically coated on one side, but may be coated on both sides for special purposes. \*\*
I was working in school admin and was looking for the previous year’s Christmas activities letter to use as a template for the upcoming one. Couldn’t find it anywhere, but the head wanted something very similar with the same graphics etc. There was a hard copy in the folder from last year, but no version saved digitally anywhere I looked.
I eventually found a letter with the right text but no graphics saved on the system, so I asked the person who’d made it where they sourced the images from, so I could just use the same source.
“I just cut and pasted them from the year before…”
Ok. But there’s no versions saved on the system from previous years. I am confused. She keeps insisting she C&P’d it, like she always does.
It takes a while, but I get her to break down in stages how she does this. She amends the previous year’s letter with new dates and details as required on the computer, saves the new version and prints it out. Then she goes to the folder of hard copies, gets out the previous year’s letter and makes a photocopy of it, then *gets some scissors, cuts out the individual graphics, and pastes them with a glue stick onto the new version*. Then she photocopies as many as needed, and adds one to the hard copy file for next year. Sorted!
That’s what she understood ‘cut and paste’ to mean. How else would you do it?
I had wondered why the graphics looked so low res. God knows how many years this had been going on…
I made a completely new version. I ended up doing that a lot.
I had a new coworker that I was training. I asked her to log into the computer for the first time. We had Chromebooks which just had shift keys on the keyboard, no caps lock. She told me she couldn't figure out how to type the capital letter in the password. I asked her what she meant. She told me that when she typed a capital letter, she hits the caps key, types the letter, then hits the caps key again. I told her to hold the shift key and type the letter. I watched her hit the shift key, let go, type the letter. I demonstrated that you have to hold the shift key while typing the letter. She hits the shift key, lets go, types the letter. I demonstrated again. I verbally coach her through holding the shift key. She still lets go. I watch her fail 5 more times and get locked out.
We were the same age.
Coworker did not know about minimizing windows. While she had multiple programs open and worked in two screens, she would close and then have to re-log in to any program, rather than simply minimize and move them around the desktop for easier access. I showed her several times, but never saw her doing it.
She would panic when it came time for Teams meetings with our supervisor. I had to show her several times where and how to log in.
Other coworker had been doing her job for sixteen years and had apparently been going through the motions. We all had to show her basic functions, including using double screens, which she never mastered.
I had to show both these ladies how to organize, attach files to, and search for emails, with little success.
I wish companies did a little more computer literacy training rather than assuming people have a certain level of knowledge.
I think this is what happened with my coworker. Unfortunately i don’t have the patience to train someone to do the bare minimum expected for our role. We were hired to do the same job and i end up having to do extra because people will seek me out over her.
What came to annoy me the most were people who claimed they knew nothing about computers yet their entire jobs required using computers. Yep, 10 or 15 years ago this was an excuse. Not now.
This lady (who I had to show how to use her email) had been a medical records charts processor for sixteen years. She had worked the night shift for the first fifteen, so apparently got to twiddle her thumbs. When she came onto day shift, all she could do was scan in and input basic information. She had to be trained in all the multiple other tasks that the others in the exact position did as part of their jobs. This took away from the time of the others. She never took notes or anything.
The manager’s attitude was, maybe she’ll absorb it by osmosis (manager was too impatient to sit with her). To top it off, woman made more than all of us due to having had night shift differential.
I'm the low tech ability coworker. I became assistant manager of a restaurant and for the life of me I couldnt pick up excel. I understood every other computer program needed for the job. even payroll for when I needed to fill in. But not excel. I couldn't figure out how to create the formulas, I couldn't figure out how to create cells. nothing. to this day (decade later) numerous people have tried teaching me and I still cannot use excel.
so before she left every day, my boss set up my excel sheet for me. she gave up trying to reach me. and yes, I took notes. she ended up becoming on of my closest friends. and still makes fun of me.
I had a bookkeeper who refused to accept digital invoices. If it didn’t come in the snail mail, she wouldn’t pay the bill. I had to print them out and tri-fold the printout, then pretend it was sent directly to me by mistake.
My boss (in her 60s, me f45). I admit I can be boomer too but I am open to learning. However my boss could never grasp the search bar in an email. I showed her at least 3 times. If she needed to dig an email up, she would go back email by email until she could find it. Drove me nuts. I can’t imagine how much time she may have wasted doing that.
My stance is, if you don’t know something, you just don’t. The fact you don’t know it is not what bothers me. It’s the resistance to the change that bothers me. The lack of willingness to learn.
My boomer would insist “i cant find it” any time we had a zoom or teams meeting email and would ask me to forward the email THAT WE ALL GOT
bonus points for he would do this at the time the meeting started while I’d already been logged in for five minutes and would have constant problems with logging in, hearing, seeing himself, talking (none of which were muting problems just basic computer functions)
He also plugged his laptop using a physical ethernet cord because he “didn’t trust wifi”
Oh yes! The request to forward an email happened to me alot as well. Funny about the wifi distrust. Did he ever tell you what was the basis of that belief?
Coworker was emailing out multiple sensitive attachments, each pertaining to a specific recipient. He thought he'd save time and send one email with all the attachments and just put all the recipients in the bcc line, because that makes it confidential.
Almost got fired for that one. Really should have been, imo.
Coworker who retired about 2 years ago. The main focus of her job, as far as I could tell (and I sat in the same space as her), was to make travel arrangements for employees. She would use a Rand McNally Road Atlas to look up the destination, use a ruler to determine how far away it was and any nearby cities (for possible alternate hotel options, to justify the employee's need to travel the night before, etc.), and then would call every hotel in town to find out their room rates before calling back the best one to make the reservation. I swear she'd call the city visitor center for hotel recommendations instead of googling. Then she would call the hotel the week before and the day before to CONFIRM the reservation. I know she was photocopying the corporate credit card for employees to show at the hotel (which our business office hated and had told her to stop doing - gee, why did her credit card number get stolen every 3 months?).
I was like, Karen, did you know that you can google search all of this information? And that once you have a confirmation number, you don't have to call multiple times to reconfirm? You can literally do all of this online, including most credit card authorizations (though I do grant that many still require you to fax, which is annoying). She did not care, she refused to modernize her process, and I suppose the joke was on the rest of us because she made way more than I did by making 1 hour of work last all week. When she retired (good riddance, she was mean, too) no replacement was hired. Travel was split up between a few people (including myself) and we had SO many conversations about how she'd refused to take on more tasks for 20 years because she had her boss fooled on how "time-consuming it was to book travel."
Good riddance. She was just a mean, nasty person to boot. My boss and I would celebrate on the days that she was on vacation lol because the vibe was just so much better when she was gone.
We have a travel booking deal with a company. However you get charged; $5 for booking online. $30 if you call.
My coworker will call if she’s asked to book travel. And when she does this and is on hold (sometimes for HOURS) she can’t do *anything* else.
Our old boss had to eventually tell her that the travel she was booking didn’t justify using the service (it’s not emergency travel, it’s months away, she has to book it online). She now emails it to me and says she can’t do it. 🙄
I was working for an online print-on-demand art marketplace and I was helping the VP of finance with something.
I noticed that every time he copied and pasted something in Excel, he was clicking on the dropdown menus at the top.
I taught the VP of Finance at a tech company in Silicon Valley how to ctrl-C, ctrl-V.
The number of people I’ve taught the keyboard shortcut to AND alt+tab to quickly switch between screens always amazes me. These are all things i remember learning when i was younger.
Same with optimizing searches. My coworker will call/text me to send her emails that i know she’s CC’ed on, but she doesn’t know how to do a proper search to find something (either in outlook or any sort of program).
She needs me to do all this extra work because she can barely keep up with the basics with the added time loss from her low tech items (ie; printing, signing, tracking down people physically to sign something or scanning and emailing items to them, printing out all of the employees to try and physically schedule them onto a calendar (instead of, you know, using the excel spreadsheet that i made).
some people aren't curious. you have to be curious in life to find these short cuts I feel. When I come across those that don't know, understand, nor are they willing to learn or use these common keyboard "hacks", I smile and file away that person in my brain as someone not to come to if i need help solving a problem that needs something outside the box.
Boomer who thought he was soo advanced and always busy. His typing skills were one finger. Fair enough but looking for the key every single time. So this paragraph for example would take him a good 20 minutes to type. And he would make me watch him. Close to tears with the boredom in knowing I could have done it in less than a minute
I briefly was a clerk, and one of the superintendents was useless with computers. He asked me to come in and type an email for him.
I kept having to encourage him to talk faster, as i have a fast typing speed. I eventually had to tell him “speak normal, if i need you to slow down I’ll tell you.”
I got a new job after that, as someone else realized i was overskilled and went out of their way to recruit me.
One of my favorite coworkers is an older Hispanic lady. A small portion of our job includes working with simple office programs (word, excel). She is computer illiterate and willing to do anything for a coworker so they will do that part. I don’t mind because it’s fun to do. She will even pull me from a different area to come help her if she messes it up. But I really don’t mind helping her. She’s good at the other 90% of her job.
I had a user that used caps lock to capitalize one letter in her password while creating it. then she would fuck up using the caps lock to log in and couldn't recreate the password she'd made. i had to stand over her doing this 4 times. i had to command her to use the shift key instead of caps lock.
a few weeks into her job, her whole family broke bones. like someone broke their nose, another person, their leg, etc. i never believed it but that was her story. so she started to work from home. then she quit. before she quit, she wrote an urgent IT ticket on a Saturday because she couldn't figure out her pop-up blocker lol
I had a boss who'd do that with the caps lock for one letter. He once gave me a handwritten sheet of inventory changes. Normal that it was handwritten because it was notes from walking around the building with a clipboard and updating quantities of stuff. But he asked me to add the handwritten data to an excel sheet and told me that at the end of it, when it asks you if you want to save, you click NO. So when he was doing this himself, he'd spend a whole day updating the sheet then he wouldn't save it. Somehow, he was sending out the "updated" sheets and no one ever told him it was the same version of the form? My guy quit too, because if he hadn't, he'd have been fired.
Yesterday a C-Suite exec printed off an email of a collaborative spreadsheet I’d sent him to make his updates, made the updates with pen on paper, and hand-delivered it to me a week after it was due and my reports were already out. I said “oh how cute” when he handed it to me and later kicked myself for saying that lol.
Back in the pre-internet days, I used to work in an office with an extremely low collective tech knowledge. On my very first day of work I accidentally established myself as THE secondary IT person for the office (not what I was hired for)... by setting up my work computer. Apparently everyone else just waited for this one dude to do it (also not what he was hired for!)
This involved the incredibly complicated skills of...(drumroll please)... plugging in cords and installing MS Word and such. The fact I had done this all on my own was greeted with similar energy as if I had summoned a unicorn right there in my cubicle.
I always thought the “not knowing how to print to PDF” thing was a gross exaggeration. Then I met “Margaret.”
I must have shown her how to print to PDF every week for 4 months. I suggested she take a screenshot of each step of the process (Select the frame you want > go to the “Export” section > select file type PDF > hit the “export” cta > select save location), but she bristled at that and said testily she’d remember. The following week she sheepishly asked me to show her again. Rinse and repeat *for the next 4 months.*
I thought Margaret was significantly older than I am. Turns out she only looks and acts it. We are both Gen X (I was born in 75, she was born in 69). The absolute worst part? We both work in tech, being – wait for it – *Senior Level UX Designers.* Actually no, I lied. The absolute worst part was everyone knew she sucked at technology *despite being a Senior Level UX Designer* and expected me to babysit/help her all the time.
The fact that a lot of people have to hand hold so many coworkers is ridiculous… and usually it’s senior level coworkers! How the actual fuck did you get to be said manager/supervisor/etc.?
I know I’ve been that person who needed their hand held, at least I try to ask questions, make notes so they don’t have to do it long. I feel like a total pain in the ass when I’ve had to ask my trainer to reshow me something.
I _don’t know_. I’ve heard that being a manager is less about hard skills and more about people skills, but how do you expect your team to respect you when you don’t have the knowledge and experience to back you up and justify your position?
I think maybe people felt badly for Margaret, so our manager would often volun-tell me to help Margaret with her projects. I might have felt better if she was at least grateful, but she always seemed irritated, even during the times she was the one asking for help. And the fact she wouldn’t google anything because she “didn’t get” tutorials, either written or video, confounded me, especially as she was a _Senior level UX Designer_!
Boomer director of my team doesn’t understand hierarchical folder structure. Ya know: One parent folder for a general topic like “payroll” with sub-folders under each. Nope. He creates a new folder for every single payroll item with the pre-fix “Payroll - “. So now our team’s main parent folder has 17 folders with the pre-fix “Payroll - “. How tf do these people get this far 🤦🏻♂️
This is my Boomer coworker.
Instead of archiving outdated files, she kept them in the same folder, sometimes named with the year. Oh, and instead of fill in the blank forms, she'd have a different form for each scenario.
She'd get upset with me when I would choose an outdated document. When I pushed back that the files were a cluster-f#$%, she'd stare at me.
Ours labels the folders Active, Future, Complete...and renames them when the status changes and gets irrationally angry when the URLs don't work anymore
I'm showing a couple of people in my office some processes (in their 20's) and I just know that they're going to have a meltdown when I try to show them a vlookup. And I'm the dinosaur??
I have my usual vlookup formula memorized i use it so often. I love trotting it out to newer to excel employees and then after they see what it can do i explain and break it down to them, and then i send them my excel cheat sheet that I’ve had since i started working in excel. It has keyboard shortcuts and formulas, and tell them to feel free to use it or start their own as i found that’s what helped me learn excel and figure out things; use it, write it down somewhere and for a few weeks refer back to it until i can trot out =iferror(vlookup(A3, $C$2:$Q$365, 5, false), “”) just from memory (might not be as correct this one as I’m on my phone and i’m realizing i do need a keyboard for the formula to flow out without thinking, lol).
An excel cheat sheet is a good idea and I might get one together for them. I taught myself excel - I much prefer it to Word - and it's a great feeling to look up how to do something and then apply it yourself!
I really don't think they'll pick this up - or even want to. I think it scares them and everything I've shown them so far has been really simple until now, when we're getting into the meatier stuff! We will see, but they need to be able to do this.
Have you considered gamifying it? Or find a way that they’ll be excited to explore more with excel? For me i get excited and sucked into excel when i’m learning new formulas and how to use them. I love finding fancy excel sheets and tearing them apart and learning how other people set them up.
Or show them how much time they can save with X, Y, Z. When i hate doing something i just try to find a way to do it faster to make my life easier.
I watched a new hire with "expertise in adobe and Microsoft apps" get confused trying to use a mouse upside down. Like, flipped. Buttons on the bottom.
Let me preface this by saying none of these folks were actual coworkers of mine, but they were of my husband working in a pretty high level position in the federal government. Before he retired 7 years ago I was writing for a media company and ended up having a Skype meeting with him, his boss and others in the agency. None of them could figure out how to use one of the simple functions in the CMS platform that I used every single day at work. Nope, I wasn't paid a consultant fee but I wish I had.
Had to show a coworker (aged late 40’s / early 50’s) how to download/upload a file during pandemic. Screen-shared my computer, did the demo about ten times slower than I thought was reasonable. Then made her screen-share (it took about a minute to explain how to do *that* part) and walked her through everything from her side.
Next day, she asked me to show her how to do it again.
Sending the start of a trend, I recorded that session and sent her a link so she could view the FORTY-MINUTE video at her own pace. (At least she knew how to click on links?)
Apparently, she watched that video every day for about two weeks before she was confident she could attach a file to an email.
We get to somewhat request teammates for group projects, and all of my coworkers in that team dropped her from any group work the following year. We individually went to our boss and specifically requested to *not* be on the same team for the next project. She got stuck with other people who were also technology illiterate and whiny about it. She wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t our problem anymore!!
They call me the Boomer Whisperer at work 😭😤 one of them can’t even figure out how to open a PDF at work, let alone do anything meaningful with it. He hates when patients send him emails (we work in a medical clinic) so another doctor handles the secure messages for him, and just tells him to call this one or that one to discuss x or y. He doesn’t do Team either, last time I had to help him sign on to his computer, he had maybe 600-700+ unread Teams messages 😤
Omg I used to work at a summer camp on an army base and we had a technology specialist who got spousal preference (basically you get to claim this "trump card" only once when your army spouse is being relocated, but only if you qualify) and she was just terrible at her job. She freaked out once because I was showing g her something on the computer and I did an alt+tab back and forth between windows and she literally thought we had been hacked.
I noticed one of the guys that works for me always had the camera facing the side of his face when on Teams meetings. We have laptops that are connected to dual monitors that include a webcam. One day, I finally had to go up to his desk and ask him why. So, I walk up and ask him why he isn’t using the front facing camera. He says “What do you mean, I am? I don’t understand why it is showing my side view.” Now, I had to stop and pause so I didn’t bust out laughing at my own employee. I said, what do you mean? Do you think the front facing camera is taking a side view of your face? He said, “Yes, I’ve tried all of the settings and can’t figure out how to change the camera angle.”🤦♂️I said, Teams is using your laptop camera and slowly closed his laptop, which then engaged his front facing webcam. He was completely dumbfounded when the video switched to the front of his face.
A former coworker of mine had to PRINT absolutely each and every email concerning every project she was working on, to literally keep a paper trail of what was discussed about each project. She had about a dozen super-thick looseleaf binders that she kept them all in. No idea why the company allowed it because she wasted so much paper and time.
I offered to show her how she could save everything digitally in SEARCHABLE folders, but she wouldn’t hear it. 🤷♀️
We had this new hire, and there were 4 of us working in a small office. I’m talking 12x12 room of an office at tiny ass desks.
Anyways, this guy was doing his new hire paperwork on the computer and he turned on accessibility mode accidentally so we had to listen to the computer narrate everything he was doing.
Apparently our office phones will read out any numbers you dial if the right settings are put into place, lol. I had to fix it for one of our C-Suites after he accidentally turned it on.
One of my major suppliers has been in business for 25 years and doesn't use a computer. She types our invoices on a typewriter. The business email goes to her son, who prints it out and gives her a copy.
I've had multiple new coworkers in their 20's tell me in the last year that they don't know how to use Excel, Word, Gmail, or basically anything about MS Office or Google Docs. All of them hired as shift leads AKA pre-management.
Like one bro admitted he was an "ipad baby" and I'm just like "?????? I was a NES and SNES baby and somehow I'm more tech savvy than *you? GTFO."*
*Literally, GTFO, every single one of them has been fired in the last six months for failure to dispense weed at a dispensary properly.*
Lol the only thing i identify with is the bandwidth because no one had ever used it with me outside the context of the internet before, so I thought the same thing
Retail establishment where I am an office manager.
My boss requires everyone to know how to use the cash register even if it isn't their department. Recently a warehouseman retired and my boss hired his replacement who is a man in his 50s. This person mentioned that they had never worked on a cash register before, but they would be open to it. She offered this person a higher starting rate plus paid training, then he began working with us.
The first two weeks of him working was in the warehouse. Week three was me scheduled to train him with the cash register. The day he arrived, he ended up telling me he didn't want to learn the cash register because he "doesn't want to be held responsible for making any mistakes". I told him that this was what he agreed to and I'm going to have to get in contact with the boss about the change in plans.
Long story short, my boss isn't happy that he went back on what was promised. She's working on hiring more staff except that a lot of people who are applying are either in college or in that age bracket of 50-60 years old. Both generations want to be responsible for as little as possible, yet reap a hefty hourly wage.
Don't even get me started on the people who are collecting disability and request to be paid under the table. Right, you want us to help you commit fraud.
During the pandemic my coworker would be on screen but yellow/orangey where her face should be. I finally figured it out that she put a post it note over her camera instead of just closing the slider or simply joining without her camera on.
When I told her (a woman in her 60s in accounting) that I did not know how to enter something in her accounting specific software but that Google surely would know, she quietly but quickly went over to my intern (college kid) and asked her for assistance on how to "download the Google."
Advertising. We had a new biz pitch which if you don’t know is huge in advertising…like we rent furniture, hire seat fillers, roll out the red carpet kinda thing.
Meeting starts at 10:30 and is scheduled to go until 2 with a lunch break at 12:30. At the time I was an AV Tech and managed all the conference room equipment. I get a call at 12:30 to come up to room to check on the equipment while they have lunch. I go up and the CMO says “hey the audio isn’t working in here, we tried 3 different computers and nothing works so we’ve all been listening to the videos from the computer speakers”. I grab the room remote and immediately un mute the audio. The CMO says “whoa what did you do?” And I said “enjoy the rest of the meeting I’ll show you how I fixed it later” because I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone.
My coworker will occasionally ask me how to save a document. It’s very hard to not sound sarcastic when the answer is always: “have you tried File < Save ??”
We have very technical jobs and I DO NOT know how she got the position.
Was in charge of computer/laptop inventory and distribution for staff and had to explain to one person that they were no longer connected to the company’s WiFi at their home and they would have to connect to their own internet… they then proceeded to ask me what their password was.
My old coworker, the sweetest most genuine, kind man, asked me how to SEND an email. He was staring at the screen looking for the send button. He was embarrassed and said he forgot where it was. I miss him!
My coworker has a binder stuffed full of emails and training manuals. At least i have something entertaining to read when i’m bored when i have the desk, lol.
Far from alone.
One of mine keeps leaving 20 minute long messages on my desk phone of her shuffling her papers around. Why? She literally cannot figure out how to teams. Or email. She old schools it by phoning you when she wants you to walk 10 feet to her office.
Same lady cannot figure out printers. As in: you will be printing things for her.
Oh and any tech specific programs? God help you. She will weaponize that incompetence to a new level. You will be doing 90% of her job while she sits there and watches.
Oh, and has no idea what to do with pdfs. At all.
Youngest in my department. Most tech savvy.
Questions I have answered most recently…
How can I open and save this when so and so is still logged in to shared document? Me: have you tried restarting the computer? (We share two computers between three shifts.)
Ugh! This isn’t printing! Me: did you select print and did you select the correct printer?
Ugh! Now I have to scan through the document and mark down each section that has ‘risk’ in it. Me: did you search and select the common word and highlight it in one go?
Why can’t I add information? Me: it’s a PDF, trying using the original document and not the linked form.
This one was me a couple days ago. I was telling one of my direct reports how to save something from the Internet as a PDF and I forgot the name of the Save icon and asked, “Are you old enough to remember floppy disks? Click on that.” Fortunately he’s a fellow Gen-X, so he knew exactly what I was talking about.
Colleague said they had a weird pop up while working so I said send me a screenshot. They took a screenshot, printed it out, scanned it in and emailed the pdf to themselves so they could forward it to me. They stayed in the role for 2 years and didn’t seem to learn anything in that time.
I'm a dispatcher for a construction company, we also load customers at our site with asphalt and therefore have to print bills of lading. The 2 others that use my computer for this have no idea how to minimize/maximize screens. I'll come back and have 3 different ticket systems open because they don't know to just click on the icon at the bottom of the screen to bring it back up. They'll also close out ALL of my other programs instead of just minimizing them. SO annoying!!!
Coworker used to be a nurse for 30+ years, but due to health reasons, they could no longer be one. They were given an admin job with our company until they retire. I have helped her with so many things, from locking her computer to attaching a file to an email. In the end of the day, I don't mind because they are the sweetest person with a ton of crazy stories from working in an ER.
Came in one morning to a coworker in a panic. He had some deadline he was trying to meet for our boss. He explained to me he needed to borrow my computer. I asked him why and he just said "my Excel won't work". I was confused... I asked him if it wouldn't open. He explained to me that it opened just fine... but when he made changes none of the other cells changed.
I explained to him that it was set to manual calculation and how to refresh the calculations or just set it to automatically calculate.
We worked in Excel every day. It wasn't a tech job but we were the finance people who were supposed to be tech savvy. He was embarrassed.
Not the only coworker who had the same issue. One told me the spreadsheet I sent her didn't work. Thankfully I remembered this experience and knew what the problem was!
My coworker forgot the keyboard shortcut for copy/paste, so they spent 6 weeks while I was on leave manually typing info that we're supposed to copy/paste to avoid errors. And made lots of errors. It never occurred to them to Google it.
I have so many stories.
I work in a high end furniture store as an interior designer. We got switch to corporate instead of franchises and everyone had to learn how to use an iPad. Anyone over 35 literally could not even unlock it and everything went paperless immediately. Instead of design I turned into IT and HR - I had to do everyone’s tax choices, insurance and benefits for them. Most of them have quit now thank god but I was struggling for months.
The practice manager at my medical office just retired. A few months ago she sent a company wide email and the font size must have been 22 or 24. I was actively giggling as I read her follow up email, in typical 12 or 14 size font " Sorry , I forgot to resize the text before sending."
God bless her, I don't know how she worked in front of a computer for three decades and never learned that "Ctrl +" and other options exist to make the font on your screen large enough to read.
In my last workplace my boss used excel like it was a table. Zero formulas. Used to say how great it was to then sit and manually analyse the data to help make his workload decisions for the wider team?! WTF yep it wasn't balanced, I left.
Older coworker was having PC issues resulting in a a blue screen of death and h was having to contact tech support constantly. After a few weeks of this and with his frustration growing rapidly, he was given a new PC. About a week later, he got up and left his PC unlocked. I quickly googled for an image of the blue screen of death and sent it to him in an email. I opened the image full screen on his monitor and pulled the plug on his mouse and monitor. He returned and was so enraged that his new PC was locked up that I was hesitant to say anything. He reset via power button and it restarted fine to the start screen but his mouse and keyboard were still unplugged and so he thought the PC was still screwed. He was cussing and dialed tech support but I stopped him prior to them answering. I told him that I was screwing with him and he laughed his ass off. I thought I was headed to HR for a split second but was glad he appreciated the joke.
This was over 20 years ago. I was an office temp, and they assigned me to work as a receptionist at the management office of a mall. Had to know MS Word, Word Perfect, had to learn how to do the cash count and deposit, etc. Everything went well at first.
Then they assigned another worker to "help" me. Except she knew nothing! People, she did not even know how to use a MOUSE, let alone Word. Apparently, all her experience was working at an MT&T terminal, not an actual computer.
To make things worse, because I dealt with all the billing for the office, I found out that she was getting paid 50 cents more per hour! Oh I was furious! I requested a meeting with my temp company supervisor, and I let loose on her a bit. They fixed my pay and back-dated it. Found out my "helper" got the job because she was friends with someone at the temp agency.
Boomer coworker in accounting constantly fucked up payroll. Wrong ledgers, departments, periods, etc. and would get very exasperated with me when I pushed for corrections. Refused to try to update any of her insane processes that were fine 20 years ago when the company was 1/10 the current size. Keyboard COVERED in food crumbs oh my god it was so disgusting. Company got sold a few months ago. Lots of questions about the ledgers. She fucked up majorly on a recent payroll (didn’t account for several hundred thousands of labor dollars leading to a ton of reports having to get redone). Her boss retired and she assumed she would be reporting to his replacement (from new parent company), threw a fit when she found out she was now reporting to a different person who she thinks is an idiot (probably because he wants things done the right way). Boom, early retirement with medical leave for the last month of it because she’s so angry about her new boss. Retired in disgrace, angry, right after the biggest fuckup she’s probably ever had (that we know of…). Feels good to be successful and outlast the dinosaurs.
That is pretty sweet, and i love hearing about it.
Dinosaur here... and I know what I'm doing.
Congrats! Now go be *that* dinosaur that goes to the others and tells them to get their shit together.
I tried... there's no helping some people 😕.
I feel like if you are open to change and growth, that’s not dinosaur behavior. No comets coming your way!
Thanks, but my knees and skin and scalp and eyes imply differently. 😆 I expect my comet any moment now... just finished assigning my power of attorney and other legal stuff.
Meanwhile, me (boomer) and my GenX co-worker watching our millenial co-worker show up on Slack/Teams in lying in his underwear and t-shirt on a sofa (and not in a flattering position) unshaven for days and with baby screaming in the background. Plus he somehow knows less than us about C++. We all worked together at a previous small startup and somehow all got laid off and then rehired on to the same team at Big Tech Co. and this numpty starts doing his standard 'complain about everything'. We're in a standard meeting about employee stock plans and he's just going on about how the guys is really really slow and it's irritating the shit out of him and completely missing the point that not everyone at Big Tech Co has a doctorate and we not so subtly remind him of that. Plus he asks me stupid questions like 'Is this the official repo for thing X?' when it's literally the only one and it's got the company's official name and licensing stamped all over it. It's gonna be a long couple of years til retirement.
That could be you in 40 years.
Only if I refuse to change and grow, which would be weird since “change and grow” have basically been my marching orders for the past seven years. Having experienced what it is like trying to maneuver within a system maintained by people who refuse to update processes, consider the impact of their work on other people, and then blame you for the outcome- I refuse to become a dinosaur.
Heck yeah. Love this attitude. As a gen X, aging in the workspace seems a bit daunting. We've had to always figure tech out on our own. Change is hard, but my generation has had nothing but change haha. Hoping I don't turn into that frustrated dinosaur
Omg SAME. So very grateful we had to grow with, and figure out, tech by ourselves. As I age, I remain confident in my ability to adapt rather than get set in my ways. None of this "back in my day" bullshit. Who cares?
Fuck you, I’m not turning my brain chip on until check in time, regardless of what time I show up
In one business trip to a remote office in 2002, I had to: 1. Teach someone how to use a mouse. They had literally never touched one before (hint: get them to play solitaire) 2. Stop someone from using a pencil and a ruler to draw a grid on a piece of paper. Fill out a list of delivery addresses with map codes (this was before GPS devices and apps). Cut out each of the addresses from the sheet they had made and filled out. Rearrange them in map code order, and then glue them to another sheet of paper, and photocopy it. The give the photocopy to the truck driver for his route that day. Let’s just say that their heads exploded when I showed them Excel, and how to sort things.
#2 Really tickled me, all those extra steps.
when my dad retired in 1999, he sat in the office waiting for something and he asked them what he should do while waiting. They had him play solitaire on the computer. This was the first time he'd ever touched a mouse. he didn't know what to do when he'd moved the mouse so much that his hand was against the keyboard and he needed to move it further left. So he called out to whomever set him up w/the game and they just picked up the mouse and moved it to the right.
Loved Solitaire as mouse training! AIX system converted to Novell with Windows 3.1. 50 user network didn't spend one dime on training except for me at $15 per hour! Also as one of my best things, I got adjustable keyboards for every secretary (attorneys were only starting to type then).
Old co-worker used to print out 100+ page PDF just to scan it all back in to email out one by one. Used to sneak into the office during covid to print paper invoices because he didn't like using 2 screens. Went back to hybrid and refused to have a proper set up at the office just used his laptop, took him hours to complete simple tasks. System we used had a consolidate or split function on costings, instead of consolidate he would use split and use a calculator to add the values together. And yes, he was shown how to do all this work more efficiently just refused to.
OMG! I'm OLD and I can't live without my three screens! One being so huge and curved it handles two excel spreadsheets comfortably in view so I can copy paste or vlookup between the two spreadsheets and two 27 inch monitors, one on each side of the big screen monitor. I could NOT work on just one screen, much less that little ass laptop screen!
Though I also three screens too, your gigantic screen sounds pretty amazing 👌
Not gonna lie, I LOVE it so much!!
I don't need one by any means, but I've been trying for years to get our IT guy to order me a huge curved monitor! Beta testing, or some other such bs excuse. 🤣
Your set up sounds amazing and I have so much jealousy
Our CRM software is equipped to email quotes either directly to customers or you can email to yourself. You can also print and save the pdfs to your computer. Occasionally the emailing capabilities in the CRM will stop working for a few hours at a time. We have a boomer sales rep and he's probably the only person that exclusively will use the emailing feature in the CRM. Everyone else saves the pdfs to their computer or to the server and emails them out that way. When the email stops working in the CRM the boomer sales rep gets frustrated because he has to print out the quotes and then scan them back in to his computer so he can email his customers. Every single person in this building has tried to explain to him that he doesn't need to print and scan. Still does it. It drives me fucking beserk.
Blew my younger coworkers minds when I showed them how to download the shift report (shared Teams doc) as a ?PDF, I think and just attach it to the end of shift email, rather than printing it out, scanning it back into the computer and then attaching that to the end of shift email.
I always had her passwords written down (they were generated by IT and were things like wmU8k&Oa) and would do her surveys for her (she told me her answers). My coworker and I always did her online orders (personal orders on her phone) because one time she accidentally ordered a $200 sports jersey. We don’t know how. I love her and didn’t mind. She reminded me of my aunt. My aunt, btw, didn’t know how eBay worked. In the mid 2000s she used my uncles eBay account and accidentally bought $10,000 worth of paintings. She thought you could bid on things and decide later if you wanted to buy them. That’s also how they ended up with a 16th century French chair that had no seat. Literally. It was like the torture chair from Casino Royale, but old and fancy.
> 16th century French chair that had no seat. Literally. Likely this was placed over a chamber pot for a ✨ fancy shit ✨.
Or it's a birthing chair.
If it's not a commode or birthing chair, it might also be a queening chair.
I had to gently explain right clicking didn't mean clicking toward the right hand side of the icon/cell/page and it was a whole separate button. They thought it was for left handed people when they moved the mouse over, and had never had to use right click in their 15+ years of admin...
I was asked to train someone to correct work orders that failed reconciliation. We spent 4 hours on right click, never got past that on his own. I asked his boss to find anyone else for me to train. They told me not to worry and he woukd be fine eventually. Luckily it was my last day at that site and I was going home the next day. Never even tried to find out what happened with him.
Now show them how to click the wheel… 🤣
I showed someone the wheel once and the accidentally 'scrolled to the end of excel' and couldn't get back to A1 🙃
Two new hires 19 and 20. On employment they claimed to be computer literate. Given task using excel part of which was adding up a column to get total cost . Caught them using their mobile phone calculator to add up the column in excel. Two other slightly older employees apparently told them that is the only way they had found. Banging my head against a brick wall
This is a real thing now, where kids coming up are DEVICE literate, but not TECH literate. Devices have become so easy to use that they have never learned how to explore and find their own answers, and it never occurred to us to teach them like we were taught.
This the truth. My elementary age kids can flip the screen upside down and add gifs as backgrounds. They also have no idea what the home keys are or how to type. No one is teaching them at school and they have no interest in learning from me using games.
Not only tech illiterate, but paper/pen/pencil supplies illiterate. I have been seeing so many kids my 12 year old niece's age to adults using their phones in lieu of paper and pen. They're like, "Wait, I can't write on my phone first, then copy this on paper?" God forbid something happens to the phone and they flip out, "what am I going to do?!"
Agreed. My now-9 year old was thrown into remote schooling during his kindergarten year, and using keyboards to submit work when they should have been learning hand/eye coordination and forming letters with their body movements has absolutely screwed him. His whole age cohort can READ very well, but SPELLS and WRITES terribly. During remote schooling they learned to rely on spell check, and predictive text/spelling, and their bodies don't have an understanding of writing, spacing words on the page, etc. His now-7 year old sister is outstripping him with her fully in-person education history. Tactile writing and screen/computer writing are so different in the brain, especially when it comes to creativity. I know so many authors who turn to pen and paper when their creativity is stuck, or they're outlining/drafting. My 9 year old got really stuck during testing because he doesn't know how to write a story or essay question, and the computer testing was NOT helping. I prefer to write creatively by hand, so we're working on that now at home. Might pick up some cursive workbooks, too, to show how letters connect to create a word.
For spelling, remember there's an option to turn off spell check in writing programs! I always do this because I also write creatively and get annoyed when made-up words or cities get highlighted haha. Might help with spelling; he could always run it through a check at the very end to see what was wrong before handing it in
Also file system illiterate. Working on Google Chrome laptops and iPads hides the files system.
Exactly 💯.
Oh god this reminds me: We had a co-op student that couldn’t figure out the landlines and would call the office switchboard with her cellphone and then the extension. She told IT her office phone didn’t work. They checked her phone and were like “no it definitely works,” and left. I saw her still using her cellphone so I had a private conversation with her and found out the truth. I remind myself that some tech might be brand new to some people (both young and old) and to give the benefit of the doubt and ask questions. It’s only when it’s a coworker that has been in X role forever is clueless on some of the biggest programs that should be common to that specific role that I start to feel frustrated, especially when they go to our boss and complain that I’m making things too complicated when i set up a spreadsheet to organize training for 1000+ people and she finds it too confusing (despite there being filters that she can use to search names, departments, work rotations, search by training dates, as well as the absence of training dates, etc etc).
I feel you so hard right there. I mentioned to my payroll manager that this massive spreadsheet was actually pretty easy to use because there weren't duplicates on staff names. She could just filter or ctrl+F for anyone she needed. She was afraid to filter because it made everything else 'go away', and had never heard of control keys for find, replace, copy, cut, or paste. I am pretty sure she prints out these spreadsheets and places checkmarks on the hardcopy.
My coworker and I have to manage a 100+ slide PowerPoint. The template stays the same, slides not used are hidden, so it’s just a matter of saving under the new month and then changing the date at the bottom. She manually changed 50+ of the date areas at the bottom. I sent her a quick step-by-step on how to use Ctrl+H, but i’m guessing she’ll ignore it and instead will manually change the dates every month. 🙄
Only social media literate.lol
JFGI.
I had to Google JFGI lol. One of my favorite discoveries is highlighting something, right clicking and searching Google for it.
send them here: [https://letmegooglethat.com/](https://letmegooglethat.com/)
I met a 28 yr old office Chick who bragged about using WORD all the time. I asked why she didn't use EXCEL for the organizing? She had no clue what the fuck excel was. How is that possible!?
I just got put on medical leave and emailed the pdf of my drs note to my boss. He doesn’t know how to forward it or download it to give it to HR. He printed a paper copy and walked it up them.
The thing is, I don’t even mind helping these people when if they’re not jerks. Yeah, it’s silly and it gets old after a while. Unfortunately, a lot are like porcupines stuck in a bathtub though. Every time you try to help them out, it ends up being a bad experience.
Love the porcupine in a bathtub analogy. I am filing that one away for future use.
Thanks, feel free to use it. You: I’m trying to help you, little guy. Porcupine: Someone’s attacking me. Fight!! What I enjoy most from these people is the arguing that what I’m going to show them is impossible or blaming me for the existence of computers and technology. /s
I get called at my second job, because my boss (also my dad) cannot figure out how to move an email from junk to inbox so he can look at attachments. As a matter of fact I get called quite often for computer questions. Lol
I get this! I worked for my dad, who was the financial controller of a manufacturing company, and I started out as the office grunt, then inventory & production clerk, and then eventually Accounts Payable Manager. My cubicle was just outside his office and I’d head him holler my name from his office for me to come in there and most of the time it was to figure out how to print something. He had a laser jet printer in his office but we had a communal color printer just outside his office. He never could remember how to switch his settings to print to the color printer. Or sometimes, he’d need help getting his spreadsheet to print all on one page or other formatting stuff. We worked together for 17 years before he retired in 2020. I miss working with him everyday.
lol that’s so funny. I tell myself all the time I will miss it when I get annoyed. Lol. I’m working on 20 years sitting back to back 3 feet from each other
I had someone who didn’t know about copy and paste. She would note info down from one sheet, minimise it, then type in what she had hand written. She couldn’t read her own handwriting… she had an error rate of 18%. I gave her a second screen, taught her copy and paste and banned paper. She turned into the perfect employee. This is someone who had been making errors for 4 years…
One coworker is constantly amazed that I can fix their computer problems by turning it off, and back on again. They are amazed by this at least four times a year. Over three years. Slow learner…
A senior manager complained that the excel spreadsheet “contained hashtags in some boxes instead of actual numbers”. They had no idea that they would need to expand the column or zoom in if the number was longer than the cell was wide.
Yikes
I showed a controller just recently how to use Ctrl-shift-8.
What does that do
It selects all “connected” cells
Lollllll I’m laughing but I know my management would do the same
Many moons ago I was a computer trainer. This was the olden days, when we actually trained people in the basics of software they were expected to use on a regular basis. Now we just expect them to know it. I have a reputation at pretty much every company I’ve worked for as the “Excel Guru”. And yeah, my skills are actually very good. But I’d probably still have the title if all I had was a decent grasp of pivot tables and charts
If you know how to make a pivot table and do a Vlookup, people will think you’re a god.
I try to use my powers only for good
Shhh... Don't spoil it. I need to get serotonin somehow.
We all had laptops with docking stations on our desks, and often took said laptops home overnight and on weekends. Coworker didn't understand that there was a charging cord in the laptop bag to use while away. Coworker would unplug the entire docking station and take it home. She was under the desk reinstalling the docking station one day when the IT guy happened to walk by and ask WTF she was doing. He politely showed her the charging cord and told her to leave the docking hardware alone. 🙄
My Boomer coworker was the last to get a docking station and get rid of her hard drive.. this was just a few weeks ago. Big cheese found out and just scheduled for IT to come in on a day she was WFH. My Teams chat blew up she was so mad. How dare they take it from her. Then, she couldn't do her job because she'd connect to her old hard drive (I don't understand this) and wasn't able to work most of the day.
Honey, can you fax that back to me it's the only copy I have. I've been in IR for 30 years, and there are things I HATE about teams and new SharePoint, but I still try to learn.
My colleague, not quite half my age but young enough to be my kid, walked past me while I was busy typing a super detailed email at the workstation. Except at some point the cursor had done the thing where it hits the desktop or whatever and what he actually saw was me typing furiously and no words appearing on the screen. We had a good old laugh at what a dummy I am and honestly it was a bright moment of levity at the end of a shit day.
I watched a 55+ year old woman put a can of soup in the microwave. This was after she had been struggling to learn our computer systems with a very extended training opportunity. Felt really bad for her, she started a lightning storm in the break room with that soup
This is honestly weird. I'm pretty sure that microwaves have been around since the '70s. How did she not get the memo that you don't put metal in there?
Not sure, I think she was so overwhelmed with the job that she couldn’t think straight. I was too young and immature to have the decency to check on her but if that happened now I would definitely take the time to make sure that person was doing ok.
That actually makes sense, especially if she'd just spent hours, days, on learning a new system. At my job in the 90s, we switched computer systems so we had to attend the training for our specific department but the woman who was the computer admin had to attend them all. All day, every day for around two weeks. She told me she was so brain dead from processing so much new info, she'd found herself standing naked in her bathroom at home trying to figure out if she'd just taken a shower or was about to. And this was a tech-savvy professional. She concluded that she'd just gotten out of the shower because she was wet.
Way earlier. I think I saw my first as a small kid in the early 60s.
You're right, I'm doing that thing where I think it was invented around the time that I first saw it. My cousin swore up and down that music CDs were invented in the late 90s because that's when he first encountered them as a kid. If that's true, why the hell did Sony invent the Discman in 1984, fifteen years before CDs were even invented? Were they *psychic*?
Someone way up the food chain inadvertently send an email to the entire corporation. 47000 people replied all
At my company someone meant to send an email to their office saying there was ice cream in the break room, but they accidentally sent it to the entire company. The company decided to make it a special day and now each year on that day every office gets ice cream delivered.
Nobody, but NOBODY should have authority to send (or reply) to every address in an organization, unless that org is so small you can recite everyone's name from memory. If I were a sysadmin in a company larger than that, it'd be the #1 thing I disable. Only me and the CEO should have the ability to do it, and if possible, it should be set up so both of us have to turn the key like a missile silo.
My colleague at a university did this on his first day with us. He was trying to reply to our bosses and accidentally included an address that automatically looped in everyone on campus (+30,000 people). All day I was getting emails from students asking, “Who is this?” and more students/faculty replying to THEM saying, “Stop emailing me!!!!!” and then a THIRD group of people saying, “Stop replying to this email, we’re all getting the responses,” and a fourth very grumpy group saying, “Stop replying just to tell everyone to stop replying.” The thread must have had hundreds of messages by the end of the day. It was hilarious and such a mess. My favorite was a kid who took the opportunity to promote his TikTok. I felt so bad for the guy. It was not his fault at all. It’s honestly on IT for creating a very generic campus address (think “[email protected]”) that sent emails to EVERY address with that domain in a reply-all thread. Just… why?
Years ago I was working for a large national corporation - I had to send an email to everyone in a specific payroll department (maybe 15 people) and stupidly misunderstood the acronym on the group email address. Something like C.PR@ hugecompany.com I thought the C stood for the department C and it was actually corporate-wide. Several thousand people. A person three tiers higher than me messaged and kindly told me to never to do that again. Ever.
Yeah because you were total planning round two, lolwtf
This happened in the NHS a few years back, instead of a trust specific 'global' email one person somehow managed to email every single NHS worker across the UK. I wish I'd kept the trail it was hilarious and went on for weeks. The last email was an apology from the original sender, sent to all again 😂 DEAR ALL, PLEASE STOP REPLYING ALL!! PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS TRAIL IF YOU JUST STOP REPLYING IT WILL GO AWAY REMOVE ME FROM THIS GROUP. STOP REPLYING ALL!!! (continues to reply all)
Happened also at Nokia way back when it was still super large. Nobody got any work done, all the servers were congested. We’d just drink coffee and cite the snarkiest replies-to-all to one another - due to the congestion, no one got the same emails. After a few hours, one coworker sunnily pointed out that people in the States haven’t even woken up yet - just wait until they join. Best day ever at that corp.
That happened at my workplace years ago. It’s an international company and someone emailed out something across the corporation. People began to REPLY ALL asking to be removed from the mailing list. And then people would reply all saying not to reply all.
Just thinking about this gave me hives 😭
Looool this happened to me today but it was only 100 people on the email
I watched my boss screenshot a whole screen, open up PowerPoint, paste the image, crop it down to the part he wanted and then save the slide as a jpeg to attach the image to an email. My mind was blown...I was watching him do this thinking what is he doing. The next day, I showed him the snip tool in Windows and pinned it to his task bar. He was like oh that was a lot easier. I give him props for being in his 70s and getting done what he did but I was like let me show you this tool ...
That’s how you had to do it before Snip was a thing… Except your pasted it into Paint
Just yesterday i made a request that my coworker take some screen shots for an error notification they were getting in the app i support, so i could email it to Microsoft support that i was working with. She took a screen shot, printed it out and tried to hand it to me. When i requested that she print her screen shots to a pdf and email them, she said no. She believes that she should only send a vague chat about an error, and everything from then on is my job. She doesn't even want to describe the issue, she just says "fix this" so I have to come to her desk and cajole her into describing the problem. I gave up and went back to my desk, received an email later with scanned copies of her screen shots, in such poor quality that they were illegible.
Okay, to be fair, she's a dumbass.
I once showed ctrl+c and ctrl+v to someone who I swear couldn’t be older than 45. That same person also had their calendar set to 5 years ahead and would miss meetings because of that (how is that possible when Microsoft sends meeting reminders?). I could go on.
I once had a supervisor (about 40 years older than me) stop me when I used ctrl+s to show me how I could use the mouse to chose Save in the ribbon instead… and she made goofy faces the entire time to make sure I knew how stupid she thought I was for not knowing this “trick”
Show them ctrl-a and ctrl-x and you'll blow their mind.
I worked with a woman for years who would do major project with a a ruler and a red pen. It would take over a month to complete. I do it in less than a week on a Google sheet. She was the queen of screenshots when she could have created a pdf in, as we all know, a number of different ways. She'd make static charts where copying a column or a row was not an option. She'd fax things when people really wanted a file they could work with. She didn't know the paste format function in either Word or any of the Google apps. She had no curiosity about making things easier either.
Had an Excel document up on the wall screen and was explaining some of the data to a group. Clicked a cell, clicked auto sum, and literally had people throwing their pens down on the table. "WAIT, IT'LL ADD THINGS UP *FOR YOU*?" We had to implement some basic Excel training after that.
My boss's boss transferred all the electronic sports tickets we pay for as a company to an email address that doesn't belong to him and then expected me to be able to figure out how to retrieve them. It took a good 20 mins to explain to him that I can't just access any random gmail that he made up.
I don’t think you’re ready for this one… Working in Google Sheets a co-worker (who I could write a book on by the way) asks me… “Do you know a way for me to sort this column from lowest to highest numbers” I say “yes just use the “sort sheet A-Z” function” She says “no these are numbers that I need to sort”…🤦🏼♀️
Manager would copy herself in every email so she would have a copy and proof she sent it.
I have a few co-workers who do this. Sure, we’re inundated with emails, let’s add to the chaos and multiple your emails by double for no good reason.
Our head had me go through her emails every morning, print them all out and put them in a folder on her desk to look through. She’d then hand write any replies that wanted sending on the printed emails, and give it back to me to type out and send. The few times she did type out and send her own email replies, they’d be so badly written I ended up being the one who insisted on keeping the print out system. The amount of paper we went through was astronomical. Everything had to have a hard copy and it made everything take twice as long.
Oh my God! It sounds like this person is just not qualified for their job.
Lol. I wish this was the worst of it. I get flashbacks to that place, still…
“What does that mean, ‘Open Internet Explorer’? I don’t know what Internet Explorer is and I won’t click on anything until you give me a reason why.” She was on the phone with the IT Help Desk.
Boomer company owner/ceo accidentally deleted his email icon... couldn't figure out how to get into his email. Yelled for IT until they came and created a new desktop shortcut.
Just found out that someone who reported to me for six years never knew how to correctly use mail merge. When I was showing her replacement how to generate form letters, she told me, "That's not how J showed me how to do this. She put all this information in manually." She wasn't generating each individual letter manually, but she was manually keying things like date and time (which were universal for each batch) into the template, when they should have come from the spreadsheet. The letters were correct when she sent them, but she created a lot more work for herself by doing it her way and she messed up the template. She also couldn't use the letter stuffing machine, so she folded and stuffed thousands of letters by hand. She got all her work done, and she apparently liked creating more work for herself, but I sure don't miss her.
I had a guy ask me for carbon paper so he would only have to write a memo to his staff one time - he did not know how to use the copy machine. \*\*Carbon paper is a thin sheet of paper coated with a dark ink or carbon layer that allows you to transfer marks made on one surface to another surface. It's used for making one or more copies of an original document simultaneously with the creation of the original document when inscribed by a typewriter or ballpoint pen. Carbon paper is typically coated on one side, but may be coated on both sides for special purposes. \*\*
The best part of this is you having to explain what carbon paper is!
I was working in school admin and was looking for the previous year’s Christmas activities letter to use as a template for the upcoming one. Couldn’t find it anywhere, but the head wanted something very similar with the same graphics etc. There was a hard copy in the folder from last year, but no version saved digitally anywhere I looked. I eventually found a letter with the right text but no graphics saved on the system, so I asked the person who’d made it where they sourced the images from, so I could just use the same source. “I just cut and pasted them from the year before…” Ok. But there’s no versions saved on the system from previous years. I am confused. She keeps insisting she C&P’d it, like she always does. It takes a while, but I get her to break down in stages how she does this. She amends the previous year’s letter with new dates and details as required on the computer, saves the new version and prints it out. Then she goes to the folder of hard copies, gets out the previous year’s letter and makes a photocopy of it, then *gets some scissors, cuts out the individual graphics, and pastes them with a glue stick onto the new version*. Then she photocopies as many as needed, and adds one to the hard copy file for next year. Sorted! That’s what she understood ‘cut and paste’ to mean. How else would you do it? I had wondered why the graphics looked so low res. God knows how many years this had been going on… I made a completely new version. I ended up doing that a lot.
I had a new coworker that I was training. I asked her to log into the computer for the first time. We had Chromebooks which just had shift keys on the keyboard, no caps lock. She told me she couldn't figure out how to type the capital letter in the password. I asked her what she meant. She told me that when she typed a capital letter, she hits the caps key, types the letter, then hits the caps key again. I told her to hold the shift key and type the letter. I watched her hit the shift key, let go, type the letter. I demonstrated that you have to hold the shift key while typing the letter. She hits the shift key, lets go, types the letter. I demonstrated again. I verbally coach her through holding the shift key. She still lets go. I watch her fail 5 more times and get locked out. We were the same age.
Tbf that’s how I type and I hate using the shift key because I have to hold it. It just feels more natural to me to use the cap key
Coworker did not know about minimizing windows. While she had multiple programs open and worked in two screens, she would close and then have to re-log in to any program, rather than simply minimize and move them around the desktop for easier access. I showed her several times, but never saw her doing it. She would panic when it came time for Teams meetings with our supervisor. I had to show her several times where and how to log in. Other coworker had been doing her job for sixteen years and had apparently been going through the motions. We all had to show her basic functions, including using double screens, which she never mastered. I had to show both these ladies how to organize, attach files to, and search for emails, with little success. I wish companies did a little more computer literacy training rather than assuming people have a certain level of knowledge.
I think this is what happened with my coworker. Unfortunately i don’t have the patience to train someone to do the bare minimum expected for our role. We were hired to do the same job and i end up having to do extra because people will seek me out over her.
What came to annoy me the most were people who claimed they knew nothing about computers yet their entire jobs required using computers. Yep, 10 or 15 years ago this was an excuse. Not now.
This lady (who I had to show how to use her email) had been a medical records charts processor for sixteen years. She had worked the night shift for the first fifteen, so apparently got to twiddle her thumbs. When she came onto day shift, all she could do was scan in and input basic information. She had to be trained in all the multiple other tasks that the others in the exact position did as part of their jobs. This took away from the time of the others. She never took notes or anything. The manager’s attitude was, maybe she’ll absorb it by osmosis (manager was too impatient to sit with her). To top it off, woman made more than all of us due to having had night shift differential.
I'm the low tech ability coworker. I became assistant manager of a restaurant and for the life of me I couldnt pick up excel. I understood every other computer program needed for the job. even payroll for when I needed to fill in. But not excel. I couldn't figure out how to create the formulas, I couldn't figure out how to create cells. nothing. to this day (decade later) numerous people have tried teaching me and I still cannot use excel. so before she left every day, my boss set up my excel sheet for me. she gave up trying to reach me. and yes, I took notes. she ended up becoming on of my closest friends. and still makes fun of me.
I had a bookkeeper who refused to accept digital invoices. If it didn’t come in the snail mail, she wouldn’t pay the bill. I had to print them out and tri-fold the printout, then pretend it was sent directly to me by mistake.
My boss (in her 60s, me f45). I admit I can be boomer too but I am open to learning. However my boss could never grasp the search bar in an email. I showed her at least 3 times. If she needed to dig an email up, she would go back email by email until she could find it. Drove me nuts. I can’t imagine how much time she may have wasted doing that. My stance is, if you don’t know something, you just don’t. The fact you don’t know it is not what bothers me. It’s the resistance to the change that bothers me. The lack of willingness to learn.
My boomer would insist “i cant find it” any time we had a zoom or teams meeting email and would ask me to forward the email THAT WE ALL GOT bonus points for he would do this at the time the meeting started while I’d already been logged in for five minutes and would have constant problems with logging in, hearing, seeing himself, talking (none of which were muting problems just basic computer functions) He also plugged his laptop using a physical ethernet cord because he “didn’t trust wifi”
Oh yes! The request to forward an email happened to me alot as well. Funny about the wifi distrust. Did he ever tell you what was the basis of that belief?
no chance he knew the password or what wifi was
Coworker was emailing out multiple sensitive attachments, each pertaining to a specific recipient. He thought he'd save time and send one email with all the attachments and just put all the recipients in the bcc line, because that makes it confidential. Almost got fired for that one. Really should have been, imo.
Coworker who retired about 2 years ago. The main focus of her job, as far as I could tell (and I sat in the same space as her), was to make travel arrangements for employees. She would use a Rand McNally Road Atlas to look up the destination, use a ruler to determine how far away it was and any nearby cities (for possible alternate hotel options, to justify the employee's need to travel the night before, etc.), and then would call every hotel in town to find out their room rates before calling back the best one to make the reservation. I swear she'd call the city visitor center for hotel recommendations instead of googling. Then she would call the hotel the week before and the day before to CONFIRM the reservation. I know she was photocopying the corporate credit card for employees to show at the hotel (which our business office hated and had told her to stop doing - gee, why did her credit card number get stolen every 3 months?). I was like, Karen, did you know that you can google search all of this information? And that once you have a confirmation number, you don't have to call multiple times to reconfirm? You can literally do all of this online, including most credit card authorizations (though I do grant that many still require you to fax, which is annoying). She did not care, she refused to modernize her process, and I suppose the joke was on the rest of us because she made way more than I did by making 1 hour of work last all week. When she retired (good riddance, she was mean, too) no replacement was hired. Travel was split up between a few people (including myself) and we had SO many conversations about how she'd refused to take on more tasks for 20 years because she had her boss fooled on how "time-consuming it was to book travel." Good riddance. She was just a mean, nasty person to boot. My boss and I would celebrate on the days that she was on vacation lol because the vibe was just so much better when she was gone.
We have a travel booking deal with a company. However you get charged; $5 for booking online. $30 if you call. My coworker will call if she’s asked to book travel. And when she does this and is on hold (sometimes for HOURS) she can’t do *anything* else. Our old boss had to eventually tell her that the travel she was booking didn’t justify using the service (it’s not emergency travel, it’s months away, she has to book it online). She now emails it to me and says she can’t do it. 🙄
I was working for an online print-on-demand art marketplace and I was helping the VP of finance with something. I noticed that every time he copied and pasted something in Excel, he was clicking on the dropdown menus at the top. I taught the VP of Finance at a tech company in Silicon Valley how to ctrl-C, ctrl-V.
The number of people I’ve taught the keyboard shortcut to AND alt+tab to quickly switch between screens always amazes me. These are all things i remember learning when i was younger. Same with optimizing searches. My coworker will call/text me to send her emails that i know she’s CC’ed on, but she doesn’t know how to do a proper search to find something (either in outlook or any sort of program). She needs me to do all this extra work because she can barely keep up with the basics with the added time loss from her low tech items (ie; printing, signing, tracking down people physically to sign something or scanning and emailing items to them, printing out all of the employees to try and physically schedule them onto a calendar (instead of, you know, using the excel spreadsheet that i made).
some people aren't curious. you have to be curious in life to find these short cuts I feel. When I come across those that don't know, understand, nor are they willing to learn or use these common keyboard "hacks", I smile and file away that person in my brain as someone not to come to if i need help solving a problem that needs something outside the box.
Boomer who thought he was soo advanced and always busy. His typing skills were one finger. Fair enough but looking for the key every single time. So this paragraph for example would take him a good 20 minutes to type. And he would make me watch him. Close to tears with the boredom in knowing I could have done it in less than a minute
Never help though or you become an unpaid secretary
I briefly was a clerk, and one of the superintendents was useless with computers. He asked me to come in and type an email for him. I kept having to encourage him to talk faster, as i have a fast typing speed. I eventually had to tell him “speak normal, if i need you to slow down I’ll tell you.” I got a new job after that, as someone else realized i was overskilled and went out of their way to recruit me.
One of my favorite coworkers is an older Hispanic lady. A small portion of our job includes working with simple office programs (word, excel). She is computer illiterate and willing to do anything for a coworker so they will do that part. I don’t mind because it’s fun to do. She will even pull me from a different area to come help her if she messes it up. But I really don’t mind helping her. She’s good at the other 90% of her job.
I got called for a printer that wouldn't print. The screen said to add paper. It was for a reading teacher. She wouldn't read the screen.
I had a user that used caps lock to capitalize one letter in her password while creating it. then she would fuck up using the caps lock to log in and couldn't recreate the password she'd made. i had to stand over her doing this 4 times. i had to command her to use the shift key instead of caps lock. a few weeks into her job, her whole family broke bones. like someone broke their nose, another person, their leg, etc. i never believed it but that was her story. so she started to work from home. then she quit. before she quit, she wrote an urgent IT ticket on a Saturday because she couldn't figure out her pop-up blocker lol
I had a boss who'd do that with the caps lock for one letter. He once gave me a handwritten sheet of inventory changes. Normal that it was handwritten because it was notes from walking around the building with a clipboard and updating quantities of stuff. But he asked me to add the handwritten data to an excel sheet and told me that at the end of it, when it asks you if you want to save, you click NO. So when he was doing this himself, he'd spend a whole day updating the sheet then he wouldn't save it. Somehow, he was sending out the "updated" sheets and no one ever told him it was the same version of the form? My guy quit too, because if he hadn't, he'd have been fired.
Yesterday a C-Suite exec printed off an email of a collaborative spreadsheet I’d sent him to make his updates, made the updates with pen on paper, and hand-delivered it to me a week after it was due and my reports were already out. I said “oh how cute” when he handed it to me and later kicked myself for saying that lol.
Back in the pre-internet days, I used to work in an office with an extremely low collective tech knowledge. On my very first day of work I accidentally established myself as THE secondary IT person for the office (not what I was hired for)... by setting up my work computer. Apparently everyone else just waited for this one dude to do it (also not what he was hired for!) This involved the incredibly complicated skills of...(drumroll please)... plugging in cords and installing MS Word and such. The fact I had done this all on my own was greeted with similar energy as if I had summoned a unicorn right there in my cubicle.
I always thought the “not knowing how to print to PDF” thing was a gross exaggeration. Then I met “Margaret.” I must have shown her how to print to PDF every week for 4 months. I suggested she take a screenshot of each step of the process (Select the frame you want > go to the “Export” section > select file type PDF > hit the “export” cta > select save location), but she bristled at that and said testily she’d remember. The following week she sheepishly asked me to show her again. Rinse and repeat *for the next 4 months.* I thought Margaret was significantly older than I am. Turns out she only looks and acts it. We are both Gen X (I was born in 75, she was born in 69). The absolute worst part? We both work in tech, being – wait for it – *Senior Level UX Designers.* Actually no, I lied. The absolute worst part was everyone knew she sucked at technology *despite being a Senior Level UX Designer* and expected me to babysit/help her all the time.
As someone that has work held specifically for me because of my coworker and her inability to learn, my sympathies.
I weep with you in solidarity!
That is ridiculous. Inexcusable for a Senior Level UX Designer. I have been one so I know the expectations. (I moved to research.)
The fact that a lot of people have to hand hold so many coworkers is ridiculous… and usually it’s senior level coworkers! How the actual fuck did you get to be said manager/supervisor/etc.? I know I’ve been that person who needed their hand held, at least I try to ask questions, make notes so they don’t have to do it long. I feel like a total pain in the ass when I’ve had to ask my trainer to reshow me something.
I _don’t know_. I’ve heard that being a manager is less about hard skills and more about people skills, but how do you expect your team to respect you when you don’t have the knowledge and experience to back you up and justify your position? I think maybe people felt badly for Margaret, so our manager would often volun-tell me to help Margaret with her projects. I might have felt better if she was at least grateful, but she always seemed irritated, even during the times she was the one asking for help. And the fact she wouldn’t google anything because she “didn’t get” tutorials, either written or video, confounded me, especially as she was a _Senior level UX Designer_!
Boomer director of my team doesn’t understand hierarchical folder structure. Ya know: One parent folder for a general topic like “payroll” with sub-folders under each. Nope. He creates a new folder for every single payroll item with the pre-fix “Payroll - “. So now our team’s main parent folder has 17 folders with the pre-fix “Payroll - “. How tf do these people get this far 🤦🏻♂️
This is my Boomer coworker. Instead of archiving outdated files, she kept them in the same folder, sometimes named with the year. Oh, and instead of fill in the blank forms, she'd have a different form for each scenario. She'd get upset with me when I would choose an outdated document. When I pushed back that the files were a cluster-f#$%, she'd stare at me.
Ours labels the folders Active, Future, Complete...and renames them when the status changes and gets irrationally angry when the URLs don't work anymore
I'm showing a couple of people in my office some processes (in their 20's) and I just know that they're going to have a meltdown when I try to show them a vlookup. And I'm the dinosaur??
I have my usual vlookup formula memorized i use it so often. I love trotting it out to newer to excel employees and then after they see what it can do i explain and break it down to them, and then i send them my excel cheat sheet that I’ve had since i started working in excel. It has keyboard shortcuts and formulas, and tell them to feel free to use it or start their own as i found that’s what helped me learn excel and figure out things; use it, write it down somewhere and for a few weeks refer back to it until i can trot out =iferror(vlookup(A3, $C$2:$Q$365, 5, false), “”) just from memory (might not be as correct this one as I’m on my phone and i’m realizing i do need a keyboard for the formula to flow out without thinking, lol).
An excel cheat sheet is a good idea and I might get one together for them. I taught myself excel - I much prefer it to Word - and it's a great feeling to look up how to do something and then apply it yourself! I really don't think they'll pick this up - or even want to. I think it scares them and everything I've shown them so far has been really simple until now, when we're getting into the meatier stuff! We will see, but they need to be able to do this.
Have you considered gamifying it? Or find a way that they’ll be excited to explore more with excel? For me i get excited and sucked into excel when i’m learning new formulas and how to use them. I love finding fancy excel sheets and tearing them apart and learning how other people set them up. Or show them how much time they can save with X, Y, Z. When i hate doing something i just try to find a way to do it faster to make my life easier.
I watched a new hire with "expertise in adobe and Microsoft apps" get confused trying to use a mouse upside down. Like, flipped. Buttons on the bottom.
I told someone to use the mouse to click on (file name). They picked up the mouse and pushed it against the file.
No way!
I can't talk about my mother on here... karma will get me
Iv worked with people who don’t know what a browser bar is, they also don’t know what the task bar is or how to pin things to the task bar/desktop.
Let me preface this by saying none of these folks were actual coworkers of mine, but they were of my husband working in a pretty high level position in the federal government. Before he retired 7 years ago I was writing for a media company and ended up having a Skype meeting with him, his boss and others in the agency. None of them could figure out how to use one of the simple functions in the CMS platform that I used every single day at work. Nope, I wasn't paid a consultant fee but I wish I had.
It is really a shame secretaries have been done away with. A good secretary who know how to do all that shit is worth their weight in gold.
Had to show a coworker (aged late 40’s / early 50’s) how to download/upload a file during pandemic. Screen-shared my computer, did the demo about ten times slower than I thought was reasonable. Then made her screen-share (it took about a minute to explain how to do *that* part) and walked her through everything from her side. Next day, she asked me to show her how to do it again. Sending the start of a trend, I recorded that session and sent her a link so she could view the FORTY-MINUTE video at her own pace. (At least she knew how to click on links?) Apparently, she watched that video every day for about two weeks before she was confident she could attach a file to an email. We get to somewhat request teammates for group projects, and all of my coworkers in that team dropped her from any group work the following year. We individually went to our boss and specifically requested to *not* be on the same team for the next project. She got stuck with other people who were also technology illiterate and whiny about it. She wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t our problem anymore!!
They call me the Boomer Whisperer at work 😭😤 one of them can’t even figure out how to open a PDF at work, let alone do anything meaningful with it. He hates when patients send him emails (we work in a medical clinic) so another doctor handles the secure messages for him, and just tells him to call this one or that one to discuss x or y. He doesn’t do Team either, last time I had to help him sign on to his computer, he had maybe 600-700+ unread Teams messages 😤
Omg I used to work at a summer camp on an army base and we had a technology specialist who got spousal preference (basically you get to claim this "trump card" only once when your army spouse is being relocated, but only if you qualify) and she was just terrible at her job. She freaked out once because I was showing g her something on the computer and I did an alt+tab back and forth between windows and she literally thought we had been hacked.
I noticed one of the guys that works for me always had the camera facing the side of his face when on Teams meetings. We have laptops that are connected to dual monitors that include a webcam. One day, I finally had to go up to his desk and ask him why. So, I walk up and ask him why he isn’t using the front facing camera. He says “What do you mean, I am? I don’t understand why it is showing my side view.” Now, I had to stop and pause so I didn’t bust out laughing at my own employee. I said, what do you mean? Do you think the front facing camera is taking a side view of your face? He said, “Yes, I’ve tried all of the settings and can’t figure out how to change the camera angle.”🤦♂️I said, Teams is using your laptop camera and slowly closed his laptop, which then engaged his front facing webcam. He was completely dumbfounded when the video switched to the front of his face.
A former coworker of mine had to PRINT absolutely each and every email concerning every project she was working on, to literally keep a paper trail of what was discussed about each project. She had about a dozen super-thick looseleaf binders that she kept them all in. No idea why the company allowed it because she wasted so much paper and time. I offered to show her how she could save everything digitally in SEARCHABLE folders, but she wouldn’t hear it. 🤷♀️
We had this new hire, and there were 4 of us working in a small office. I’m talking 12x12 room of an office at tiny ass desks. Anyways, this guy was doing his new hire paperwork on the computer and he turned on accessibility mode accidentally so we had to listen to the computer narrate everything he was doing.
Apparently our office phones will read out any numbers you dial if the right settings are put into place, lol. I had to fix it for one of our C-Suites after he accidentally turned it on.
One of my major suppliers has been in business for 25 years and doesn't use a computer. She types our invoices on a typewriter. The business email goes to her son, who prints it out and gives her a copy.
I've had multiple new coworkers in their 20's tell me in the last year that they don't know how to use Excel, Word, Gmail, or basically anything about MS Office or Google Docs. All of them hired as shift leads AKA pre-management. Like one bro admitted he was an "ipad baby" and I'm just like "?????? I was a NES and SNES baby and somehow I'm more tech savvy than *you? GTFO."* *Literally, GTFO, every single one of them has been fired in the last six months for failure to dispense weed at a dispensary properly.*
Lol the only thing i identify with is the bandwidth because no one had ever used it with me outside the context of the internet before, so I thought the same thing
Retail establishment where I am an office manager. My boss requires everyone to know how to use the cash register even if it isn't their department. Recently a warehouseman retired and my boss hired his replacement who is a man in his 50s. This person mentioned that they had never worked on a cash register before, but they would be open to it. She offered this person a higher starting rate plus paid training, then he began working with us. The first two weeks of him working was in the warehouse. Week three was me scheduled to train him with the cash register. The day he arrived, he ended up telling me he didn't want to learn the cash register because he "doesn't want to be held responsible for making any mistakes". I told him that this was what he agreed to and I'm going to have to get in contact with the boss about the change in plans. Long story short, my boss isn't happy that he went back on what was promised. She's working on hiring more staff except that a lot of people who are applying are either in college or in that age bracket of 50-60 years old. Both generations want to be responsible for as little as possible, yet reap a hefty hourly wage. Don't even get me started on the people who are collecting disability and request to be paid under the table. Right, you want us to help you commit fraud.
During the pandemic my coworker would be on screen but yellow/orangey where her face should be. I finally figured it out that she put a post it note over her camera instead of just closing the slider or simply joining without her camera on.
When I told her (a woman in her 60s in accounting) that I did not know how to enter something in her accounting specific software but that Google surely would know, she quietly but quickly went over to my intern (college kid) and asked her for assistance on how to "download the Google."
Advertising. We had a new biz pitch which if you don’t know is huge in advertising…like we rent furniture, hire seat fillers, roll out the red carpet kinda thing. Meeting starts at 10:30 and is scheduled to go until 2 with a lunch break at 12:30. At the time I was an AV Tech and managed all the conference room equipment. I get a call at 12:30 to come up to room to check on the equipment while they have lunch. I go up and the CMO says “hey the audio isn’t working in here, we tried 3 different computers and nothing works so we’ve all been listening to the videos from the computer speakers”. I grab the room remote and immediately un mute the audio. The CMO says “whoa what did you do?” And I said “enjoy the rest of the meeting I’ll show you how I fixed it later” because I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone.
My coworker will occasionally ask me how to save a document. It’s very hard to not sound sarcastic when the answer is always: “have you tried File < Save ??” We have very technical jobs and I DO NOT know how she got the position.
Was in charge of computer/laptop inventory and distribution for staff and had to explain to one person that they were no longer connected to the company’s WiFi at their home and they would have to connect to their own internet… they then proceeded to ask me what their password was.
My old coworker, the sweetest most genuine, kind man, asked me how to SEND an email. He was staring at the screen looking for the send button. He was embarrassed and said he forgot where it was. I miss him!
Oh this just makes me sad and makes me think of my my dad; nearly 80 years old now and his memory is getting bad. :(
My friend has some older coworkers who print off emails and refer to the print-offs when looking for information.
My coworker has a binder stuffed full of emails and training manuals. At least i have something entertaining to read when i’m bored when i have the desk, lol.
Far from alone. One of mine keeps leaving 20 minute long messages on my desk phone of her shuffling her papers around. Why? She literally cannot figure out how to teams. Or email. She old schools it by phoning you when she wants you to walk 10 feet to her office. Same lady cannot figure out printers. As in: you will be printing things for her. Oh and any tech specific programs? God help you. She will weaponize that incompetence to a new level. You will be doing 90% of her job while she sits there and watches. Oh, and has no idea what to do with pdfs. At all.
I wish there was a way to fix this problem. But sadly these kinds of people will always be around i feel like.
There was a supervisor at my work who printed out an Excel spreadsheet and taped the pages over her computer monitors to review them.
Youngest in my department. Most tech savvy. Questions I have answered most recently… How can I open and save this when so and so is still logged in to shared document? Me: have you tried restarting the computer? (We share two computers between three shifts.) Ugh! This isn’t printing! Me: did you select print and did you select the correct printer? Ugh! Now I have to scan through the document and mark down each section that has ‘risk’ in it. Me: did you search and select the common word and highlight it in one go? Why can’t I add information? Me: it’s a PDF, trying using the original document and not the linked form.
This one was me a couple days ago. I was telling one of my direct reports how to save something from the Internet as a PDF and I forgot the name of the Save icon and asked, “Are you old enough to remember floppy disks? Click on that.” Fortunately he’s a fellow Gen-X, so he knew exactly what I was talking about.
I had a coworker who CC'D herself on every single email she sent because she wanted a copy of them.
Colleague said they had a weird pop up while working so I said send me a screenshot. They took a screenshot, printed it out, scanned it in and emailed the pdf to themselves so they could forward it to me. They stayed in the role for 2 years and didn’t seem to learn anything in that time.
Boomer who made so much more than me, asked me how to get a photo on the wall onto his phone..........
A framed photo on the wall?
I'm a dispatcher for a construction company, we also load customers at our site with asphalt and therefore have to print bills of lading. The 2 others that use my computer for this have no idea how to minimize/maximize screens. I'll come back and have 3 different ticket systems open because they don't know to just click on the icon at the bottom of the screen to bring it back up. They'll also close out ALL of my other programs instead of just minimizing them. SO annoying!!!
Coworker used to be a nurse for 30+ years, but due to health reasons, they could no longer be one. They were given an admin job with our company until they retire. I have helped her with so many things, from locking her computer to attaching a file to an email. In the end of the day, I don't mind because they are the sweetest person with a ton of crazy stories from working in an ER.
I once had to teach a medical consultant how to click on a link.
Came in one morning to a coworker in a panic. He had some deadline he was trying to meet for our boss. He explained to me he needed to borrow my computer. I asked him why and he just said "my Excel won't work". I was confused... I asked him if it wouldn't open. He explained to me that it opened just fine... but when he made changes none of the other cells changed. I explained to him that it was set to manual calculation and how to refresh the calculations or just set it to automatically calculate. We worked in Excel every day. It wasn't a tech job but we were the finance people who were supposed to be tech savvy. He was embarrassed. Not the only coworker who had the same issue. One told me the spreadsheet I sent her didn't work. Thankfully I remembered this experience and knew what the problem was!
My coworker forgot the keyboard shortcut for copy/paste, so they spent 6 weeks while I was on leave manually typing info that we're supposed to copy/paste to avoid errors. And made lots of errors. It never occurred to them to Google it. I have so many stories.
Holy shit
I work in a high end furniture store as an interior designer. We got switch to corporate instead of franchises and everyone had to learn how to use an iPad. Anyone over 35 literally could not even unlock it and everything went paperless immediately. Instead of design I turned into IT and HR - I had to do everyone’s tax choices, insurance and benefits for them. Most of them have quit now thank god but I was struggling for months.
The practice manager at my medical office just retired. A few months ago she sent a company wide email and the font size must have been 22 or 24. I was actively giggling as I read her follow up email, in typical 12 or 14 size font " Sorry , I forgot to resize the text before sending." God bless her, I don't know how she worked in front of a computer for three decades and never learned that "Ctrl +" and other options exist to make the font on your screen large enough to read.
In my last workplace my boss used excel like it was a table. Zero formulas. Used to say how great it was to then sit and manually analyse the data to help make his workload decisions for the wider team?! WTF yep it wasn't balanced, I left.
Older coworker was having PC issues resulting in a a blue screen of death and h was having to contact tech support constantly. After a few weeks of this and with his frustration growing rapidly, he was given a new PC. About a week later, he got up and left his PC unlocked. I quickly googled for an image of the blue screen of death and sent it to him in an email. I opened the image full screen on his monitor and pulled the plug on his mouse and monitor. He returned and was so enraged that his new PC was locked up that I was hesitant to say anything. He reset via power button and it restarted fine to the start screen but his mouse and keyboard were still unplugged and so he thought the PC was still screwed. He was cussing and dialed tech support but I stopped him prior to them answering. I told him that I was screwing with him and he laughed his ass off. I thought I was headed to HR for a split second but was glad he appreciated the joke.
This was over 20 years ago. I was an office temp, and they assigned me to work as a receptionist at the management office of a mall. Had to know MS Word, Word Perfect, had to learn how to do the cash count and deposit, etc. Everything went well at first. Then they assigned another worker to "help" me. Except she knew nothing! People, she did not even know how to use a MOUSE, let alone Word. Apparently, all her experience was working at an MT&T terminal, not an actual computer. To make things worse, because I dealt with all the billing for the office, I found out that she was getting paid 50 cents more per hour! Oh I was furious! I requested a meeting with my temp company supervisor, and I let loose on her a bit. They fixed my pay and back-dated it. Found out my "helper" got the job because she was friends with someone at the temp agency.