[gmw]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I just spent an hour, with a steely-eyed missile man options trader (mind you) who reportedly spent a few HOURS yesterday, frustrated, because apparently, the PROTECTED VIEW warning, in Word, about having to "click here" to edit a file in Word that you "downloaded from the Internet" was invisible to him.

I mean...it's one thing to not know something. It's another to not know something that I or we think is "widely known" and lo, it's not. But it's another to STARE at a goddamn prompt and IGNORE IT.

As in the attached. I mean, REALLY? You can't see that, even AFTER I've sent you this image??????[...]

Hitch, I am not going to try and claim there are no people in the world who seem unable to follow even simple instructions, but when I feel my patience crumbling I try to remind myself that - just like any remote conversation, like we're having here - it's very easy to get into misunderstandings over very basic assumptions.

Microsoft products are quite notorious for their visual changes between versions, so it can be important to know what version (operating system and product) you are discussing - but even discovering the version can be difficult.

And then you can run into trouble because unless you can actually see the computer at the other end: you don't know what colour scheme is being used; you don't know what brightness and contrast and colour levels are set; you don't know what else might be running on the system that has a stay-on-top window obscuring part of the screen (or maybe a cat sitting on a shelf above the screen with its tail hanging down); you don't know if the person may have movement difficulties (inherent or because of junk on the desk). You don't know whether the person suffers from colour-blindness - there's even a rare one that turns yellows and oranges to pink.

And computer software in general is pretty notorious for bugs. Sometimes the computer at the other end is not doing what you assume it should be doing. I've even had software I've written myself sometimes surprise me thanks to odd interactions with other software in particular installations.

And, finally, there are some people that have difficulty with the basic concepts. Not having spent a life-time acquiring this stuff as second nature, they are so distracted by the idea that when they move this thing on the desk (and remember there are myriad different forms of hardware used to move the mouse pointer on the screen) they don't have much left over for reading everything that's on the screen - not being something they do every day, they don't necessarily know what things to look out for.

How many words were on that image you sent? You and I know where to expect things to appear, but some people have to read what's there, all of it, and if they're feeling under pressure (and if we're losing our patience they probably are feeling under pressure), they're probably skimming and missing it. One thing I would suggest is do not draw your red-pointer arrows in a neat horizontal or vertical, they look too much like part of what is actually on your screen. The person is likely to go looking for a neat red arrow on their screen and not find it. Scrawl the arrow across the page, the more hand-drawn it looks the better - not saying that's a panacea, but it might help a bit.


ETA: Hmm... I worry the above might sound a bit holier-than-thou or something. I should point out that my wife plays a game of picking who I am speaking with by the tone of my voice, and counting how often I have to repeat myself. Sometimes patience can be hard to find.