It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re completely capable of making sense of this machine. It’s just that some asshole got a bonus for trying to confuse you so a little graph would go up.

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist
zip's bf
no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good
It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re completely capable of making sense of this machine. It’s just that some asshole got a bonus for trying to confuse you so a little graph would go up.
I bought my elderly mother a smartphone (she had been using an ancient flip phone for ages and it was falling apart) at the start of 2022 and this shit has been killing me
I dread having to get her an actual new PC just so she can check email, but even basic browsers are starting to fail on Windows XP
A couple of jobs ago I did tech support for niche medical software and at least half of the issues people called over were not our software, it was bloatware on their computers breaking things or slowing everything down for no reason. We helped them anyway, this was a privately-owned company, their clients were mostly small private practices and the owner was not a dick about metrics.
But yeah, I would log in remotely to their computer and walk them through uninstalling and disabling bloatware, while reassuring them that they were not dumb. These were doctors! Recognized in their field! Extremely confident they could get up on someone's brain and remove tumors or whatever! And they were still feeling stupid and ashamed
great article. this is exactly why i don't charge the elderly for removing malicious software.
as someone who helps old folks with their computers for a living (among other things), this is absolutely fucking correct.
This is very much in line with a rant I've had brewing. For all we talk about users in tech, the software we build is actually built for a purpose. The purpose rarely aligns with the interests of the user. In so many cases, if the things we built were actually for the benefit of the user, the correct and obvious action would be to not build it. The way we pretend otherwise is just a staggering abdication of responsibility toward our fellow humans.
it's so frustrating, and becoming so much easier for unscrupulous orgs to do it with SaaS models