Standing in the bike shop yesterday, waiting to pick up my bike after an overhaul, and the guy in front of me in the queue tells the mechanic that he's here to pick up a bike too - he'd dropped it off for repair the previous day.
"OK, what was wrong with it?"
"It had a puncture."
I blame the parents. There are a number of guys in my office who admit to being unable to sew a button on a shirt. I blame their parents too.
What other minimal skills of this kind have you found people to lack? Or, more daringly, what minimal skills do you lack yourself?
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I've noticed that many people can't boil water in that they don't put the lid on. The fools!
We once had a councillor taking part in IAC who complained about how much time it took. When she talked me through it I discovered that she had composed her answers in word (so could read the whole thing - text entry box on our site isn't huge). Then printed it out and typed it in again.
When I asked why she hadn't cut and pasted she had no idea what I was talking about and complained that our notes didn't tell you how to do that. She had described herself as fairly computer literate in our survey.
I should add this story on an orienteering-type event, being done in pairs: my partner got the grid of the next checkpoint, looked it up on his map, took a bearing from the map on his compass and then set off in completely the wrong direction.
Me: "Where are you going? Shouldn't we be going sort of south-east?"
Him: "No, it's this way, the needle's pointing this way."
Me: "...You know the needle always points north, right?"
Also, my Dad doesn't understand the 'show desktop' icon. He always has about 30 windows open at once, and insists on minimising each one individually when he wants to go to his desktop. I keep trying to explain but he won't listen to me.
I don't know why my examples are all computery.
I'm also amazed when people buy frozen pastry. (I mean, just normal pastry - obviously puff pastry is too much hassle to make by hand.) Surely ordinary pastry is the easiest thing in the world to make? And a lot easier than remembering to take something out of the freezer 24 hours before you want to cook...
Soph, if it makes you feel any better, I deliberately avoid knowing anything about how my father uses computers, because I know it would only depress me. This is a man who, when compelled to have one in his office, used it only in order to check that his watch wasn't slow, and had his secretary print out all his emails so that he could deal with them in a format with which he was familiar - he has an instinctive distrust of anything invented since about 1935.
However, my birthday present this year arrived via Amazon, so I deduce that he's getting happier with the modern world.
Ah, my Dad is one of them silver surfers, so he spends his whole time on the computer. I'm forever being sent rubbish jokes in the form of badly done ppt presentations...
He also loves saving money and getting a bargain, so Ebay is the thing he has been waiting his whole life for... I can't mention that I was thinking of getting some new curtains without being emailed 20 links to ebay auctions for ugly window coverings...
Maybe your Dad got his secretary to order things from Amazon?
Unlikely - he no longer has a secretary. He's become a lot happier about computers since he discovered that you can buy obscure books over the Internet. For him this is the killer app. (For me too, to be honest.)
I agree with Soph's dad. Why would anyone need a 'show desktop' icon when you can just hold down the windows key and press 'M'? Hmmm?
I did not know about Windows+M. You can all scorn me now.
aPOU achieves 'educational' status at last!
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