Friday, April 30, 2004
Funny User Tricks
I was just reminded of a computer user anecdote that may or may not translate well into writing. This was a part time secretary for a client, who now does a small amount of work for them out of her home instead.
What made me think of her was the question posed to me of whether we could put Juris Timesheet on her home computer, so she could relieve a burdensome volume of manual time entry for one of the full time secretaries. The main obstacle will be comfort level with her regularly receiving and copying or saving to the right place the client/matter validation database. I have confidence the secretary in the building will be able to save e-mailed batches to the right place on the network, and be able to send the database to her external helper.
Anyway, this reminded me when the woman was new there. Her first few months were chronic, seemingly hallucinatory computer problems I had to keep checking. When I swapped her Pentium 100 for a Pentium 60, it was like a placebo effect that made it all go away.
Her thing seemed to be impatience. She would click click click urgently, and in their document manager, that would cause such problems that everything would completely freeze. At first she didn’t listen to me when I explained what she was doing.
One day she was especially frantic to get something or another done. She utterly immobilized her computer, then started trying other secretary’s computers. She immobilized three of them! The fourth person was guarding her computer and not allowing this woman to touch it when I walked in to see what was happening. Had to reboot all of them, and naturally when I tried her computer it worked just fine.
Click click click…
In fairness, after a while she stopped having problems, apparently chilled a little, and never needed my help anymore. If she did, I knew there was a real problem. I really doubt there would be a problem having her save an MDB file to a folder and replace the old one, even if it’s complicated by also having her delete the LDB file. After all this time, I suspect she’s come that far, despite having been one of the most trying users ever once upon a time. Some people start out not that bad, and never progress. They start out not understanding basic concepts, and they are never willing or able to learn anything.
But to this day, it still amazes me that the act of her attempting to use three other computers hung them all. That’s impressive.