God, I work at a library and the amount of garbage “screenshots” I get from ancient camera phones is… infuriating. (And then they expect me to somehow improve the quality. With what, my magic wand? Geez.)
Ed Rhodes
“But you always see them ‘boosting’ the image on ‘NCIS!’ “
Bicycle Bill
Even better is when someone loses their cellphone so they call their carrier to trace it Like the carrier can pinpoint the location – immediately, in real time, and within a three-foot radius – of each and every one of the 70 million plus phones in their network.
Demoted Oblivious
You have my sympathy Bill, and at I guess, I’d assume you worked for a telco?
But to be fair, most of the equipment and computational capacity is there, so doing locates for one or all of the millions of phones on a network is not the issue. The problem is not scale, but the age and/or security policies of devices of each person on the network, and their urban/rural location. I keep my location sharing disabled (mostly), but in a sufficiently dense cell network, there’s a *lot* of data to be able to triangulate me anyways. And then a lot of users’ phones just share their location anyways. As well, people are taught by t.v. that carriers *can* do this, and our governments are cheaping out on our educations, so what do you expect except that people will believe what they see. Which can be helped if you just zoom in and enhance like they do on those same shows.
Given how many *B*illions of dollars phone services make, the carriers could offer a little more customer service. This is the obligation of the executives, and is not a targetted gripe at phone company _workers_ who are regular decent folks.
–Sent from my smartphone
thejeff
Even assuming they could – how would they even tell you? Even with a precise fix, they’re going to be able to give you coordinates, not tell you it’s behind the seat cushion.
Demoted Oblivious
Well if they send you a google maps link, you can use the maps app to guide you to the location of your lost phone! I mean, how else would they do it?
RowenMorland
And should they tell you, voice on the phone calling up to ask someone’s location, who might be hiding from you with good reason.
Demoted Oblivious
Well I’m already in the house, so why not? xp
Demoted Oblivious
I’m hiding behind the couch while they’re using their phone to look for it.
thejeff
Obviously you need to prove who you are by either calling from your phone or entering the code they just sent to your phone. 🙂
ktbear
YES with your magic wand. Oh wait, were you being sarcastic?
Reltzik
PSA: “Enhance” isn’t code for a big mallet with the phrase “enhanced tech support” written on it.
Amy
Cake decorator. Number of people who can’t figure out how to email a .jpeg and send a screenshot instead, and then expect us to improve image quality before printing on their cake. Bonus points for leaving a cursor over a child’s face.
Also: no, I cannot crop a rectangle so it fully covers a circle and not lose any of the image.
I wrote an app for my company that allows people to enter their expense reports on either their computers or their phones. To include a receipt, one need only take a picture of it, it’ll be auto-resized so that it can be quickly uploaded without being a huge image file. That means that if you take a client out for lunch or something, you don’t even need to hang onto the receipt, just take a pic and toss it!
But now, get this, I need to add pdf support in addition to images because this one guy doesn’t know how to use his phone or mobile apps, so he takes the receipts home, scans them on his PC, and wants to upload them as pdf files because that’s what his scanner is configured to make and he doesn’t know how to change anything!
ARGH! Stupid tech illiterate boomers!
Jamie
PFt, just get a pdf2jpg converter! …mostly kidding.
Delicious Taffy
No matter how much ease of access and user-friendliness you add to a process, some dumb motherfucker is gonna insist on finding a way to make it as difficult an annoying as possible.
Bicycle Bill
True, true. The smarter the phones get, the dumber the users seem to become.
Reltzik
That’s less about phones, and more about the general trend of humanity.
…. actually, wait, smart phones help people access 24 hour streams from shady “news” sources and bubble up with like-minded folks. Okay, yeah, they may be playing a part in it.
khn0
I find this thread to be slightly disturbing. I haven’t this much of disdain for tech-illiteracy since… since I worked helpdesk and one of my supervisor insisted that all customers would lie…
It’s like it’s OK to be unable to know the proper spelling of a word but not how to type it. Both are bullshit imo (not a humble opinion). People have to choose from a bunch of competencies they are able to acquire. They can’t and won’t get them all. What they choose, care to, or are able to acquire is their way to proceed with the unability to choose goals – if they would be responsible to have their own goals, they wouldn’t even need an app if they think it should be done on paper. I would add to look Ilich or Gorz for some read on this, but this is also everyone’s choice to care or not.
Delicious Taffy
Sure, not everyone can be good with everything, but when it’s the same people trying to do the same thing and they somehow can’t remotely comprehend it anymore purely because the object they’re interacting with isn’t the same shape as the one they used twenty years ago, even though it uses identical steps to accomplish it and the user interface hasn’t changed in any meaningful way, there’s a level of willful stupidity there that I can’t blame anyone for being upset with.
khn0
not everyone can and not everyone should.
Why would they learn this new trick while the old was functionning well?
In the name of progress, but what is progress if not the adaptation of production tools in order to extract more relative value from the working process (in other word: increase production), hence exploit more?
Delicious Taffy
What the fuck are you talking about? If some old dipshit can’t figure out how to do the exact same thing they’ve been doing for decades just because the rectangle they have to use is a little bit smaller, it has nothing to do with fucking worker exploitation. It’s actually 100% fine to make fun of people who can’t figure out that the thing that does what they want still does the thing if you make the casing a little shinier.
Demoted Oblivious
Except that (and knowing full well I’ve mocked support calls too), the devices *don’t* do it the same way, and they do keep moving the menus around (lookin at you windows), and they keep changing where settings are when they make the button shinier, and a lot of the time you *can’t* do it the same way you’ve always done it, and finally, as people age, their brains do continue to change and for a lot of people it really is very hard to keep up with the perpetual change.
You have my sympathies D.T., but an attitude of ageism about old dipshits also isn’t going to help things along, or help you be more patient with them, and one day we are both going to be old dipshits too. (I may be already, or maybe just a run if the mill dipshit. It depends on who’s carbon dating me)
Delicious Taffy
Maybe I’m overreacting and going a little far in regards to the age thing, sure. A lifetime of being asked how to fix some problem I can’t see and is only being described orally by someone who hates adjectives, all because I’m “good with computers” (meaning I can type in a word processor and right-click) has made me a little oversensitive to this sort of thing.
Demoted Oblivious
Ugh… re-reading myself was way-more finger waggy you lil’rascal than I meant it to be, but thank you for your receptivity. Your frustration is absolutely valid. I’ve handled 2.5 hour password reset support calls (remote client, encrypted hard-drive). We got there, but their password is now yuiop, and after my manger reviewed the call, their manager was talked to, and they’re not allowed to call support anymore without seeing their manager first.
I would agree with you and suck it up if my customer base was retired grandma’s and their cat photos or w/e. *MY* “customer” base is our high-paid tech bros who have somehow never learned what the “Print Screen” key does! ?
This dang phone and its apostrophes in fucking EVERYTHING ? (also its inability to let me see the whole textarea at once)
khn0
As I said DT, I worked HD, and I spent hours helping people like the one who just had slipped the device into the sink with washing water and dirty dishes – because they were drunk and not caring and my point is: why should they care?
What you can’t accept: them talking to you like shit or urging things to work when they’re not.
What they don’t have to accept: caring about things moving or changing or whatev that they don’t asked.
I can understand how frustating it is, you are at the receiving end of all complaints and in charge to solve things.
My take about technological changes supposed to affect efficiency what is what relative value is about is in fact not mine, but the one of Bihr reflecting theories of both Gramsci and Makhaiavski.
Demoted Oblivious
To be fair Ana, I too would suck it up if my support base was my retired grandmas’ and her cats’ photos’ too (rest boths hers soul)
While I love that poster… It was the Boomers generation that convinced the (s/car/whatever) companies that the manuals needed warnings instead of help (and that this would create profit). X’ers grew up with the changing standard (and perpetuated it), and Millenials grew up never having a chance to *not* be warned that “It’s coffee, it’s hot”. And where does the blame reside? The arrow points back in time. The Millenials were raised by X’ers, and X’ers by Boomers, and Boomers by traumatized wartime survivors whose only help was to cope via alcohol. While we’re playing this game, it was the greatest generation that actually was more likely to adjust the valves on their car, which was why the manuals included it in the first place. All of these folks were being perpetually short-changed by executives looking to pad their bottom line, and that became easier as time went on as an ever smaller percentage of the population weren’t drunk trained killers unwilling to put up with bullshit.
This seems a good time to remind people that This be, the Verse:
They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
Demoted Oblivious
Also: why does everyone need trigger warnings today instead of being responsible for how they react to their emotions? Because for a generation now we have been continuously bombarded with “the following program contains mature subject matter. viewer discretion is advised.” And I know y’all read it in your heads in ‘the voice’.
thejeff
Or because some people always needed trigger warnings, but we just used to ignore them and blame them when they reacted badly.
Much like how we’re now “overly sensitive” to casual racial and gender slurs.
Some Ed
We need trigger warnings for stuff because we have some increased understanding that trauma of all sorts heal over time, if you don’t keep re-traumatizing all the time.
It’s like how when you hit your thumb on something, it starts sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb? All trauma is like that. Mental trauma tames longer to heal.
As an example of mental trauma taking longer to heal, 40 years ago, I lived in my family’s junk room, but I was still required to keep my room neat. But my parents also maintained the rule that I wasn’t allowed to mess with my brothers’ things. Which were in my room. So my room was messy.
I’m getting better, but I still have issues from this. Part of that still having issues was from being triggered back in the day when other people put stuff in my spaces without talking with me about it. It’s not their fault, that’s a stupid trigger. But it’s mine and I have to deal with it until I can really manage this stuff.
Some Ed
To be clear, most people’s trigger issues are way worse than that. *My* main trigger issues are way worse than that. That’s just the stuff I am OK with talking about. I’m sure you have issues that you don’t want to talk about either, which is a lot of why you complain about needing to have trigger warnings: you don’t want to admit to your own issues, and seeing those warnings reminds you that you have some. Also probably seeing this comment. Sorry about that, it just felt necessary to say.
Kella
Trigger warnings don’t mean you’re not responsible for how you react to your emotions. Getting a trigger warning does not mean you’ll never get triggered. It means you get to choose whether you’re in a good head space to consume potentially triggering content or not. That is quite literally taking responsibility for how you’ll react to your emotions, but you need the information up front to do it well.
Also, triggers are not just emotions. They can be debilitating, full body shut downs that last hours, sometimes days. It doesn’t matter how “responsible” you are with them. You don’t control when they happen and being caught off guard by one usually makes it worse. Adding a trigger warning is really no different from adding an allergen warning.
thejeff
In some cases it’s enough to brace yourself for the content rather than being caught by surprise.
Genie
I feel your pain. I sent an unprotected Word document to someone with track changes enabled, for them to make changes on, and what came back was a PDF of an image of the document with handwritten changes on it.
Delicious Taffy
That’s just scary.
thejeff
I’ve seen that as official company policy. 🙂
It was a few years back though.
Kryss LaBryn
My husband’s family decided to email everyone a questionnaire, just a simple one-page thing, “Who’s your mum/dad/grandparents; did you marry/who; kids; job; etc etc” so we could all fill it out, send them back, and then everyone’s answers would be collected and organized into a family tree that would then be put into a calendar with everyone’s birthday and what on there. Pretty cool idea!
They emailed it out.
Someone had very nicely typed it out. Then they took a photo of the printout, at a weird angle, and emailed it as a jpeg.
It was upside down.
I did not bother filling it out and sending it back. Jesus Christ.
Charles Spencer
I wish this was limited to Boomers.
I’m active on a bird identification site. I can’t tell you how many times we’re asked to identify a bird from a photo take with a phone of the back of a camera. Hello? Is there a reason you’re not posting the actual photo from the camera itself? The one with better resolution so we can zoom in on the smaller identifying markings?
Delicious Taffy
Wait, they’re sending in photos of cameras and asking you what sort of bird the camera is?
Needfuldoer
Sounds like they’re taking the picture of the bird with the real camera, then previewing the picture on the camera’s LCD screen, taking a picture of their picture on the screen, and sending that to Charles and company.
Could be worse; they could Xerox scan-to-email the back of their phone, or send the camera’s digital photo embedded in a Word 97 document.
Needfuldoer
Because they don’t know any other way to get pictures from their real camera to their phone.
Some Ed
I’d respond with an identification of the camera, and say if they want a bird identified, send the picture of the bird not a picture of a camera.
Of course, I can feel their pain, too, as I used to have a camera that was pre-USB, and for a time I could not send any pictures from that camera because of that. But my situation was much easier to resolve; I just chucked the camera into an Earth day electronics recycling bin, because even though it wasn’t that old of a camera at the time (USB2 had not yet come out), it was a shit camera.
Though, a lot of phones these days have multiple ways to pull the files, so it’s not to deal with a lost proprietary cord. If, and I stress if, you’re technically savvy enough to do it, and have as much access to your camera’s documentation as needed, and your OS is compatible with the camera’s output format. I think it was only 2019 when I last had to deal with a device that produced its files in a proprietary format, and the proprietary reader of that format only ran on obsolete OSes that were not available to the person with the file to be read. I don’t work in that part of IT, so I should never need to deal with this sort of problem unless I’m the user and I wasn’t.
Alan in DC
Go easy on the Boomers, Doc.
While you weren’t looking, GenX turns 50 this year.
Some Ed
… I thought Gen X started turning 50 a couple years ago, and was going to keep working on turning 50 for a while, because we’re talking about a whole generation and we’re not all the same age.
Or are you just talking about me and making this personal? For the record, I’ve never personally drank battery acid, engine fuel (with the exception of about 3 oz of Everclear, which could have been used as engine fuel), or engine valve cleaner (used or fresh). I’m not so sure about vicariously, that could’ve all just been a nightmare.
Kamino Neko
The oldest genX started turning 50 in 2015. The youngest (the so called ‘Xennials’ because we’re technically part of the GenX cohort (officially 1965-1980), but have more in common with the Millennials) are in our early-mid 40s.
Amy
Started to ask if it wouldn’t be easier just to teach him to use his phone, like I’ve never worked customer service or something.
Demoted Oblivious
I bombed an app during internal testing (my job at the time) when I tested if the file upload field would accept a 4 GB upload. It did. The database did not. The result was not pretty. The answer, yell at me for stress testing the app *during testing*, not put restrictions on submitted file sizes, *not* put a warning for users to limit file sizes, not change the db to accept large files, and then they deployed the app to production. (because the users won’t upload large files). Result was… I needed popcorn to watch the carnage, but I left the job soon after anyways.
Some Ed
I think you should’ve invoiced them for the popcorn. To be fair, there’s a lot of popcorn I should’ve invoiced over the years.
Norah
Could we stop with the boomer stuff? I’m a boomer, and I worked for a company in which several people had to travel for company business. Most of them were Gen X or older millennials. They were supposed to use Expensify to submit their expenses. Most did, but the ones who didn’t or who had trouble using it were mostly Gen X. My boss, also a boomer 4 years older than me, had no problems with any of the new technology we adapted. The owner of the company was even older, and he loved new technology.
To be fair on the kinkos thing, not everything called “Fed Ex” allows for printing and all that niceness. And searching for a store near me often gets one “Fed Ex” confused with the other and yes it pisses me right off.
Needfuldoer
Wait until you find out FedEx Ground (and Home) and FedEx Express act more like two separate companies than divisions of one company.
That would be kinda delightful if Jennifer took Sal to task on it just like that. Sal is usually right, and Jennifer usually isn’t, it would be fun to switch that up.
Okay, let’s maybe slow down a second there. Sal hates “Sally” because she’s trying to get away from her abusive parents’ expectations of her to tone herself down, straighten her hair, and behave in a way white people are comfortable with.
Jennifer hates “Billie” because she’s trying to get away from a brief period in her life where she was beginning to feel okay seeing herself as queer and non-popular-girl.
Like, should Sal respect the name anyways? Probably. But comparing the two like that feels yucky.
WanderingLynx
Have an upvote-equivalent :3
Edwin I Callahan
Actually, Sal’s parents like her hair in its natural wavy state. It was Sal who straightened it. Willis hasn’t addressed why this semester Sal went more natural.
Spencer
Other way around. Her dad thinks it’s so pretty when it’s nice and straight, and her mom doesn’t acknowledge her.
The subtext is that Sal straightens her hair to make her parents appreciate her.
Demoted Oblivious
That it was Asher’s grav getting this wrong is rather appropriate.
thejeff
It’s not clear why she hates “Billie”. It’s not like that brief period was the only time she used it. Didn’t she use it in high school? Walky knew her by it in the first strips. Not in the earliest flashbacks though.
If anything, it might be her drinking/partying period (most of high school and the first semester) she’s trying to get away from.
Demoted Oblivious
She hasn’t even stated (that I recall) that she *hates* “Billie” (which /was/ from the earliest strips I thought). “Jennifer” has thus far, been an unexplained change. But using a name change to get away from when you did bad things isn’t the path of acceptance and growth (not that there is one true way), but it *is* the path of denial and distancing and not being responsible for your actions.
*I* didn’t do those things. That was “Billie”.
It’s not clear that this is why the change, but it’s also not clear that it isn’t. I’m cautious of Ms. Billingsworth’s change because I know these people, and have been hurt by them. They are real, and they are jerks.
thejeff
Maybe. We don’t know enough of Jennifer’s change yet to know why she did it. Or even what kind of change she’s trying (or pretending) to make.
And if there’s no one true way, no symbolic change necessarily means you’re on the wrong path either. Not sufficient in itself of course.
Some Ed
True. I’ve known people who went through name changes with roughly this much fanfare because they got a new significant other who was so inconsiderate as to not respect their name, but the subject of the name change was so infatuated with them they put up with them. At least for a bit.
Usually, it’s been of this form, where the crush would insist on using their given name or a villainy generally associated with that given name, rather than a nickname of the subject’s choosing. It never lasted longer than the relationship.
Leorale
Sal’s reasons to not be called ‘Sally’ may well be better than Jennifer’s attempts to be done with ‘Billie’.
Both are old childhood nicknames. ‘Sally’ never fit Sal to begin with, and it’s fraught with her jerkass racist parents, so A+ to Sal for forging her own identity.
‘Billie’ was a time and self-image that Jennifer is attempting to leave behind (plus she’s taking big steps, like getting therapy, to help her do that). It wasn’t just dating Ruth — she was Billie in highschool when she was shoving Walky into lockers, when she almost killed her friend driving drunk, and was generally the Drama Hurricane that she presumably doesn’t want to be anymore. Jennifer is probably still a drama hurricane, but she’s allowed to hope, and to pick a name that reminds her that she’s trying to make better choices.
Will it fail, will Jennifer sometimes fall into her old patterns? Probably. But Sal should still call people what they’ve asked to be called. She doesn’t need their whole story to determine whether they’ve earned it or not. She can just call them their names.
This would get down voted to oblivion if it could be, but Sal has a point. If someone has a need to be known by a particular name because of identity issue etc., absolutely it’s worth respecting. If someone is just rebranding cuz they can, it’s not worth people being militant about (especially over respect, which is earned, not freely given in unlimited amounts and it lives on a two-way street with trust). If someone is trying to duck away from the inconvenience of their past reputation, well… the Inglorious Basterds had some creative ideas about that.
Now, obviously Ms. Billingsworth has *A* reason for doing this, but she has yet to provide that reason. She is not required to. Lacking an explanation however, leaves us just with what we do know. I am getting a distinct sense of this being driven less by afformentioned identity issues, and more about avoiding association with her past self, without any proof she’s actually a different/growing person. Also, people seem to be forgetting that criminals *also* change names a lot, for the purpose of hurting people. While the benefit of the doubt would be a kindness, this behaviour has been used by others too many times in my own life to give a character in a comic a lot of slack. Along with her D.U.I., continued drinking problems, repressing her identity (sexual or otherwise), her ignoring (healthy) former associations, and now her current associations, well, things aren’t a healthy stage for a jumping off point for rebranding.
A consideration here is that she is a child, and we seal juvie records for good reason. Undercover cops also change their names, for obvious good reasons. So I wait cautiously to learn more about this situation before welcoming Ms. Billingsworth as Jennifer with open arms. The real irony of course being that Jennifer is her legal name.
Meh. I’m not sure people really have to earn the right to ditch a nickname they don’t like anymore. Or need to publicly psychoanalyze themselves to justify it to everyone.
There are different types of respect, and they certainly don’t all have to be “earned.”
Demoted Oblivious
Hmm… one can behave respectfully (courtesy) while having zero respect for someone. But my experience has been that to actually “have respect” for someone, you need a chance to see them behave in a manner worthy of thinking or feeling that respect. Prior to said moments, we just treat each other with respect (courtesy) under the assumption that when the time comes, we’ll see each other behave in a fashion deserving of the courtesy we’ve shown or been shown thus far. Thus, I’ll generally treat people with respect as a default case, but I don’t feel respect for people until I see them challenged in some way.
Maybe it’s just that my baseline respect for people in general is high enough that I’m not aware of it when I normally interact, so I only take note of it when I see someone justify said respect or lose it. But for my respect for someone to go up, it has to be earned, and I expect I have to earn it from others and (try to, mostly) behave accordingly. Maybe if more people thought they needed to earn respect, instead of just being given it, they too would behave better to earn it.
Thank you for helping me consider myself on this. I’ll think further on it.
Yumi
I think the idea of having to earn respect can do a lot of harm, depending on how one defines respect. Maybe not the way you view it, I don’t know. But for me, there’s a base level of respect that should be extended to all people, and I think that’s what some other people mean when they talk about respect too.
There’s a post I’ve seen on Tumblr about how some people use respect to me “treat as a human being” and some use it to mean “treat as an authority figure,” and then people will say things like, “If you don’t respect me, I won’t respect you” and mean, “If you don’t treat me as an authority figure, I won’t treat you as a human being” and they think they’re being fair when they’re not.
For me, when I’m in a position of authority, it’s critically important to me that I’m treating those I have authority over with respect, even if they get rude (and I often work with middle schoolers, so it happens).
Now, there may also be a difference between treating someone with respect and having respect for them, but your previous comment seemed more aligned with the “treating with” aspect.
temperaryobsessor
I agree with you. I think the words you might be looking for are dignity and reverence.
Being treated with dignity is not something you should have to earn, if someone makes you feel like you have to audition for dignity they are proberly not good people to have in your life if you can avoid it.
On the other hand reverence is something you have to earn.
407 thoughts on “Sip”
Ana Chronistic
it’s also being fucking polite, SALLY
Ana Chronistic
I can’t believe how many of our fucking co-workers don’t know how to go to a
Kinko’sFedEx Office to print thingsor take a goddamned SCREENSHOT *foams at the mouth at 3MB “screenshot” taken from a camera phone*
ian livs
God, I work at a library and the amount of garbage “screenshots” I get from ancient camera phones is… infuriating. (And then they expect me to somehow improve the quality. With what, my magic wand? Geez.)
Ed Rhodes
“But you always see them ‘boosting’ the image on ‘NCIS!’ “
Bicycle Bill
Even better is when someone loses their cellphone so they call their carrier to trace it Like the carrier can pinpoint the location – immediately, in real time, and within a three-foot radius – of each and every one of the 70 million plus phones in their network.
Demoted Oblivious
You have my sympathy Bill, and at I guess, I’d assume you worked for a telco?
But to be fair, most of the equipment and computational capacity is there, so doing locates for one or all of the millions of phones on a network is not the issue. The problem is not scale, but the age and/or security policies of devices of each person on the network, and their urban/rural location. I keep my location sharing disabled (mostly), but in a sufficiently dense cell network, there’s a *lot* of data to be able to triangulate me anyways. And then a lot of users’ phones just share their location anyways. As well, people are taught by t.v. that carriers *can* do this, and our governments are cheaping out on our educations, so what do you expect except that people will believe what they see. Which can be helped if you just zoom in and enhance like they do on those same shows.
Given how many *B*illions of dollars phone services make, the carriers could offer a little more customer service. This is the obligation of the executives, and is not a targetted gripe at phone company _workers_ who are regular decent folks.
–Sent from my smartphone
thejeff
Even assuming they could – how would they even tell you? Even with a precise fix, they’re going to be able to give you coordinates, not tell you it’s behind the seat cushion.
Demoted Oblivious
Well if they send you a google maps link, you can use the maps app to guide you to the location of your lost phone! I mean, how else would they do it?
RowenMorland
And should they tell you, voice on the phone calling up to ask someone’s location, who might be hiding from you with good reason.
Demoted Oblivious
Well I’m already in the house, so why not? xp
Demoted Oblivious
I’m hiding behind the couch while they’re using their phone to look for it.
thejeff
Obviously you need to prove who you are by either calling from your phone or entering the code they just sent to your phone. 🙂
ktbear
YES with your magic wand. Oh wait, were you being sarcastic?
Reltzik
PSA: “Enhance” isn’t code for a big mallet with the phrase “enhanced tech support” written on it.
Amy
Cake decorator. Number of people who can’t figure out how to email a .jpeg and send a screenshot instead, and then expect us to improve image quality before printing on their cake. Bonus points for leaving a cursor over a child’s face.
Also: no, I cannot crop a rectangle so it fully covers a circle and not lose any of the image.
Doctor_Who
I wrote an app for my company that allows people to enter their expense reports on either their computers or their phones. To include a receipt, one need only take a picture of it, it’ll be auto-resized so that it can be quickly uploaded without being a huge image file. That means that if you take a client out for lunch or something, you don’t even need to hang onto the receipt, just take a pic and toss it!
But now, get this, I need to add pdf support in addition to images because this one guy doesn’t know how to use his phone or mobile apps, so he takes the receipts home, scans them on his PC, and wants to upload them as pdf files because that’s what his scanner is configured to make and he doesn’t know how to change anything!
ARGH! Stupid tech illiterate boomers!
Jamie
PFt, just get a pdf2jpg converter! …mostly kidding.
Delicious Taffy
No matter how much ease of access and user-friendliness you add to a process, some dumb motherfucker is gonna insist on finding a way to make it as difficult an annoying as possible.
Bicycle Bill
True, true. The smarter the phones get, the dumber the users seem to become.
Reltzik
That’s less about phones, and more about the general trend of humanity.
…. actually, wait, smart phones help people access 24 hour streams from shady “news” sources and bubble up with like-minded folks. Okay, yeah, they may be playing a part in it.
khn0
I find this thread to be slightly disturbing. I haven’t this much of disdain for tech-illiteracy since… since I worked helpdesk and one of my supervisor insisted that all customers would lie…
It’s like it’s OK to be unable to know the proper spelling of a word but not how to type it. Both are bullshit imo (not a humble opinion). People have to choose from a bunch of competencies they are able to acquire. They can’t and won’t get them all. What they choose, care to, or are able to acquire is their way to proceed with the unability to choose goals – if they would be responsible to have their own goals, they wouldn’t even need an app if they think it should be done on paper. I would add to look Ilich or Gorz for some read on this, but this is also everyone’s choice to care or not.
Delicious Taffy
Sure, not everyone can be good with everything, but when it’s the same people trying to do the same thing and they somehow can’t remotely comprehend it anymore purely because the object they’re interacting with isn’t the same shape as the one they used twenty years ago, even though it uses identical steps to accomplish it and the user interface hasn’t changed in any meaningful way, there’s a level of willful stupidity there that I can’t blame anyone for being upset with.
khn0
not everyone can and not everyone should.
Why would they learn this new trick while the old was functionning well?
In the name of progress, but what is progress if not the adaptation of production tools in order to extract more relative value from the working process (in other word: increase production), hence exploit more?
Delicious Taffy
What the fuck are you talking about? If some old dipshit can’t figure out how to do the exact same thing they’ve been doing for decades just because the rectangle they have to use is a little bit smaller, it has nothing to do with fucking worker exploitation. It’s actually 100% fine to make fun of people who can’t figure out that the thing that does what they want still does the thing if you make the casing a little shinier.
Demoted Oblivious
Except that (and knowing full well I’ve mocked support calls too), the devices *don’t* do it the same way, and they do keep moving the menus around (lookin at you windows), and they keep changing where settings are when they make the button shinier, and a lot of the time you *can’t* do it the same way you’ve always done it, and finally, as people age, their brains do continue to change and for a lot of people it really is very hard to keep up with the perpetual change.
You have my sympathies D.T., but an attitude of ageism about old dipshits also isn’t going to help things along, or help you be more patient with them, and one day we are both going to be old dipshits too. (I may be already, or maybe just a run if the mill dipshit. It depends on who’s carbon dating me)
Delicious Taffy
Maybe I’m overreacting and going a little far in regards to the age thing, sure. A lifetime of being asked how to fix some problem I can’t see and is only being described orally by someone who hates adjectives, all because I’m “good with computers” (meaning I can type in a word processor and right-click) has made me a little oversensitive to this sort of thing.
Demoted Oblivious
Ugh… re-reading myself was way-more finger waggy you lil’rascal than I meant it to be, but thank you for your receptivity. Your frustration is absolutely valid. I’ve handled 2.5 hour password reset support calls (remote client, encrypted hard-drive). We got there, but their password is now yuiop, and after my manger reviewed the call, their manager was talked to, and they’re not allowed to call support anymore without seeing their manager first.
Ana Chronistic
I would agree with you and suck it up if my customer base was retired grandma’s and their cat photos or w/e. *MY* “customer” base is our high-paid tech bros who have somehow never learned what the “Print Screen” key does! ?
Ana Chronistic
GRANDMAS
This dang phone and its apostrophes in fucking EVERYTHING ? (also its inability to let me see the whole textarea at once)
khn0
As I said DT, I worked HD, and I spent hours helping people like the one who just had slipped the device into the sink with washing water and dirty dishes – because they were drunk and not caring and my point is: why should they care?
What you can’t accept: them talking to you like shit or urging things to work when they’re not.
What they don’t have to accept: caring about things moving or changing or whatev that they don’t asked.
I can understand how frustating it is, you are at the receiving end of all complaints and in charge to solve things.
My take about technological changes supposed to affect efficiency what is what relative value is about is in fact not mine, but the one of Bihr reflecting theories of both Gramsci and Makhaiavski.
Demoted Oblivious
To be fair Ana, I too would suck it up if my support base was my retired grandmas’ and her cats’ photos’ too (rest boths hers soul)
HeatherJean
https://imgur.com/a/qjdu5eZ
Demoted Oblivious
While I love that poster… It was the Boomers generation that convinced the (s/car/whatever) companies that the manuals needed warnings instead of help (and that this would create profit). X’ers grew up with the changing standard (and perpetuated it), and Millenials grew up never having a chance to *not* be warned that “It’s coffee, it’s hot”. And where does the blame reside? The arrow points back in time. The Millenials were raised by X’ers, and X’ers by Boomers, and Boomers by traumatized wartime survivors whose only help was to cope via alcohol. While we’re playing this game, it was the greatest generation that actually was more likely to adjust the valves on their car, which was why the manuals included it in the first place. All of these folks were being perpetually short-changed by executives looking to pad their bottom line, and that became easier as time went on as an ever smaller percentage of the population weren’t drunk trained killers unwilling to put up with bullshit.
This seems a good time to remind people that This be, the Verse:
They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
Demoted Oblivious
Also: why does everyone need trigger warnings today instead of being responsible for how they react to their emotions? Because for a generation now we have been continuously bombarded with “the following program contains mature subject matter. viewer discretion is advised.” And I know y’all read it in your heads in ‘the voice’.
thejeff
Or because some people always needed trigger warnings, but we just used to ignore them and blame them when they reacted badly.
Much like how we’re now “overly sensitive” to casual racial and gender slurs.
Some Ed
We need trigger warnings for stuff because we have some increased understanding that trauma of all sorts heal over time, if you don’t keep re-traumatizing all the time.
It’s like how when you hit your thumb on something, it starts sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb? All trauma is like that. Mental trauma tames longer to heal.
As an example of mental trauma taking longer to heal, 40 years ago, I lived in my family’s junk room, but I was still required to keep my room neat. But my parents also maintained the rule that I wasn’t allowed to mess with my brothers’ things. Which were in my room. So my room was messy.
I’m getting better, but I still have issues from this. Part of that still having issues was from being triggered back in the day when other people put stuff in my spaces without talking with me about it. It’s not their fault, that’s a stupid trigger. But it’s mine and I have to deal with it until I can really manage this stuff.
Some Ed
To be clear, most people’s trigger issues are way worse than that. *My* main trigger issues are way worse than that. That’s just the stuff I am OK with talking about. I’m sure you have issues that you don’t want to talk about either, which is a lot of why you complain about needing to have trigger warnings: you don’t want to admit to your own issues, and seeing those warnings reminds you that you have some. Also probably seeing this comment. Sorry about that, it just felt necessary to say.
Kella
Trigger warnings don’t mean you’re not responsible for how you react to your emotions. Getting a trigger warning does not mean you’ll never get triggered. It means you get to choose whether you’re in a good head space to consume potentially triggering content or not. That is quite literally taking responsibility for how you’ll react to your emotions, but you need the information up front to do it well.
Also, triggers are not just emotions. They can be debilitating, full body shut downs that last hours, sometimes days. It doesn’t matter how “responsible” you are with them. You don’t control when they happen and being caught off guard by one usually makes it worse. Adding a trigger warning is really no different from adding an allergen warning.
thejeff
In some cases it’s enough to brace yourself for the content rather than being caught by surprise.
Genie
I feel your pain. I sent an unprotected Word document to someone with track changes enabled, for them to make changes on, and what came back was a PDF of an image of the document with handwritten changes on it.
Delicious Taffy
That’s just scary.
thejeff
I’ve seen that as official company policy. 🙂
It was a few years back though.
Kryss LaBryn
My husband’s family decided to email everyone a questionnaire, just a simple one-page thing, “Who’s your mum/dad/grandparents; did you marry/who; kids; job; etc etc” so we could all fill it out, send them back, and then everyone’s answers would be collected and organized into a family tree that would then be put into a calendar with everyone’s birthday and what on there. Pretty cool idea!
They emailed it out.
Someone had very nicely typed it out. Then they took a photo of the printout, at a weird angle, and emailed it as a jpeg.
It was upside down.
I did not bother filling it out and sending it back. Jesus Christ.
Charles Spencer
I wish this was limited to Boomers.
I’m active on a bird identification site. I can’t tell you how many times we’re asked to identify a bird from a photo take with a phone of the back of a camera. Hello? Is there a reason you’re not posting the actual photo from the camera itself? The one with better resolution so we can zoom in on the smaller identifying markings?
Delicious Taffy
Wait, they’re sending in photos of cameras and asking you what sort of bird the camera is?
Needfuldoer
Sounds like they’re taking the picture of the bird with the real camera, then previewing the picture on the camera’s LCD screen, taking a picture of their picture on the screen, and sending that to Charles and company.
Could be worse; they could Xerox scan-to-email the back of their phone, or send the camera’s digital photo embedded in a Word 97 document.
Needfuldoer
Because they don’t know any other way to get pictures from their real camera to their phone.
Some Ed
I’d respond with an identification of the camera, and say if they want a bird identified, send the picture of the bird not a picture of a camera.
Of course, I can feel their pain, too, as I used to have a camera that was pre-USB, and for a time I could not send any pictures from that camera because of that. But my situation was much easier to resolve; I just chucked the camera into an Earth day electronics recycling bin, because even though it wasn’t that old of a camera at the time (USB2 had not yet come out), it was a shit camera.
Though, a lot of phones these days have multiple ways to pull the files, so it’s not to deal with a lost proprietary cord. If, and I stress if, you’re technically savvy enough to do it, and have as much access to your camera’s documentation as needed, and your OS is compatible with the camera’s output format. I think it was only 2019 when I last had to deal with a device that produced its files in a proprietary format, and the proprietary reader of that format only ran on obsolete OSes that were not available to the person with the file to be read. I don’t work in that part of IT, so I should never need to deal with this sort of problem unless I’m the user and I wasn’t.
Alan in DC
Go easy on the Boomers, Doc.
While you weren’t looking, GenX turns 50 this year.
Some Ed
… I thought Gen X started turning 50 a couple years ago, and was going to keep working on turning 50 for a while, because we’re talking about a whole generation and we’re not all the same age.
Or are you just talking about me and making this personal? For the record, I’ve never personally drank battery acid, engine fuel (with the exception of about 3 oz of Everclear, which could have been used as engine fuel), or engine valve cleaner (used or fresh). I’m not so sure about vicariously, that could’ve all just been a nightmare.
Kamino Neko
The oldest genX started turning 50 in 2015. The youngest (the so called ‘Xennials’ because we’re technically part of the GenX cohort (officially 1965-1980), but have more in common with the Millennials) are in our early-mid 40s.
Amy
Started to ask if it wouldn’t be easier just to teach him to use his phone, like I’ve never worked customer service or something.
Demoted Oblivious
I bombed an app during internal testing (my job at the time) when I tested if the file upload field would accept a 4 GB upload. It did. The database did not. The result was not pretty. The answer, yell at me for stress testing the app *during testing*, not put restrictions on submitted file sizes, *not* put a warning for users to limit file sizes, not change the db to accept large files, and then they deployed the app to production. (because the users won’t upload large files). Result was… I needed popcorn to watch the carnage, but I left the job soon after anyways.
Some Ed
I think you should’ve invoiced them for the popcorn. To be fair, there’s a lot of popcorn I should’ve invoiced over the years.
Norah
Could we stop with the boomer stuff? I’m a boomer, and I worked for a company in which several people had to travel for company business. Most of them were Gen X or older millennials. They were supposed to use Expensify to submit their expenses. Most did, but the ones who didn’t or who had trouble using it were mostly Gen X. My boss, also a boomer 4 years older than me, had no problems with any of the new technology we adapted. The owner of the company was even older, and he loved new technology.
nothri
To be fair on the kinkos thing, not everything called “Fed Ex” allows for printing and all that niceness. And searching for a store near me often gets one “Fed Ex” confused with the other and yes it pisses me right off.
Needfuldoer
Wait until you find out FedEx Ground (and Home) and FedEx Express act more like two separate companies than divisions of one company.
Xaeon
And then sent to you as a .heic file.
butts
seriously, you’d think she of all people would get that
Leorale
That would be kinda delightful if Jennifer took Sal to task on it just like that. Sal is usually right, and Jennifer usually isn’t, it would be fun to switch that up.
Imogen
Okay, let’s maybe slow down a second there. Sal hates “Sally” because she’s trying to get away from her abusive parents’ expectations of her to tone herself down, straighten her hair, and behave in a way white people are comfortable with.
Jennifer hates “Billie” because she’s trying to get away from a brief period in her life where she was beginning to feel okay seeing herself as queer and non-popular-girl.
Like, should Sal respect the name anyways? Probably. But comparing the two like that feels yucky.
WanderingLynx
Have an upvote-equivalent :3
Edwin I Callahan
Actually, Sal’s parents like her hair in its natural wavy state. It was Sal who straightened it. Willis hasn’t addressed why this semester Sal went more natural.
Spencer
Other way around. Her dad thinks it’s so pretty when it’s nice and straight, and her mom doesn’t acknowledge her.
The subtext is that Sal straightens her hair to make her parents appreciate her.
Demoted Oblivious
That it was Asher’s grav getting this wrong is rather appropriate.
thejeff
It’s not clear why she hates “Billie”. It’s not like that brief period was the only time she used it. Didn’t she use it in high school? Walky knew her by it in the first strips. Not in the earliest flashbacks though.
If anything, it might be her drinking/partying period (most of high school and the first semester) she’s trying to get away from.
Demoted Oblivious
She hasn’t even stated (that I recall) that she *hates* “Billie” (which /was/ from the earliest strips I thought). “Jennifer” has thus far, been an unexplained change. But using a name change to get away from when you did bad things isn’t the path of acceptance and growth (not that there is one true way), but it *is* the path of denial and distancing and not being responsible for your actions.
*I* didn’t do those things. That was “Billie”.
It’s not clear that this is why the change, but it’s also not clear that it isn’t. I’m cautious of Ms. Billingsworth’s change because I know these people, and have been hurt by them. They are real, and they are jerks.
thejeff
Maybe. We don’t know enough of Jennifer’s change yet to know why she did it. Or even what kind of change she’s trying (or pretending) to make.
And if there’s no one true way, no symbolic change necessarily means you’re on the wrong path either. Not sufficient in itself of course.
Some Ed
True. I’ve known people who went through name changes with roughly this much fanfare because they got a new significant other who was so inconsiderate as to not respect their name, but the subject of the name change was so infatuated with them they put up with them. At least for a bit.
Usually, it’s been of this form, where the crush would insist on using their given name or a villainy generally associated with that given name, rather than a nickname of the subject’s choosing. It never lasted longer than the relationship.
Leorale
Sal’s reasons to not be called ‘Sally’ may well be better than Jennifer’s attempts to be done with ‘Billie’.
Both are old childhood nicknames. ‘Sally’ never fit Sal to begin with, and it’s fraught with her jerkass racist parents, so A+ to Sal for forging her own identity.
‘Billie’ was a time and self-image that Jennifer is attempting to leave behind (plus she’s taking big steps, like getting therapy, to help her do that). It wasn’t just dating Ruth — she was Billie in highschool when she was shoving Walky into lockers, when she almost killed her friend driving drunk, and was generally the Drama Hurricane that she presumably doesn’t want to be anymore. Jennifer is probably still a drama hurricane, but she’s allowed to hope, and to pick a name that reminds her that she’s trying to make better choices.
Will it fail, will Jennifer sometimes fall into her old patterns? Probably. But Sal should still call people what they’ve asked to be called. She doesn’t need their whole story to determine whether they’ve earned it or not. She can just call them their names.
JBento
This was literally my first thought.
Demoted Oblivious
This would get down voted to oblivion if it could be, but Sal has a point. If someone has a need to be known by a particular name because of identity issue etc., absolutely it’s worth respecting. If someone is just rebranding cuz they can, it’s not worth people being militant about (especially over respect, which is earned, not freely given in unlimited amounts and it lives on a two-way street with trust). If someone is trying to duck away from the inconvenience of their past reputation, well… the Inglorious Basterds had some creative ideas about that.
Now, obviously Ms. Billingsworth has *A* reason for doing this, but she has yet to provide that reason. She is not required to. Lacking an explanation however, leaves us just with what we do know. I am getting a distinct sense of this being driven less by afformentioned identity issues, and more about avoiding association with her past self, without any proof she’s actually a different/growing person. Also, people seem to be forgetting that criminals *also* change names a lot, for the purpose of hurting people. While the benefit of the doubt would be a kindness, this behaviour has been used by others too many times in my own life to give a character in a comic a lot of slack. Along with her D.U.I., continued drinking problems, repressing her identity (sexual or otherwise), her ignoring (healthy) former associations, and now her current associations, well, things aren’t a healthy stage for a jumping off point for rebranding.
A consideration here is that she is a child, and we seal juvie records for good reason. Undercover cops also change their names, for obvious good reasons. So I wait cautiously to learn more about this situation before welcoming Ms. Billingsworth as Jennifer with open arms. The real irony of course being that Jennifer is her legal name.
thejeff
Meh. I’m not sure people really have to earn the right to ditch a nickname they don’t like anymore. Or need to publicly psychoanalyze themselves to justify it to everyone.
Yumi
There are different types of respect, and they certainly don’t all have to be “earned.”
Demoted Oblivious
Hmm… one can behave respectfully (courtesy) while having zero respect for someone. But my experience has been that to actually “have respect” for someone, you need a chance to see them behave in a manner worthy of thinking or feeling that respect. Prior to said moments, we just treat each other with respect (courtesy) under the assumption that when the time comes, we’ll see each other behave in a fashion deserving of the courtesy we’ve shown or been shown thus far. Thus, I’ll generally treat people with respect as a default case, but I don’t feel respect for people until I see them challenged in some way.
Maybe it’s just that my baseline respect for people in general is high enough that I’m not aware of it when I normally interact, so I only take note of it when I see someone justify said respect or lose it. But for my respect for someone to go up, it has to be earned, and I expect I have to earn it from others and (try to, mostly) behave accordingly. Maybe if more people thought they needed to earn respect, instead of just being given it, they too would behave better to earn it.
Thank you for helping me consider myself on this. I’ll think further on it.
Yumi
I think the idea of having to earn respect can do a lot of harm, depending on how one defines respect. Maybe not the way you view it, I don’t know. But for me, there’s a base level of respect that should be extended to all people, and I think that’s what some other people mean when they talk about respect too.
There’s a post I’ve seen on Tumblr about how some people use respect to me “treat as a human being” and some use it to mean “treat as an authority figure,” and then people will say things like, “If you don’t respect me, I won’t respect you” and mean, “If you don’t treat me as an authority figure, I won’t treat you as a human being” and they think they’re being fair when they’re not.
For me, when I’m in a position of authority, it’s critically important to me that I’m treating those I have authority over with respect, even if they get rude (and I often work with middle schoolers, so it happens).
Now, there may also be a difference between treating someone with respect and having respect for them, but your previous comment seemed more aligned with the “treating with” aspect.
temperaryobsessor
I agree with you. I think the words you might be looking for are dignity and reverence.
Being treated with dignity is not something you should have to earn, if someone makes you feel like you have to audition for dignity they are proberly not good people to have in your life if you can avoid it.
On the other hand reverence is something you have to earn.