By Suzann Dodd, Contributor
THE PROBLEM is simple, the people who buy computers often don't know very much about them or their programmes. If they do, the persons to which they are assigned are a shade above incompetent.
It's usual for me to happen into an office where the boss barely knows how to get her e-mail, the secretary is a robot who can use a particular application in a particular version and virtually refuses to learn anything else unless the boss is willing to send her on some course somewhere.
That Gatesware comes with unadulterated Help so if one simply spent an hour reading the instructions they would be a master, is apparently too much to ask of a worker.
So the boss who might not know how to turn the computer on hires a 'secretary' who'd be more productive on a manual typewriter and spends what he doesn't have on calling technicians.
Sadam Sysop told me of a worker whose only method of operation was to turn the computer off, have it reload, then click on certain icons. The idea of being able to close windows, to multitask, (in the most nebulous use of the word), was beyond her and until the day he left the job she would never take any advice from him.
I can tell you of a 'secretary' who is virtually helpless in 'Word', saves everything to the C root directory, and when I tried to show her how to use the world's simplest application, the one I use, she recoiled in terror. "No! No! I don't like that!"
Of course, when she got into difficulty and ran to beg my secretary to help all she would hear is, 'Sorry, I don't know the programme you use', so had to retype everything because she didn't know how to find her files in the application she claimed to know.
This kind of 'don't teach me anything, I don't want to learn' is as much part of the tech as the Internet. It explains why people are far less productive with a computer than they were with a typewriter.
The problem is that the latest programmes assume you know what you're doing. The belief is that you went from 3.1 to '95, to '98 to 'Me' and now you're using XP. The reality is that the person banging on the computer came in at '95 and has never understood it so showing her anything else, even giving her an extra option is the road to perdition.
As I've said before, the guy at the top has to become computer literate so that he can teach his staff, or at least know enough to realise his staff is lost.
Suzann Dodd is a writer and an attorney-at-law.
