I can still remember having to talk people through the sheet of instructions we put together at TCP when Win95 first came out. Its not as if this instruction sheet used jargon or similar; I mean, it had screen shots and everything.
Alternatively we'd have people phoning up to complain that they'd followed the instructions to the letter and that they couldn't log on. I can still remember one rather obnoxious man (why are the truely obnoxious ones always male ?) saying that the box I'd asked him to check hadn't been mentioned anywhere in the instructions. I took great pleasure in asking him to look at the bottom of the first page of instructions and read out where it said to check the box he had just checked to make his connection work.
The change in his voice when part way through reading out the instruction to tick the check box was very fun to hear... you could tell that he realised that he had just made an idiot of himself and that he knew that I knew that he had done this. Especially since he had been so obnoxious to me and swore that he'd followed the instructions to the letter.
But yes, people for some reason have real problems in reading written instructions, be they on paper, in an email, in a manual (if they even know where the manual is). It seems that the lusers prefer someone to demonstrate how to do something so they can cargo-cult it... and then get it wrong, or forget it so have to be shown again, or....
I guess the whole thing is another aspect of DUMMY MODE ON. Only with those people, it's as soon as a _computer_ enters the picture, the rational thinking process goes byebye.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Alternatively we'd have people phoning up to complain that they'd followed the instructions to the letter and that they couldn't log on. I can still remember one rather obnoxious man (why are the truely obnoxious ones always male ?) saying that the box I'd asked him to check hadn't been mentioned anywhere in the instructions. I took great pleasure in asking him to look at the bottom of the first page of instructions and read out where it said to check the box he had just checked to make his connection work.
The change in his voice when part way through reading out the instruction to tick the check box was very fun to hear... you could tell that he realised that he had just made an idiot of himself and that he knew that I knew that he had done this. Especially since he had been so obnoxious to me and swore that he'd followed the instructions to the letter.
But yes, people for some reason have real problems in reading written instructions, be they on paper, in an email, in a manual (if they even know where the manual is). It seems that the lusers prefer someone to demonstrate how to do something so they can cargo-cult it... and then get it wrong, or forget it so have to be shown again, or....
no subject
I guess the whole thing is another aspect of DUMMY MODE ON. Only with those people, it's as soon as a _computer_ enters the picture, the rational thinking process goes byebye.