Illiteracy

I was amazed today at the level of computer illiteracy that exists in the world today. Today at work, we had some vendor-type people in to present some blather about their company...yadayadayada. Both were engineers of some kind involved in the designing and building of equipment, all of which would involve programmable logic controllers and probably some editable text programming. Both representatives had the inevitable Dell laptops.

It took these guys literally 20 (count them, twenty) minutes to figure out how to get a file from one laptop to the other, using a USB portable memory stick. They had to move the file because they couldn't figure out how to make the screen show up on the projector. (it worked with one Dell but not the other). Dude 1 needed a file on Dude 2's computer, but Dude 2 kept copying the SHORTCUT to the file to the USB stick, rather than the ACTUAL file. DOH!!! A basic concept in computing - the shortcut (in Windows) or the alias (in Mac or Linux). But these engineers just didn't seem to have a grasp of the concept. That USB stick went from one to the other Dell at least 15 times.

I almost busted out laughing. I would have helped them but I was having too much fun watching them.

At this point, I think I could design some pretty wicked equipment if these guys can do it....