Rethinking the 23 Things

I have to admit, in all of the time I've been using computers and trying to make them work for me, I never realized until yesterday how task-specific any computer knowledge is.

Okay, yeah, they're the spawn of Satan and all that. But I had a woman come up to me whose flash drive, she said, wasn't working in Internet Computer 10. So fine, I go through all the usual stuff with her. Then I plug it into #10 and the software loaded on her flash drive doesn't bring up her files. Having used flash drives that have no software loaded on them, I opened her files from the file pulldown menu. They opened just fine.

"You have to open them manually," I told her.

She panicked. "Wait, what did you do? How did you do that?"

"Word > File > Open > Drive F."

Here was a woman with a flash drive full of Word and PDF files, with the software at home to use and create them, who had apparently never *ever* saved a file to, or retrieved one from, her hd. *facepalm*

No wonder that in an entire human generation of computers in common use, people still can't make heads or tails of them. Nothing you know how to use makes much difference to using any other software/websites.

Which is why the 23 Things were so time consuming, but also helpful just for Learning More Random Stuff.