Mandrake disappointment 1752
On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 13:09:33 -0700, Snit
Don't feel bad - I know professional programmers who get stumped by their VCR's. :) It takes a *lot* of patience to teach some of my intro...
That's true. I've noticed it in myself, when trying to teach my Mum to use her laptop. I find myself getting impatient when I know I ought not to, because she has trouble grasping what seems obvious to me. And usually, she's not too bad with technology - she can programme the VCR, at least, which totally stumped my late father.
I think a lot of it is really fear of making a mistake and looking or feeling silly - once you can convince the person it's okay, even expected, to make mistakes to begin with, they get on better, IMO. Ideally, I would like to migrate her to Linux, because for one thing she could make her mistakes in greater safety in Linux desktop than a Windows one.
Another thing I've found is that my ability to buttist her is limited in some situations by her lack of understanding of XP - to help, I have to know what the problem is, and there are times when she hasn't sufficient knowledge to clearly explain the difficulty she's having. I'm no Windows expert, in fact, I think now that I know Linux better than I know XP, so I could probably be more use to her there than in XP.
Still, that's a project for the future.
-- Kier
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