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I had to go over and do some upgrades for her and also figure out why some things were not functioning the way they should have been. In the process, I made sure to reset some Parental Controls. Ooops...
I get a call last night...
"Daddy, I can't access my Yahoo! email. It keeps asking me for the Administrator Name and Password."
Oh boy. Okay, either give up the Admin UN/PW or have her wait until I can go over again and do some adjusting. Nah, I'll let her in. But, she has to "double ankle promise" never to tell her Mom or Sister the UN/PW. Okay.
Once logged in, I have her go through the process of reconfiguring Parental Controls. I walked her right through it step by step and she did not miss a beat. She read the screens to me in order, perfectly, and did everything I said without second guessing or doing the wrong thing. I was sure to tell her that "I wished my clients were as savvy as she was when it came to using the computer". That girl is something else!
If it were a client, we would have been in a GoToMeeting and I would have had control of their system setting up everything. I've been through enough frustrating phone calls to try and explain something verbally over the phone when it comes to system configuration and the "average" client.
I just have to say that today's youth are a bit more intelligent than we may think. She totally impressed Daddy with that session and I now have full confidence in her abilities to compute on a daily basis.
Are you smarter than an 8 year old?
I think it has more to do with having grown up with computers vs not.
Most of my clients are over 45 and some don't even use a computer at all in life. The same guys who can't use a computer to print out a memo and post it in a staff room are the same guys who make a few million a year by working smart and hard in their industry.
I wouldn't say that they aren't smarter then an 8 year old, I have seen them in board meetings. But I know that they didn't have a computer in their classrooms even in highschool. I had an Apple 2E all through my grade school and was programming in basic and logo in grade 2.
I wish I had the business savvy of some of computer illiterate clients.
If everyone was as savvy as our kids we wouldn't have clients.... thank god for the ol' dinos who need me.
So yes, I'm smarter than an 8yo :). What I don't know, I either don't care about knowoing or I can figure out.
And her art is reallly good.
Much better than mine. ;-)
I have to forbid her from using my computers without permission.. so now she wants her own laptop..
I agree and tell him to go right ahead. I look over a few minutes later and he is happily surfing away at the BBC children's websites, etc.
Scary!
The real problem is that most of them they apply it to all the wrong things. I see kids spending an amazing amount of energy on ingenious schemes to get out of doing things when if they'd just get off the ego and do the thing, it would be so much easier.
I am sure that this happens to lots of you as well but it is 2009 for god sake and this person is only 30.
I have a new client, I set up a sample site on my domain.
http://example.com/clients/cName
I email her the link and invite her to look at it to give some feedback.
She calls me to say she put that link into Google but can't find the site... [sigh]
I explained she needed only to click the link in her email. She said she doesn't click links in her email because she got a virus that way once.
I wanted to tell her she can trust me, but instead I told her I understand and helped her find the address bar to paste in the address.....
I want to scream but again it is people like that that are the reason people like us can make money.
She calls me to say she put that link into Google but can't find the site...
Haha . . . yeah I get that all the time. My favorite is the short tempered ones who talk to me like I'm an idiot because they don't even have an address/location bar. After a volume of patient discussion, I figure out it's hidden and walk them through revealing it.
Now think about this . . . how does the address bar get hidden? Consider we're working with someone without the knowledge to manage their browser, much less figure out how to hide the address bar . . . .
Well I'll tell you how. Some of those . . . sites for which the Internet is Famous . . . open many full windows and try to execute every Javascript/ActiveX trick in the book, one of which is hiding the address bar and buttons so you can't navigate away . . . .
The additional humorous boost here is . . . HAHA . . . you're a closet pron-surfer to boot and you don't know I know it. :-)
Too be honest with the level of hand holding IE and MS try to do I am surprised it isn't hidden by default. I wonder what a clean install of IE8 would look like with no preferences carried over.
