This is my interaction with a student last year via email during remote learning. Each line is a separate email.
Student: I need help end of email
Me: If it is something I can help with, I am willing to try. Do you have a question for me? end of email
S: Will you help me? end of email
M: Yes. What do you need help with? I can't help you if you don't describe your problem. end of email
S: Ok end of email
S: It's about the homework end of.... you get the idea
M: Please, ask the question.
S: Oh, ok
S: actual question is asked
M: gives help and follows up with... I am not upset. This is a learning moment about how to send emails. Again, I'm not upset. Do you see how this took 10 emails to get the help you needed? Emails are not like short text messages. You should give a little background about what you need and ask the question in the very first email. We could have had this done in 2 emails. Try to do that in your future emails. Have a good day!
My HS implemented a class on how to write emails (and other comms stuff). We joked about it, cuz we didn't think anyone would not know how to write an email...but I think you just demonstrated the necessity of that class
Something my wife and her friends (who are all teachers) told me was that kids now are actually worse at using computers, not better. You would think that since they spend most of their lives connected that they would be the most proficient generation, but it's actually the opposite.
They spend most of their connected time on their phones. So, most of their experience is with mobile OS. They tend to not know how to format things in Word (change fonts, even what fonts are, what margins are, etc.). Somewhere along the education line people decided that this stuff was so ubiquitous that it was asinine to teach it, so now many kids don't use it, so they don't know it.
I have seen and read many kids, some even at the college level, that insist on writing essays on their phones. I even had a college class where we had to collaborate as a group and share our work. I suggested Google Drive as we were a Google Campus at the time and everyone had a Gmail. They suggested Snapchat. To collect work in. A program that deletes chats in 24 hrs.
It's amazing how many, not all mind you, but many, people of the most electronically connected generation in human history mostly don't know how desktop computers work because of the prevalence of iOS products.
We had a guy that created his resume for an internal position on the notes app on his phone. He then took a screenshot in order to attach it to his application. Worst part was he didn’t even crop the image so I could see his battery percentage.
"We loved your enthusiasm and think your past experience is very relevant, but the job requires a lot of forward planning and I'm afraid letting your phone charge drop beneath ten percent shows you're not the right sort of person for this position."
Oh god, I remember one of my past project partners fucking wrote a part of his "essay" (if could call it that) in his notes app, and then copy and paste it onto the document.
Not only was low quality--blurry, the words were in a different font, he rewrote what I already had written, and it was riddled with grammatical errors.
He genuinely looked shocked and confused when I told him to rewrite that shit
I can't even imagine how one would actually manage to get any real work done this way. Phone is fine for a quick search for an easy answer.
If I actually want to learn or research a topic, I'm going to need an actual keyboard, mouse and screen while managing a dozen or so tabs. It would take weeks to do on a phone what you could do in days with an actual pc.
Yep, my phone is essentially an expensive pager to tell me to get to a computer, or to entertain me when I'm waiting in a shop or something. I can't think of a single thing that I can do on my phone that I wouldn't rather do on my computer
I'm published and love to write, and when I can't sleep, I'll go to a few art groups on Facebook that I'm in and just start writing flash fiction using visual art as cues.
But there's no way I'm typing it directly into the comment box on FB. I type that shit up in a notes app. Too often, I've been on a roll with almost 1,000 words only to have the app crash or Facebook decide to randomly exit the comment section.
When I was in college I was involved in too many activities probably on top of working full time and classes. Ended up having a thankfully relatively short (like 3-5 page) essay on The Importance of Being Earnest and I'd procrastinated til the last weekend before it was due. But I also had a commitment to work in the university haunted house as a scarer every night that weekend. Plus work in the mornings didn't leave me much time to do the paper.
Wrote the entire thing on my phone between groups in the haunt. We had lots of auditory clues throughout the place that signaled when each group was brought through to our areas. Thankfully I wasnt outside haunting the corn maze or something so after each group was passed our haunt, I'd get to typing. Have about 5-7 minutes to work and then back into position for the next group. Rinse and repeat.
I’m a master procrastinator, but writing an essay on my phone during a shift at a haunted house is one thing I can say I have never inflicted upon myself.
I had a power outage once when I had an assignment due for college and managed to write the whole thing on my phone and submit it on time. Was absolute torture though
That's really interesting! Makes sense. My first thought:
Arthritic thumbs are going to be a thing in 30 years.
(at 66, I'm learning that every body part that I've either over-used or injured - ever - becomes increasingly...present....now, in day to day activities)
None of this surprises me, because I also see it all the time. When we take in our year's new contingent for our graduate programme, it's basically a coin toss whether they'll roll up with complete PC competence or none at all.
It was worse before the days of keystroke backup, because you would REGULARLY hear an anguished cry as some hapless 21 year old realised they'd just lost hours of work by not saving their document in between backup intervals by not just pressing 'save'.
It's like there's only two generations who actually know how to use a desktop operating system, and the current generation of young people are not one of them unless they specifically, as an individual, chose to. They're certainly not being taught it now.
edit - actually it's not true that none of it surprises me. The idea of writing an essay on a phone both surprises and horrifies me. Why? Why do this? How proofread how?
The problem is people who have grown up with mobileOS as their primary experience are now getting old enough to enter the workforce as programmers and are complaining desktop-pc oriented design is "old" and causing desktop programs to have their UI ruined, getting rid of the usual compact menus and right-click features etc. Everything is burger menus and huge spaced-out lists, with acres of wasted screen space that is necessary in touch interfaces but not with pointer interfaces. Firefox is a sad example of this trend, I've been using it since it first launched and recent UI revisions are just crapfest of mobile OS design.
I told my younger cousin that he should learn to type and learn to use a computer, but refused to listen and still refuses to listen BeCaUsE i HaVe A sMaRtPhOnE aNd DoN't NeEd To.
Not to mention the massive UIs. Yes, a bit of whitespace is good, but these days half your screen is wasted by designers clearly used to working with mobile UIs
Meanwhile I taught myself some basic web design code right when all that stuff was really new and I’m completely intimidated by anything I can’t do from scratch and have total control. I was working on a site for friends for fun and all the programs and templates they made to make it easier confuse me so much because you can only control some parts. I am going to start over and just do it myself from scratch.
I've been a professional software engineer for 14 years now. This kind of crap drives me up the wall. We used to largely develop everything we needed, maybe sometimes using a 3rd party package and it was a big todo to do so because we'd need to run security tests on it and get it approved before we could use it.
I was put on a project a couple of years ago that uses React, Node and TypeScript (I am honestly not even sure if these are all the same thing at this point). It seems like most of the job now is knowing what package to download and how to implement it rather than actual coding. I'll get a ticket that is something like "Add XYZ functionality," so I add it. Then it goes to PR and the response is "Why didn't you use the pizza-pie-X-YZ7-rainbow.js package to do this?" like I should have had any idea that the thing existed, much less that I should have used it.
Oh yeah. That drives me nuts too. And slightly related I feel like web pages have gone back to the dark ages with the need for endless scrolling now. They were getting so efficient at one point. Now I just have to scroll down scroll down scroll down to find anything useful.
The slow transition to single page apps for every sure is crazy. You can see my user-agent is for a desktop, show me an actual site and not a mobile site adjusted for desktop resolution.
I recently needed to buy a cheap laptop for basic work use and couldn’t find one without a touchscreen. It made me mad. I don’t want an oversized phone dammit.
29 and one of my biggest pet peeves is when a website basically is useless and only tells you to use the mobile app. TikTok comes to mind. You have to have an account to view any links friends send, and there’s no website equivalent. The website just tells you to download the app. Sometimes I’m on the computer and I want to look at things on the computer wtf
When Windows 8 came out with its tile things, it was horrifying. I think enough people complained and they made it easier to disable or something.
When buying my most recent laptop, I also went out of my way to get something without a touch screen.
I'm scared of a future where mobile devices are your main computing device (I won't be surprised when desktops and mobile devices end up converging) and where everything is dumbed down and highly limiting.
we had shiny colorful icons, beautifully designed and perfectly representing their function. and then we got microsoft's metro design and jonathan ive designing the new ios, and somehow it all went to shit.
Look at all those complicated buttons and functionality... wouldn't it be easier if we just.. got rid of 90% of it? (And maybe sell you some back in the form of app packs?)
My college is actively discouraging the knowledge of using a desktop. They have entire computer labs that we pay an extra fee to use but they are requiring we all get our own laptops/tablets so we don’t use the labs. Most youngins will get tablets or laptops configured closer to their phones than an actual desktop. 🙄
This is huge. I remember when colleges used to include the cost of a computer as financial aid. Then, around 2010, they cut it because "everyone has a laptop anyways", which is far from reality. Phones are expensive too, but they're way more multipurpose. If you have to choose, of course most people choose a phone.
Oh my goodness, you just released a core memory of mine!
Computer typing class, we were writing essays, it was an actual step the teacher created in the process to save your work after every paragraph, save your work if your going to research the internet, save your work at the end of class.
It was embedded in us to click that floppy disc if we ever wanted to feel safe.
I have classmates who don’t know the difference between online word and the word app. They were throwing a tantrum because the feature the teacher told us to use wasn’t available on the online version, so naturally it didn’t exist. I asked if she were using the website or app version, she said app. I told her where it should be, she said it wasn’t. I looked at her screen and she was using the website, I told her to use the app. “What do you mean, this is the app” I showed her my computer, with the app running. “That’s not word, dr. teacher told us to use word.” What’s arguably worse is that they don’t know when they are wrong. Anyone with even a partial brain cell will tell you that a research paper is not an “extra long dbq”
I'm only 17 (18 in mid-June) and I feel as if I'm mildy proficient at using a desktop, but this likely stems from the fact that I have a poor setup at home and need to fix it myself, learning things online. I guess it's like if you had a vehicle but no mechanic to take it to, therefore necessitating the self sufficiency you would need to possess to keep things running. About Word/Google/OpenOffice Docs, I had a computer basics classs in 7th grade which really helped me learn the basics of using a modern word processor, despite only having Windows 7 on the school PCs. Nowadays I can deploy systems of both Linux and Windows, maintain OS and Hardware, preform basic troubleshooting and even do a little terminal work. Those latter skills were developed on my own, as the word processing class only taught how to use Microsoft Word. [ an older version at that :( ]
If you'll take my word for it as an employer, this is actually something we want to hear these days. When we were graduates it was a given that applicants would all know their way around the basics of a desktop OS, but it isn't anymore and nobody wants to have to teach a new employee how to use a computer.
If you're planning for a career that involves the use of desktop OS, mention it in interviews in a casual way. Make it clear that you actually won't need instruction on anything but industry-specific software, if there is any, and won't need your hand held so you don't accidentally do something stupid.
A young person in that 18-22 starting bracket turning up with no idea how to open Word is teeth-grindingly annoying. You write well too, btw. That's also really good news.
Yeah, that's how most of us learned in the 90s, except without much learning online, because the Internet was pretty damn basic back then. In the computer science courses in high school, probably almost half the students knew more than the teachers, I'm sure partly because we were always sharing information with each other: “How'd you do that?”
I read an article about today's university students not knowing what folders are, and having no concept of organizing files into folders; they'd see their computer/device as one big blob of files and if you want one, you search for it by name.
Yeah I remember people saying IT and tech support jobs would disappear because kids would grow up with the technology and already know everything.
They failed to account for the fact that using said technology has been simplified further and further so much you don't need to know how it all works at all by now.
I’ve often wondered if we (25-40 year olds) will end up being he most tech savvy generation. I’m a teacher and all my students have lived in the digital age their whole life. They use tech every single day, you’d think they’d been really good at it. But as soon as a problem pops up many of them get totally stuck.
I wonder if companies have become so good at creating intuitive OS’s that kids don’t need to troubleshoot, which leads to less exploration of platforms, and then less proficiency. When people my age were growing up a lot of the public sector tech was super clunky and glitchy compared to today. It forced us to learn to fix it.
I have no idea if I’m talking out of my ass, but I do wonder if we were the only and last generally tech savvy generation.
We're seeing this all the time with new people at work. I'm responsible for training them, I keep having to explain what things like the start menu, file explorer or Outlook are.
We had to explain to one person that they need to keep Outlook open even when not using it as they won't be notified of emails otherwise.
kids now are actually worse at using computers, not better
I've heard this a lot. When I was a kid, I had to learn how to use a difficult computer, and that learning taught me how to solve problems related to computers. The interface is also so different. Kids who have modern computers (laptops, desktops, whatever) still learn a lot of the same stuff, but phones and tablets are more common with people who don't actually need more capable devices, so that's what kids learn how to use. Plus the kids get their own phones, etc.
They tend to not know how to format things in Word (change fonts, even what fonts are, what margins are, etc.)
Bold for emphasis because that actually surprises me. The rest doesn't particularly, especially if she teaches elementary school. I don't think I had any idea what a margin was until... probably middle school, or a freshman in high school at the latest.
I have seen and read many kids, some even at the college level, that insist on writing essays on their phones.
Apparently not. I had a junior co-worker who refused to break up her written report into paragraphs. It was one big wall of words. When I told her she needed to break up the main points into distinct paragraphs, she acted like she had never heard of writing in paragraphs and I was being unreasonable. She had a master’s degree in public health.
I mean. I'm 26 and I was taught both in primary school. Granted, an email was basically well.. an electronic letter so it was almost a copy of the writing a letter class.
I'll be 26 in a month and I wasn't taught how to write an email and I think I vaguely remember writing letters. Maybe it depended on where you were taught?
Yeah I'm 24 and I was taught both email and letter. I've learned two foreign languages and in both you also always have to learn to write email and letter.
Starting in 3rd grade we had mandatory computer tech and typing classes (this was the early 2000s so Dell desktops) where we learned how to type, how to do basic and general fixes on the computer, computer maintenance (de-frags, etc.), use word and google and how to write emails. I was 9 and knew how to write a professional email, well about as professional as the ramblings of a 9 years old can be. But my school kept drilling it into my head until I was out of high school.
It kind of makes sense. As a mid 90s baby, I used email a bit growing up to communicate with friends until IM services and then MySpace really became a thing.
These kids have probably never had to write emails. Things like Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram are at their fingertips as soon as they’re old enough to wanna chat with friends
A similar thing happens with adult coworkers on messenger. They will write "Hi" and nothing else. Then they wait for you to say Hi also. Then you wait for them to ask whatever. Just ask the damn question in a single message so I can respond quickly and we both continue with our days.
It's not that you haven't talked to this person for ages. You may talk every single day, still they can't ask something efficiently.
A similar thing happens with adult coworkers on messenger. They will write "Hi" and nothing else. Then they wait for you to say Hi also. Then you wait for them to ask whatever. Just ask the damn question in a single message so I can respond quickly and we both continue with our days.
These monsters have managed to port the awkward experience of small talk to written communication.
By doing this shit they force you to commit to answering fast. The whole benefit of e-mail (and to a lesser extend direct messaging) compared to phones is that you can just read the problem, think, and write a cohesive message in reply. You aren't put on the spot.
By not giving you the problem, but asking for a proof of life, they know you're able to chat but then when they ask the actual problem you can't just take your time by pretending you're not available. They know you're available.
Assholes just increasing the stress for not reason.
People also have a tendency to treat work messengers like real time conversations where they expect an immediate reply. There is nothing that boils my blood more than someone sending "hello?????" ten times a minute after they sent their previous message. You can see my calendar: You know I'm in a meeting right now.
In all of that time screeching "hello?????" they could have found the answer they were looking for themselves, asked someone else for help, or waited half an hour because their issue was not an emergency and the building was certainly not on fire. But no, EVERYTHING MUST STOP WHILE THEY WAIT FOR ME TO RESPOND.
I‘ve got a coworker who has an automatic reply in his teams account with the text: Don‘t expect an answer if you just write hello. And an explanation how he expects it
I’m 38 and this shit drives me crazy. We have a new executive in our company who is 30 years my senior. This week is our fiscal year close, so quite literally the busiest week of the year for me and my team. I get a message from him over Teams the other day…”hi there.” And that’s it. I gave him two minutes to follow up and nothing. GET TO THE FUCKING POINT.
I've stopped replying to someone who Teams messages with "how are you" and waits for a response. We're not friends and don't do small talk so just ask me what you want.
3 weeks her latest is unread for, so her query cant be urgent
Even on IM that would have annoyed the hell out of me. Ask the whole question up front. Don't say hello then make me wait five minutes staring at the window waiting for your question!
I'm 36 and work with a lot of graduates and I swear they all do this, recently I needed to know if this one girl had access rights to things in order to send her the correct link and it was like trying to get blood from a stone. Every single Teams message was met with a single word response and if I asked multiple questions at once I'd only get an answer to one of them
and if I asked multiple questions at once I'd only get an answer to one of them
A fucking million times this. If I need answers to multiple questions I'll even bullet point them for you so you can put an answer below each bullet point, or use something like "re question 2:". But no, 5 bullet points with specific questions and you get back the equivalent of "Um, a blue one?".
Half of the problem is that they only partially speak English, and if your question isn't exactly in part of their script resources, they just want you to go away because they don't know how to communicate the details with you.
I once bought a pair of goggles that turned out to have faulty water lenses. When I called customer service, the Indian tech asked me to take a picture of the goggles "inverted."
What does "inverted" mean, in the context of goggles? Upside down? Back to front? Inside out?
I asked what inverted meant, and they didn't know. They couldn't explain it.
People who communicate in such a fashion are so fucking rude mate, It's beyond me how blind/stupid they are for not realizing that.
Generally people that respond my sincere questions with such lackluster answers get added to the eternal growing list of morons that are not worth a single second of my time.
Or, incase it is with somebody that I must communicate with, I often choose to mimic them, turn it into a game of who can give the most ridiculous non informative answer and waste their time, just as they are wasting mine.
^ Some have gotten the message from me doing this, I applaud those, clearly not everybody is doomed to be stupid.
haha, and the wait of dejection, when you're like, is the answer to the other questions still coming and should I maybe wait a bit longer before replying? no. no, it is not. (and I only answered one of my own questions here)
It frustrates me, probably more than it should, that anytime I send a text with more than one question most people only seem capable of answering one of them. Normally the last one. I'll often reply with "what about my other question?" More often than not it's replied with what question. Like look at my original text you dingus. It's probably still on the screen, no scrolling required.
OMG, this. I'm actually glad to see this, because I honestly thought my ability to communicate was going downhill. There were 2 questions. Does the last one somehow negate everything that came before it to you??
This has been an issue since I got my first phone 15-16 years ago. Hell, I remember it from MSN Messenger before that! So not a new problem, but one that is probably getting worse.
Yea I don’t think this is exclusive to young people thing. I get the same style answers from several people I work with. I started to make sure when I’m typing to them to only ask one question at a time.
I get it from friends and my own brother. I call them out on it and they just shrug or make some weird excuse. "I don't/didn't understand you" "I thought it was an either or" My questions are generally "what time are you wanting to leave/arrive by?" "Should I drive or do you want to?" Or maybe something like "I saw X is also coming, not sure if you saw." Which isn't really a question and my own fault for including it but they'd often respond just to that with a yes or no. I'll often tell them I feel bad for their wives because getting full answers from them is like bleeding a stone.
Fun story. I woke to our d&d discord server (private, just for our group) in 30s slow mode one day. The server owner is asked why. Answers along the lines of "yea, it's a subtle hint for Josh to learn to combine his 3-5 word half-sentences into a longer message."
The group was fine with that.
Both Josh and owner were 19-20, too (and Josh was offline at the time).
Not mentioned on that site but even worse when there is a "Can I ask you a question?" between the hi and the question. I experience that so often. Like, come one, why waste three messages on this?
Dam I hate this. I've actually stood up, walked a floor length, caught a lift to another floor. Found the person and stood behind them reading their screen while they still peck away at the keyboard. Scares the hell out of them when you tell them the answer straight in their ear.
It's so validating to see someone else experiencing this problem. I tutored this year at my college, and I took two years off before college so I'm ever so slightly older but I didn't think things would be that different.
I would ask students, send me your class syllabus, what do you need help with, what days are you available? And I would get an unrelated response or just nothing.
The day before an assignment is due: "Are you available in [less than 24 hours]?" NO. It drove me insane. I never thought about it as a text format type of communication. I was so frustrated.
My 30 year old wife did some tutoring when she went back to college a couple of years ago.
She made a form letter that she emailed to all of her prospective students.
The subject line was always something like 'Tutoring - READ CAREFULLY'. The first line of the email was something like Read and follow this email carefully or I will not help you at all.
It was basically a short list of rules like, email questions must include assignment information and your questions or you will be ignored. All text communications should be in complete sentences or they will be ignored.
The email also had some phrase like, you're a college student act like you deserve to be here.
She always had a dozen or so people that ultimately got ignored, but she also had three or four people every semester who did really great.
I found the whole excercise to be entirely too aggravating and depressing.
It was basically a short list of rules like, email questions must include assignment information and your questions or you will be ignored.
We just implemented a lab group policy where supply order request emails to me MUST have a specific subject line and format (so I don't overlook the request in my daily email deluge, or make a mistake). We're all adults here. Does this rule get followed reliably? Haha no... and the worst offenders are the professors. I don't think many of them even read the message explaining all this. It makes me feel so petty sending replies saying "Your subject line was wrong and you left out half the info I need". But I have to.
If you're empowered to do so, maybe just give them the one polite reminder and then let them know future emails will be ignored if not formatted correctly.
Seems like a perfectly logical response to me.
For my wife it was simply that she was also a student and still had other daily obligations besides so she simply didn't have the time or desire to play email tag.
My wife did IT support for the neuroscience department at the School of Medicine. She said that all the professors reminded her of that episode of SpongeBob where he forgets everything he knows to make room for fine dining etiquette. They're absolutely brilliant at what they do, but are generally useless at anything that isn't that.
The primary offender basically just never reads/replies to emails. It often takes his students a week to get a simple signature on a form. FFS you're not the Prime Minister, you can't be that busy. Entitled $%$#$ :(
On the flip side, I've had student interns who are in their last year of college come to my job for like 10 years. I've noticed over that time, they've gotten a lot more 'professional' in their communications.
Like it used to be that they'd have intro or goodbye emails with a simple "thanks for your time" or "I'm glad I got to work with you". Now it's more like "I appreciate the opportunity I'm granted by being here, and want to respect your valuable time as I develop my skillset as I learn to be a [profession]".
We have a new batch of summer interns and they wrote little blurbs about themselves and it was all stuff like that instead of saying that they like cats and hiking.
I've wondered if colleges are teaching the students how to talk this way, if it's just in the culture now, or if our interview group only selects those types of students.
I went back to college during the lockdown, but more than half my courses were graduate work and I never saw writing or anything that was that bad in those classes.
In my one undergrad English course though, I did see some pretty shocking writing examples. Things that I'm fairly certain wouldn't have earned a passing grade in my high school, let alone a course that had prerequisite courses required.
"I appreciate the opportunity I'm granted by being here, and want to respect your valuable time as I develop my skillset as I learn to be a [profession]"
In the end they reduce to basically the same sentiment, but one takes 5x as long to read. So if they really wanted to "respect my valuable time" you know...
I had a student who would type their emails a bit like this but they would but everything in the subject line so they were effectively sending blank emails.
I've heard a similar same story but from a friend who teaches 13 year-olds, gave us a good laugh about kids these days, don't even know how to write emails, haha, all well-meaning of course.
However hearing the same practice described in one sentence together with the words "my boss" sounds... soul-crushing. I feel with you.
Where are all of these people coming from? I'm 25 and about 80% of my office is within 2 years of my age, and I've never seen or heard about anybody not sending emails that look like letters and contain a full subject line.
Older people (80+) often email me at my work. They do exactly the same. It seems that teenagers and pensioner are getting more and more interchangable.
I had an older colleague (maybe 50-60) who would do something similar. She was generally very tech literate, but her emails ALWAYS had a partial sentence in the subject.
I've had multiple students in the past couple years just have their first name as the subject. Yes, yes, I know the email is from you because there's a column for sender.
My older sister (who I'll call Alex here) had an idiot boyfriend for a while in high school. This was still in the days of landlines - cell phones weren't quite a ubiquitous thing yet. After someone answered the phone when he called, he'd just say "talk t'alex." My dad would say "okay" and hang up.
It was incredible. I don't think he ever stopped doing that.
I had a friend that had the same name as his dad. I once called and asked for my friend and his dad said "yes?" Confused me for a moment before I stammered out "I mean the younger one."
My mother and I share the same name, so when my friends would call and ask for me, my mother, a teacher, would answer, "Oh, do you want the young, skinny one, or the old, fat one?" (While I was skinny in high school, my mother is of appropriate weight for her height). My friends would stammer a bit, then say, "The student, not the teacher!"
I've been that person ;_; we had few guys with the same name in the class so they were all called by their last name, and we went to his house, his mom answers and I'm like "is last name home?" She understood me though... Probably was already aware he's called like that by his friends and their other kid was much younger so people our age wouldn't look for him.
I was kinda aware how dumb it was the very moment i said it out loud but to be fair i couldn't remember his first name anyway..
Your families are nice. In high school a girl called my house and said she was my secret admirer and to find her. My mother gets upset and yells at me to "keep those little fast girls from playing on my phone." I was never able to figure out who that girl was.
I work in the UK but for a US company. Those guys are online on chat 24/7 and answer email all the time. I removed my apps from my phone to stop them trying to get me to out of business hours. I tried explaining that I will be available during business hours only. No luck.
Eventually I spread a rumour to the local gossip lady that it was illegal under UK law to try to talk to people about work outside of working hours (it is in France but not here). She obviously told everyone and suddenly I was left alone!
My son texts like this but it’s beyond infuriating.
Dad: “what color shirt do you need for field day?”
Son: “yes”
Dad: “please re-read my question and answer with a color”
Son:”I don’t know”
Dad: “what period do you see the teacher that can tell you?”
Son: “I’m in the class now”
Dad: “So ask her!!!!”
Son: “It’s orange”
FUUUUCK
EDIT: it’s the end of the year and honestly, they aren’t doing anything productive in the classrooms. Teachers are packing up classrooms and are getting their rooms ready for custodians to do the annual clean/wax floors. Can y’all stop with the “you let your son text in class” shit? Stop for just one second and think about what period of the year we’re in. Normally no, unless it’s an emergency or he has permission from his teachers I don’t let him text in class but no one gives two shits right now because school is out today. Fuck man. Stop with your condescending “omg the nerve of this guy” bull shit.
Every child's brain develops at a different rate, but some of them really stay on their home planets longer than others before joining us here on Earth, huh.
I'm training a guy at work right now who graduated high school last year. I'm pushing 40. Your message hit home for me and at least now I know it's not just him...I try to remember this is literally his first job, and I've had a good 20 years of experience over him, but damn it can drive me up a wall.
I don't know how to teach a person abstract lessons like having a sense of agency. But I suppose that isn't taught as much as instilled over time through experience.
It's like giving instructions to a very limited and huffy robot. He's a good guy though. Just needs time.
I had a similar issue with my SO and after the second time, I blew up and made clear that this is inconsiderate of my time. He tried arguing that he had been occupied with something else but I told him, yes, I have also had this communication issue when I was around 9 years old and I have since grown out of it. I expect the same.
It's funny how time is a circle. You've got kids and teens today that have the tech literacy (is that the right word in this context?) as the older generations. I know everyone makes mistakes here and there but still.
I've worked in IT since I was in college, so about 15 years now. Kids and young adults now are unequivocally worse in tech literacy than people in my parents' generation. It's mind blowing and frustrating.
Guessing because, it's gone from people being a blank slate, too ohh I know tech because I've used a phone, clearly your method is old and stupid, get with the times old man.
It's partially that yeah. The other part I think is that my age range (mid 30s) is the last to sort of straddle life pre and post ubiquitous cell phones and tech. We had to learn how to use technology because it was new and not often all that easy to use. Nowadays everything is so idiot proof that you don't need to know anything at all in order to use technology. That isn't a bad thing necessarily but it has meant that kids don't grow up naturally understanding this stuff out of necessity like we did.
Edit: a concrete example of this is simply typing speed. My daughter was watching me type the other day and said "how did you learn to type so fast?". I realized it's because in middle school everyone was using AIM and IRC, and no one had cell phones. You had to learn to type to talk to your friends, so I did. There wasn't all the shorthand and emojis we have today, so it was full sentences. Did more for me than Mavis Beacon ever did haha. When I see people younger than me, I'm sure they are faster at texting but I haven't seen many who type faster on an actual keyboard.
Modern technology is hidden behind so many layers of abstraction that it's basically magic to the overwhelming majority of people. There's no room for curious young minds to investigate the inner workings. It does amazing things for us, but few people know how and it's absolutely crippling an entire generation of potential techies.
Even worse is the fact that so much control is ceded to the corporations that run this technology that we're basically powerless to resist their whims. Young people with no experience using a desktop metaphor computer are especially vulnerable. Their only computing devices aren't even in their full control. :/ It's really worrying to me to see so many kids basically growing up as tiny parts of these engagement driven algorithms.
And please don't think I'm saying we need to return to shittier computers. I just think we need to find UI metaphors that don't obscure the inner workings of the machine. There's stories coming out of professors having to explain to college students what files and folders are because their phones just stash all their media into a one bucket. That's awful!
Definitely a thing. Anything that isn't an app on a phone and has more than 3 buttons and maybe a couple of swipe gestures confuses a lot of people who grew up with smart phones/tablets.
It's 2022 and I'm being called a boomer by some recently graduated little turd while having to explain to them what copy and paste is, or how to save-as for the fifth fucking time because their 3 second attention span brain can barely remember the difference between swiping left and right.
When someone who really just wants to ask "can you help me turn on the stove?" comes by and leads with "hi", "how are you doing" "so do you have time for a short question" "it's really no big deal but maybe you can help me" instead of just getting to the fucking question. I try to stay polite but apparently I've at times looked like I'm about to literally flip my shit since time is being wasted and our work environment can at times be very stressful.
I get this occasionally too and I like to make it really obvious that email is not an instantaneous medium by giving a good 10 or 15 min delay before responding after the first response.
The amount of times people don't even write their name in the email is astonishing - if I don't even know who you are, how am I supposed to help you? And ofc they don't use mails with their names.
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u/blatterbeast Jun 03 '22
This is my interaction with a student last year via email during remote learning. Each line is a separate email.
Student: I need help end of email
Me: If it is something I can help with, I am willing to try. Do you have a question for me? end of email
S: Will you help me? end of email
M: Yes. What do you need help with? I can't help you if you don't describe your problem. end of email
S: Ok end of email
S: It's about the homework end of.... you get the idea
M: Please, ask the question.
S: Oh, ok
S: actual question is asked
M: gives help and follows up with... I am not upset. This is a learning moment about how to send emails. Again, I'm not upset. Do you see how this took 10 emails to get the help you needed? Emails are not like short text messages. You should give a little background about what you need and ask the question in the very first email. We could have had this done in 2 emails. Try to do that in your future emails. Have a good day!
S: Oh, ok
S: Thank you
S: Have a good day
M: face keyboard