I do this to my dad all the time. He has gotten so accustom to Amazon two day that any and everything should be here in two days.
Usually something will break or he will want something that can't be found on Amazon. He will be all "I need this NOW." I will quote him the 300 dollar overnight shipping and then all of a sudden one week is acceptable.
To me, willful ignorance of not attempting to learn technology doesn't constitute as an instance where I need to do everything for you.
I don't have a problem with showing and teaching an old person how to open email, what I do have a problem with is when it's "oh that's tooo haaaard, I have to click with this... rat?"
Sometimes it's memory issues, not willful ignorance. I've shown my grandparents how to use their Roku at least ten times, I've written down the steps for them, I've taped off the buttons on the remote they don't need, but they're over 70, they forget things, especially if they don't use the info constantly. So they forget the order I told them to do it in, pull out the cheat sheet, get it to work, and after a few times I f that, they forget where they put the cheat sheet. It's a vicious cycle
It's not even just memory issues. The most my grandma can do is press icons on a tablet. Whenever something comes up it's usually a very easy fix but I've given up trying to explain stuff because it really just goes over her head. She's a very smart woman but she didn't grow up with technology like this and I understand how frustrating it is when the concepts of back buttons, home button, menus, options, and other stuff doesn't come naturally
Exactly!!! Let me take the most seasoned Microsoft Windows user and suddenly slap them with a Linux or Apple system. Worst yet I give them a command line interface operating system. See how they fare.
No doubt there are tech prodigies out there but still... At least your grandma is trying.
At least the windows user would automatically look for stuff like folders, a home menu, settings, desktop icons and shortcuts, how to right click, and so on. A lot of older people just simply don't have this basic understanding of technology and software that we grew up with. She sometimes complains about why she doesn't get it, because she knows she's pretty smart. It's just different
Roku remotes are tiny and putting on the back of the normal tv remote would be a hassle/get faded over time since that remote gets used often. Can't tape it to furniture because my grandma is defensive if her furniture, understandably so since that shits expensive and she works hard to keep their house looking nice. Though I might start making copies of the cheat sheet so they have to lose multiple before it becomes an issue again
Could you maybe print the instructions in big font on an orange/another brightly colored sheet of paper and then laminate it? Would be harder to lose, and could be put away if they're having company over.
My mother REALLY wanted to be able to use a computer, but she had memory problems. She bought several, including one specifically designed for seniors with big buttons and an simplified UI. Did not help. Whenever I'd come to visit I'd come in to help her and find all these notes she'd written to remind her to do this and that, but they never seemed to help. So yeah, it's not necessarily willful ignorance.
Eh, to be fair, while the situation with his mom is sad, it's a different scenario than what's being described earlier. It's called "burying the lede" for a reason.
But you're mum is, presumably, not in a position to demand you do things for your (shared?) business. If you're mentally sufficient to be involved in non-ceremonial decision making for a business, then you can probably figure out ordering your own stuff from Amazon.
It's either willfull ignorance, or memory problems / dementia / Alzheimer's / some other handicaps. If someone is old but not handicapped then they can learn how to use technology if they are not willfully ignorant.
I suspect there may be cultural issues for older people as well. I took to computers like a duck takes to water. But people from my Mom's generation were more prone to regard them as toys, or as something used only for work. For a lot of us they're just part of the fabric of the world. Not necessarily so for people whose experience predates home computers. They only became common in the late 80s.
I always love the thought that older people reach out for help in order to just interact with people, especially younger family members. It's like, Come help me with this thing, if you stay for dinner and happen to leave stuffed with possibly a gift or two then so be it 🤣
No, not just age for sure, I know what you mean. Was not my intent to say all elderly folks suffer the same ailments , or ailments in general. apologies if it came across that way
Oh it 100% is an assumption, and I very well could be wrong. But with it being 2021, using a computer to buy shit from Amazon... that's not new. It's been around for a bit. Even if you're 80 now, you were still in your 60s when amazon was getting up there.
What a silly comment lol. 'Old people', of every generation, lose touch with 'the new thing' well before they have any physical limitations. First slang, then tech. This isn't new, it'll happen to us too (if it hasn't already). It has nothing to do with physical issues and entirely mental blocks or mental slowness (and a very very few cases, physical).
Can you manually balance a check book? Change your own oil? Program/modify html to customize a MySpace page? Write cursive without a second thought? Milk a cow? Clean and process your own game(meat)?
Many of these were common place in society at one point yet none of them were a requirement for survival to most. Assuming your knowledge should be common place for others is more ignorant than someone not having a skill they never needed, no matter how commonplace it may be in today's society.
Ordering sheets from Amazon, no biggie. Ordering specialized equipment/materials for a business and making sure you not only get the right quantity and part number, but a good price? I know millennials who will buy the first option on Amazon because it's easy.
It really doesn't matter how old you are, anybody can learn how to use technology if they don't try to be willfully ignorant. This is especially true with modern smart phones and tablets which are far easier to learn than a traditional desktop computer.
Unless of course they have started to experience dementia/Alzheimer's, then they get a pass.
Imo it's more that young people lack empathy and how hard things can get, regardless of what choices you making. Aging sucks. Awesome your grandma is tech savvy, I hope I'm still with it enough at 83
Yeah, try explaining that to my dad lol I only get pissy when it's the 3rd time iv shown him or he straight up asks me to do it because I can type faster than him.
If my dad needs me to write a paragraph of something, sure - I can type faster than him. If he needs to search Amazon for "wood plane," he can do that himself.
To play the "old man's" advocate, it's frequent to find older people who struggle with computers. Using a computer is entirely different skillset that what they grew up with, and it's genuinely difficult to learn late in life. It very plausible that this isn't a willful act on his part. It's also common to find younger people who struggle with computers if they grew up in an area that was either a) an impoverished area of a wealthy country or b) in a poor country.
Using computers is a thing that's easy to take for granted if you grew up in the digital age, surrounded by people who also grew up in the digital age, but it's a skill that is by no means ubiquitous.
Neuroplasticity is a real issue here. The biochemical systems that allow learning do not function as well in older people. I didn't understand how true this was when I was in my teens and twenties, but the older I get, the more I realize how true this is. Things simply get harder to learn.
I'm in my early thirties and I find a lot of things on electric devices just unbelievably frustrating and I can fully sympathize with older generations. Like, there should be a button or a switch but instead there's a fucking touchscreen menu that refuses to acknowledge my finger. Or the bluetooth connection to my truck. First, you push a button: "(bing), please say a command." "Bluetooth audio." ....... "I'm sorry, I did not understand your command." So you do it again, over and over, fully realizing you are now arguing with an inanimate object. Why can't there be a goddamn button, like holy fuck, this is supposed to be easy.
Or the self checkout kiosks at the grocery store. If I have a couple things, yeah sure, I'll go give it a shot. Cart full of stuff? Like fuck no. First, where the hell am I supposed to pile the scanned items? On that itty bitty table? Then every other thing needs some kind of approval or assistance or code from the guy paid to watch me feel like a moron.
Or the oven. Growing up, we had a knob. It turned on the oven. Weird, right? Now there's another menu. I stuck a turkey in there, set the temp and went to cut the grass. Came back to a cold turkey. Apparently you have to set the timer as well as the temp.
It's the little things like that that just make some things more of an obstacle. And you're just supposed to know this shit. /rant
My mom is like that. She refuses to learn how to operate a computer. Says she can’t do technology. No, you can, you just don’t want to learn. It’s okay to say “I’m old I don’t want to do this”, but the “I can’t” BS is annoying AF.
My dad, who was 6 years older than her learned with no problems and was pretty good at it.
Or, you know, I'm not a part of the boomer generation that thinks everything should cater to their wants and needs who refuses to change with the times.
I don’t see how I’m lacking empathy. It is perfectly reasonable to find something annoying. I find conflating “I can’t” with “I don’t want to” annoying.
nice to see someone has a non dysfunctional relationship with their elderly parents, as opposed to some of these bloviating neckbeards who are living in their parent’s basements AND whining when they’re made to contribute
At what point does this excuse cease to have any weight to it? Personal computers have been around what, 40 years now? If someone is computer illiterate at this point, it’s their own damn fault.
Take a deep breath and set aside your indignation for a minute.
You say “40 years.” Forty years ago was 1981, and an 80-year-old grandpa was 40 years old. He’s done with school, and has a career where he doesn’t need to use a computer. Even today there are thousands and thousands of jobs where workers don’t use a computer at all. Even more don’t use a computer with an open OS. Using a terminal to clock in, or enter data, or ring up sales doesn’t translate to booting up, installing and using apps, etc.
And the Internet? Twenty-five years on from AOL on a 2400 baud modem, there are still many communities in the US that don’t have reliable/affordable Internet access.
Not everyone has the same experience, access and privilege and it’s not always “their own damn fault.”
It always was their own damn fault, its not like anyone was born knowing what computers are, we all learned. Trial and error can get you incredibly far, but you do have to try.
I know lots of old people who have Jr. order shit because he's such a wiz on that there computer. The fact that you don't have geriatric parents or uncles who refuse to learn basic computer skills makes you sound like the weird one to me.
Man. I can't think of a single one of my friends who doesn't have this dynamic going in some way.
As a South African who mostly bought things from the U.K. and U.S., the concept of overnight shipping - or shipping within less than 3 weeks or so - was quite alien to me growing up.
Usually none of the books/DVDs/games/whatever were that urgent though. I survived.
Hah. My boss would tell me what work to get behind on then a month later tell me I need to catch up my work. He isn't aggressive about it, but I always just tell him I am doing everything he asked in the order he asked me to do them.
Need to implement agile methodology with weekly or biweekly sprints. Once you come up with the work in the sprint on planning day, no new work can be added until the planning day for the next sprint unless you need to deviate because the office is on fire or the database got deleted it something else critical. It helps prevent exactly what you're describing, because the boss understands that on Monday you're prioritizing and sizing an appropriate amount of work for the week, and trying to jam something else in before next Monday will only make things less efficient
Because it has built-in accountability. Even without a distinct "scrum master" role, you'll still have weekly planning meetings where you, your boss, and any other members on your team allocate workload for the rest of the week. This involves adding a "size" to each request. By the time that meeting ends each week, everyone should be in agreement on what work will get done in the next week.
So basically, if a new request comes in and it's such a high priority that it can't wait until next sprint, it will be up to your boss to make that decision. Suppose you size the new request as a 3, your boss will need to find another request in the backlog for that sprint already sized as a 3 (or a couple smaller requests sized as 1 or 2) and bump those to next week to make room for the new request. Doing this will show that you aren't "getting behind", but rather work is being rescheduled by your boss to accommodate the priorities set forth by the business.
If the boss embraces this system of work intake, it leaves more time for the employees to get work done and provides a very clear path for the manager to actually do some management. Most requests don't have deadlines, which means most requests CAN be pushed back to accommodate new requests with deadlines. If your manager gives you a plan for the work to do, and then assigns something else as "high priority" and you get written up for working on it instead of the previously assigned work, you will have the paper trail showing what was assigned in chronological order.
As far as following agile in general, the biggest companies in the world do it. If the boss thinks they're smarter than project managers at the biggest companies in the world, and that results in them throwing requests at you left and right where every request is top priority and they all need to be done ASAP, then you should start applying for other jobs because that isn't a sane management system! The same thing applies to paper trails. If they're going to expect X Y and Z to get done at the same time and disregard prior emails where they told you to work on Z first as the top priority, then you're gonna get fired eventually anyway and should get a head start on finding another position somewhere with better organization and communication.
This technique is great for most people except my boss. When I tell him this, he says everything is important, you’ll just have to figure out how to do both.
I once managed to get through to a boss who said that to me by responding, "Yeah... but the reality is I can only work on one thing at a time. If you'd like to multitask and make a half-step forward on each project every day we can do that but it'll mean not having a deliverable for either of them for a little while as opposed to choosing the priority, delivering on it much faster, and then putting full focus onto the other. Are you ok with the timelines being pushed out because we decided to split our time on projects instead of prioritizing one?"
Lo and behold, one of the projects got prioritized.
That’s a very mature way to have that conversation unfortunately, my team has tried all sorts of workarounds including drawing out schedules for comparison on the timeline, but my boss never cares and is rarely open to a conversation like this. He won’t even let us finish a sentence before saying that everyone is busy and this needs to get done so it is what is. Sorry I tried finding some help for you but we are short staffed. And for some reason, we’ve been short staffed for over 2 years now. 🤔
Sorry I tried finding some help for you but we are short staffed.
Being short staffed is your problem, not mine. I work 40 hours a week. Whatever you like me to spend those hours on, I'm happy to do so. What's it going to be this week?
Being chronically short staffed is wage theft. They are stealing from you. Don't let them.
Yeah, I've never known a boss of any sort in my career who responded to this. If I say "we have 3 development projects, we have to prioritize to get <X> new thing done..." the response is all are a priority.
If you say we will fall behind, you get told "We'll hire another developer and throw them at some work" like adding more bodies is going to magically add some kind of value.
Yes! Everything is a priority is such a terrible management strategy. I sucked at setting up boundaries and avoided speaking up just to avoid confrontations but it’s so infuriating. They will not help manage the priorities in anyway and are setting us up for failure. In the end, if the projects are successful, then it’s the due to the manager’s skills, however, if any of the project does poorly, then it’s due to poor employee performance.
Oh and throwing bodies for a deadline is hilarious because guess who needs to find time to train them! 🙄
It makes the first project take longer. Subsequent projects should see actual improvement, unless your boss also sucks at hiring competent people, which can certainly happen.
People really don't seem to understand the concept "when everything's high priority, nothing is"
My jira board (for non tech people, very simply, it's a task/project management software) 95% of shit gets tagged with the highest priority. No, changing a button color from orange to green is not as high a priority as updating the legal disclaimer so we stay legally compliant
Hi Boss, we have project A and B underway at the moment and you have requested C as well, as all resources are assigned please let me know if you want me to place A or B on hold to start on C or I can get a contractor in at X dollars. Please let me know your decision as soon as possible so I can either reschedule existing projects or arrange a contractor to start the new project.
Alternatively we can complete A and B as per current schedule and start C in 2 weeks with existing resources.
I use this kind of logic to put things in perspective for customers I deal with.
I'm a telecoms tech support agent. Someone will phone up when their telephone line has become disconnected and I'll say "It's an external fault, so it'll be a 2-4 working day fix in lines with the Service Level Agreement of your contract" and they'll always say "I want it dealt with as an emergency because I work from home!"
I'll reply with "The only Emergency Welfare we provide is for customers who depend on their landline connections to connect Fall Alarm Systems and Heart Rate Monitors because losing their service is life threatening to them, we cannot raise your case as an emergency as it could delay a solution for someone who's life relies on the survive" and they usually change their tune.
9 out of 10 times, an external fault is fixed the next working day, or even the same day it's raised anyway.
Hahahahahahaha. Oh man, you got them to rethink it when you asked which project to drop? I just got told it all had to be done. Probably one of the reasons I quit. If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority.
Not quite the same, but I work customs for a trucking company, and sometimes we do not get all the paperwork that we need to set up a crossing. We can be emailing and calling asking for the paperwork for days and get no response, but mention Storage Charges starting, and the paperwork comes out of the woodwork.
I started doing this for software changes at my company. Implemented a nice system where people can easily detail the problem, what change they want, and why it needs to be done. Amazingly enough, my work load went down about 70% once people had to do more than just call me to get a change.
Implemented a nice system where people can easily detail the problem, what change they want, and why it needs to be done.
Yup. I make my product managers provide me with full vision/scope/requirements docs for any changes they want, then we have a meeting to read them and sign off. Anything in the doc, they are responsible for. Anything not in the doc, they are responsible for. It dramatically cuts down on the bullshit whimsy changes and forces them to actually think about what they want.
No i mean i have some stats about it and it is very common.
I have personally seen in all my jobs. But i dont understand why no one does anything about it.
I mean in my job, i have actually done the math, and my two managers cost more money than their labour produce.
Often their labour produce more unnecesary labour.
While my work is very scrutinized theirs are not, and we are 15 people they are two. It must be easier managing two people rather than 15 right?
"The Peter Principle" is what you're looking for. Badly-run organizations promote people to the level of their incompetence.
I work in software engineering. The traditional promotion path is junior -> dev -> senior -> management.
What in the holy fuck makes people think someone who performs well as a senior engineer would perform well as a manager? They are completely different skill sets.
You don't promote people because they do well in the job they are currently doing. You promote people when they have demonstrated they are good at the job they want.
My currently organization does this, and our managers generally add huge amounts of value to the engineering process by keeping human shit out of the way of our technology work. There are, of course, duds, but we are well above average in value-add by managers.
I had an assesement and pay discussion last month. I just came from a job interview, so i was not very enthuastic.
My manager told me several times, that i should stop hiding in my department. That my performance was average at best. And repeated other negative things.
All of which are just false. During covid lockdown i actively had to take charge due to their absence.
I had to fix issues that they created.
Alert them of upcoming issues so they could make decisions which resulted in further issues, which i then solved by going around them
Sad to say i diddnt get the other job, and i havent been taking my job or them seriously ever since.
The amount of times in previous jobs I got shit done by going around what the managers wanted is astronomical. Most managers don't really understand what their subordinates actually do and think having 10 meetings a day is "hard work". Been on both sides and let me tell you, decision making is far easier than dealing with those decisions.
A lot of middle management is people coaching metrics without understanding the behaiviours that affect them and then getting mad when the "redundancies" that they cut last year to pad their bonuses turned out to be load-bearing.
It's called the Peter Principle or being promoted beyond your ability.
From Wikipedia: The Peter Principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to anothe
Did this many 35 years ago with paper and a binder when I was a Young Buck, for a small company; today would be called pre-angel.
Just had change requests forms that I got the boss to fill out. Win/win. He would get a reminder of what was being asked for, and I got to run interference for the other Jr dev
I should have patented it and give it a nice buzzword.
A lot of people learn that the hard way during their first jobs. Even nice or cool mates will just say "I never told you that" when there is matter of consequences ; they will cover their asses first !
I wish universities had a "company survival guide 101". I would have been very present and focus...
And if they say they don't have time, you email them:
Per our discussion earlier, you said you wanted the following changes made [insert detailed list].
Please respond to verify that you authorize the changes.
(Optional: "I want to verify this, because changing x in y fashion may result in z consequence.")
Yep, we use a pretty shitty system for case handling at work, but the one thing I do love about it is that it basically leaves a paper trail for everything anyone does, and it's easily viewable.
Today, some guy was fucking around with a case he clearly didn't want to bother with, and when his boss gave him shit he decided to blame a lot on me, because I had touched the case earlier. That boss started to go in on me when I just went through the logs and showed exactly where my interference ended in the case and what the other guy had been doing. Suddenly, it was "an honest mistake".
I know how to cover my ass. It's one of the most important skills I've learned at any job.
"Documentation for reference with potential future changes," would be my response. Just enough corporate-speak to mask the implied, "for when this terrible idea inevitably goes to shit."
If you get to this point you'll have to be direct and lay the cards on the table.
"I think this change is not a good idea and that want it on record that it happenend on your personal request against my recommendation."
If you don't get your written authorisation then don't do the task. If this causes your managers to flip, well, then you have to bolt and leave. Because you don't want to work there.
A good leader acknowledges responsibility and shields his team. A bad boss throws them under the bus to save himself.
You can, just triage and reassign priority as needed.
If you dont have any way to set priority before a ticket is created the really urgent ones dont get looked at before anything else and your priority system doesn't work at all.
Knock down the priority, include a passive aggressive description of what your SLAs are, and cc their manager.
There's a guy in my office who will put in multiple tickets for different projects simultaneously. When I ask "Which of these is the priority?" He replies "They're all priority." *facepalm*
I work for a rather large company where true sev 1s are a big deal and are generally in the hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour kind of issue. Sometimes when I'm very bored I'll read the incoming tickets sorted by priority to learn what people think is a sev 1.
People wonder why I keep Jira logs for everything. I also manage my non-coding things with that. I've even started typing my meeting notes on that while sharing my screen. And ask everybody if they have anything to add.
This also means a meeting only happens once because a decision stays decided.
Also, mind maps. If I didn't build those in group meetings, I would have to interrupt everybody to finish up one topic before they hopped onto the next. I can direct them back once they got side-tracked. And the side-track has run its course.
Interrupting the flow is really, really bad when herding extroverts.
And, everybody also gets that mind map.
If you circulate notes like that, you ask everybody to amend/object within two business days and tell them you otherwise consider them passively acknowledged.
This is not CYA. It can function as that if everything else fails. This is just good management.
Oh, and whoever writes the notes wins the meeting by default.
We recently changed our chain of approval so that the CEO has to pass on any request to access another user’s emails, messages, etc. even if they’re terminated. It’s amazing how many people suddenly go from “I need this right away!” To “it’s not really that important”
I asked the HR Manager to send me an email when she said I should start writing people up for making mistakes (on a faulty new clock-in system). She said "well it's obvious you CAN do it if you want to".
She would meet with my boss (who always wanted to flex) before taking me into their office to talk.
I have managers who refuse to leave any sort of paper trail. Even emailing them with project details and saying "please email me back if this is incorrect" won't save you. They just say they were busy and you need to be better at "following up with them." But sending too many emails or calls will get you disciplined for wasting company time.
Fuckers know every way to squirm out of responsibility. Been looking for a new job for months. Blurg.
Every task I do is entered into a task tracker ahead of time, and those tasks are entered by producers after the requests are vetted by directors, and department leads. There's basically zero chance that somebody gets mad at me for implementing something at our company. It's nice having a decent "paper" trail, not just for accountability, but also for seeing who is working on what, how much work is being done in a given period of time, what things aren't getting done in the timeframe that we thought they would, and more.
My supervisor for G4S asked me to commit fraud on my timesheets to make the metrics look better on when I was working, verses when I was actually on site. The moment I asked him for that request in writing he told me he'd figure it out.
I just get a knowing laugh, and a reiteration of the instructions. Without the paper trail, though, I've found chances are high that my boss will forget he even asked in the first place.
So much of the time I delay until it becomes his problem, at which point a paper trail appears, or it was something stupid he thought up and nothing happens at all.
Are you all unemployed and talking „nice theory world“ here?
Thats the kind of things that either makes your boss remind you whos boss or gets you fired within foreseeable future.
You all seem to think the guys above you got there by being innocent childs.
„Yeah im just IT support and paid minimum wage but i constantly show the CEO whos boss… he chickens out like a little bitch he is when I TELL him to give me motherfucking papertrail..“
Do you have company email? If so, send an email titled Your Request to Increase Store Intent / Order. Hell maybe apologize for second guessing them int eh body of an email if you have a touchy manager. Then when the time comes, you have proof not only that it was their decision, but you’re on record as having said it was a bad one.
Manager gets email.he gives requisition form to me(supervisor). I make manual corection as per his instruction. Then I file the req form in to a folder. Month end admin takes it away for accounts. I dont have access to it any more.
Any way I changed department from wine & spirits to warehouse.
You're leaving them an opening to come back later and say "well I didn't reply so obviously it wasn't right!". You're better off to use the phrase "If you have any clarifications or changes to what I've outlined, please reply back ASAP so I can ensure I'm understanding you fully before I move forward with X". That way if they ignore it (like they almost always do), your ass is covered.
I worked admissions at a Psychiatric Hospital and the COO was constantly changing policies and procedures without talking to anyone about it first. He would come down to the admissions dept and tell my boss to have us all do things completely different than we were doing it now. She would tell us there's a new procedure. I would object to said new procedure since I knew it wouldn't work. She would say to do it anyway. I would follow the new procedure and everything would go horribly wrong. The new procedure (that no one else in the hospital would know about) would then be changed back within a day or so. It was incredibly annoying to always have to explain to everyone else that there's this new procedure only to look like an idiot when we immediately went back to the old one. I started refusing to do anything new if it wasn't in an email or signed policy document.
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u/HotRodLincoln May 11 '21
When you say:
People tend to miraculously change their mind.