Exchanges with People that Make Your Brain Hurt

[Free Range Hippy Chick]

How was I supposed to know that would delete the program itself and all the data.  My supervisor yelled at me.  A lot.  I was computer-phobic for several years because I didn't know how everything could go *poof* in the blink of an eye.  Elvis-has-left-the-room gone.  No warning message.  Nothing.  Probably because my supervisor thought warning messages were unnecessary and he didn't think about the possibility of the data entry clerk hitting the wrong key.

When I was a Very Young Hippy Chick, my employer was just beginning to think about the possibility of there being computers in the office for the staff - so they got one. I knew enough to create a basic baby spreadsheet to add things up, which made me the office expert. Now this probably won't mean anything to non-UK readers, and won't mean much to half the UK readers, but what I did know, I had learned on a Sinclair QL - which meant that at a very early stage, I had learned the Three Absolute Rules of the Computer:

1. Back it up.
2. No, honestly, back it up.
3. SERIOUSLY, I'M NOT KIDDING HERE, BACK IT UP!

So when the man from the computer company came to call, I asked him about backing it up. He assured me there was no need: he had, he said, never heard of a hard drive failing. (Even then I knew this to be a brain-hurty moment.) I insisted, and he rolled his eyes and humoured me, taught me how to back it up (onto floppies but that's another story), and every Friday night I ran the backup twice, put one set of floppies in my desk and took the other set home for safety.

I had a panicky phone call one evening: everything was gone. Everything. But I had backup disks, hadn't I?

I did. Left hand top drawer.

So what should Co-worker do with them?

I had no idea. I knew I had been told, and I knew I had written it down, but I had never needed to do it and off-hand I didn't remember where I had filed the notes. I would find them for her in the morning, or she could call Computer Guy and get him to talk her through it.

CW fell about laughing. I had a backup but I didn't know how to restore it? Just how pointless was that?

'Co-worker, which of us has taken the backup that is going to save your bacon tomorrow? Who knows that the How To notes exist because she wrote them? That would be me. And which of us was the idiot who did Control-Alt-Delete *.* and then read the warning that says 'this will wipe everything, confirm Y/N' and did it anyway? Oh yes, that would be you.'

She brought me cake the next day.

[jedikaiti]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.

I have a number of friends who are a good decade and change younger than I am, and I am sure I make their brains hurt. I'll start to make some pop culture reference that predates them, then catch myself. "Oh, wait, that was before you were born." Of course I look really young (apparently), so they tend to forget I'm that much older until I have one of those brain farts - but I come in very handy on trivia night. <G>

[Outdoor Girl]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.

I have a number of friends who are a good decade and change younger than I am, and I am sure I make their brains hurt. I'll start to make some pop culture reference that predates them, then catch myself. "Oh, wait, that was before you were born." Of course I look really young (apparently), so they tend to forget I'm that much older until I have one of those brain farts - but I come in very handy on trivia night. <G>

When I started my current job, we had several weeks of training that forced a group of about 25 of us together for an extended period.  One of the girls in our group was quite young but not only that, she was a diplomat's kid and had lived all over the world.  She missed a lot of pop culture references.  At one of our conferences, there was going to be a 'fun' event that was an afternoon boat cruise.  We had to sign up for it.  One of my coworkers let our supervisor know that he and I were interested as long as it wasn't a 'three hour tour'.  She didn't get the reference; even after we explained it, she was totally lost.

[Piratelvr1121]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.

I have a number of friends who are a good decade and change younger than I am, and I am sure I make their brains hurt. I'll start to make some pop culture reference that predates them, then catch myself. "Oh, wait, that was before you were born." Of course I look really young (apparently), so they tend to forget I'm that much older until I have one of those brain farts - but I come in very handy on trivia night. <G>

That's rather how it is with friend and I.  For the first few years we were friends (it's been about 5 years now, I think), whenever she'd joke "I'm old enough to be your mama!" I'd think "No you're not, no way!"  She definitely looked younger than my mother, and dressed younger.  Not too young, just not in the way I was used to women of my mother's age dressing in our area.   Chico's, Talbot's, that sort of store.  Friend dresses more like I do in boho style shirts and broomstick skirts.

Course it dawned on me "Oh yeah, the age difference between us is the same as the age difference between myself and my oldest."

Friend usually explains references to me if I didn't see whatever it was she's talking about, like Dark Shadows.

[jpcher]

Back in the late 70s, I worked for a large electronics manufacturer in Silicon Valley.  I was not even a tech; Just a "rework girl."  My supervisor assigned me to entering failure data into a program he wrote.  His program writing abilities were only slightly more advanced than my data entry skills.  I made a typographic error while entering data, so I hit "delete."  The delete button didn't do anything, so I typed in "delete."

How was I supposed to know that would delete the program itself and all the data.  My supervisor yelled at me.  A lot.  I was computer-phobic for several years because I didn't know how everything could go *poof* in the blink of an eye.  Elvis-has-left-the-room gone.  No warning message.  Nothing.  Probably because my supervisor thought warning messages were unnecessary and he didn't think about the possibility of the data entry clerk hitting the wrong key.

Back in the Palaeolithic Era, when I was in high school, we got computer classes in our last year. We didn't have PCs - we got terminals, with a certain amount of computing time leased from the mainframe at the local university.

Logging in and out of the terminal took a lot of arcane commands. Sometimes, you could think you were logged out, but you hadn't hit the final button to achieve that state.

In the first month, one student, Friday afternoon, was working on computing, I think, the value of "e" for logarithms. It's an irrational number, with no end. He THOUGHT he had closed the program, and logged out.

On Monday, the school discovered it had no computing time left for the year.

(I can't believe I'm trying to do a one-upmanship on an age related topic. )


In my first computer programming class Sr. year in HS we had to completely fill in little tiny squares with a No.2 pencil on index card type things. Each card was a line of computer code, with if/then statements, questions, answers, etc. telling the computer what to do. Depending on the complexity of your program, you could easily have a stack of cards 3 inches tall.

Then you took your stack of cards and fed it into this monstrosity computer thing. There was a monitor and keyboard attached to the computer where your program was played . . . asking your questions. If you answered the question correctly it would do this, if you answered wrong it would do that. How cool is that?

Troubleshooting the program was oh, so tediously brain-hurty! Maybe somewhere on one of those hundreds of cards you didn't fill in a little square correctly (went out of the lines, wasn't dark enough) AND! Heaven forbid, if your cards somehow were out of order? (Someone dropped their stack of cards once. That was a major tragedy!)



The real brain-hurty part? Is that I just realized what a geek I was back in HS! I passed that class with an 'A+' and was actually a bit sad that I wasn't able to take more classes like that.

[LauraW]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.
[When I was a child, my mom had this type of washer. The "rollers" were called the wringer, because they wrung the water out of the clothes. This is the origin of the expression "put me through the wringer". The word is frequently written as ringer-which makes no sense. Sort of like the phrase "give her free rein". It refers to riding a horse- not reign/quote]

[Reika]

Tonight I had a caller that is the same age as my mom (58) tell me she didn't know that you could void a check.

[PastryGoddess]

Tonight I had a caller that is the same age as my mom (58) tell me she didn't know that you could void a check.

 

[Reika]

Tonight I had a caller that is the same age as my mom (58) tell me she didn't know that you could void a check.

 

Funnily enough, that was me when she was saying that.

[Jocelyn]

Friend usually explains references to me if I didn't see whatever it was she's talking about, like Dark Shadows.

I had a couple of friends, a mother and a daughter, and I was exactly halfway in age between them.
One day I was with Daughter, and all I caught of a radio announcement was that a person had committed suicide, so I asked her 'Who died?'
She replied, 'Kurt Cobain' and went on to explain to me who Kurt Cobain was.
I looked at her and said, 'I'm not THAT old that I don't know who Kurt Cobain is! I just didn't hear the name!'
Being the child of older parents, she was used to automatically giving pop culture explanations...

[Shalamar]

I once started to explain who Justin Timberlake is to my 75-year-old British mother.  She haughtily interrupted me with "I KNOW who he is!  He's that singer who was dating Cameron Diaz."   I shut up.   

[Adelaide]

My brother is 19 and in the military. He's always been a bit of a loose canon, and my parents had gotten into several fights with him about underage drinking, staying out past curfew, etc. when he was in high school. Me? Nothing. I was the good kid. Now, he comes home and they don't even attempt to tell him what to do and he comes and goes as he pleases. Yet they think that they can tell the responsible 22-year-old with her own car and income to come home at a certain hour, or to not drink, or to do or not do this and that. Really? 

[Kiara]

^ I think your phone may have a crush on Jeremy Renner.

I think you and I remember Siri very differently.

Getting to it late, but I love you both for this.     (And the phone clearly has good taste.)

[Lady Snowdon]

I was originally going to put this in the SS thread, but I think the person featured herein isn't really SS, just ... totally clueless.  My brain really did hurt after witnessing this.

I was driving down a very busy road yesterday.  There are a series of four stoplights in a row.  One light leads to a mall and a Target (so very busy on a Saturday afternoon) and the other three lead to various highways (also very busy on a Saturday afternoon).  Traffic is always backed up in this area on the weekends, and cars frequently are still in the intersection after the light has changed.  Usually they just continue driving through and all is fine.  Except my not quite SS.  Who stayed in the intersection after the light changed.

They tried to drive forward after a bit, but were blocked by cars who had a green light and were going straight.  So they reversed a bit to be out of the way of those cars, only to find themselves in the way of cars who had a green light and were going straight in the other direction.  The car then tried to drive forward a bit (why, I don't know, since it hadn't worked before) and found itself in the way of both directions of cars who were trying to turn left.  The car finally reversed enough to be out of the way.  By this point, it was a green light for us again, and we were waiting for that car to move, since it now had a green light.  It didn't though.  Someone finally honked at it after a bit, and we found out that whoever was driving that car had actually put it in park, apparently not expecting anyone behind him to have to go either.     

It didn't stop there though!  I ended up about two cars behind this particular car, which I was watching closely to see what else would happen.  That car almost didn't brake in time for a line of cars stopped at the next light, and had to be honked at again to continue moving when the green light came!  Thankfully, it got over into a left turn lane and I was able to keep going, so I didn't have to deal with it anymore. 

I still, a day later, wonder what on earth was going on, and who was driving, that they would be so idiotic! 

[Luci]

It's called "gridlock" and happens often. No one ever comes out a winner, makes a right decision, or stays calm. I understand the utter confussion and near panic of that poor driver, and your annoyance with him.