STOP DOING THAT!!! </b>


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I have an older cow-orker who I guess set his habits using ancient computers (he's been in the field more than 30 years, I believe). Even though this spring he got a new Core i5-4570, he still does copy-paste in Windows by hitting ^C 4 or 5 times.

    I could scream, the number of times I see cow-orkers or customers using Explorer in inefficient ways. I told one (of the former) today that I wanted to slap her hand off the mouse, after telling her to stop what she was doing and showing her an easier way.



  • Users who move the mouse at your instructions...slowly...but won't allow you to remote in or take over the mouse yourself to fix the problem.

    Yeah, that feeling...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Worse: users who remote in and let you take control, and then KEEP GRABBING THE MOUSE WHILE YOU'RE TRYING TO DO STUFF.



  • Obligatory non-xkcd webcomic you've all seen before

    http://i.imgur.com/6ETb4.gif



  • Guilty, here...
    I usually hold down ctrl/command and press C about 3-5 times. Guess it's part OCD, and part experience of it not being copied the first time. Imho, it still happens way too often...


  • 🚽 Regular



  • @Zecc said:


    I wonder if this will finally be fixed when the new TDWTF site goes live…



  • Just not using tab and enter on logon screens is something I have to stand and watch so often and the minutes add up.

    Normally they're frustrated with something the computer has done so it's not a good time to try to teach them some other unrelated, time-saving trick but also, normally, I'm in a rush and they've just typed in the password and I see their right hand reach for the mouse and then hunt for the pointer on the screen and I scream a little inside.



  • I was recently walking a customer over the phone on running Teamviewer so I could check out what her computer was doing (it had been six months and four malware programs since I last dealt with her). I had her type the name teamview in the Start screen and then asked her to press enter. She asked me about the little stick with a circle (magnifying glass), and if she should press it. I said no, just press enter.

    Next thing you know she's asking me what to do after describing the 8.1 search page. I was ready to scream.

    Later, once I'm in, she keeps on taking over the mouse and tries to run the search for Teamviewer again, trying to show me what she did before because I obviously couldn't figure it out. It was one of the few instances where I actually told a client directly to calm down, stop talking, and do exactly as I say.

    @LurkerAbove said:

    Just not using tab and enter on logon screens is something I have to stand and watch so often and the minutes add up.

    They have no ability to discover usability shortcuts. The funny thing is that the people who do that tend to also be the ones that use the computer all the time. They just happen to use a specific program or set of programs -- in exactly the way they were taught how to use it/them and god help you if you tell them a different way because it took them long enough to get to the minimum level they've mastered.



  • Yeah that all sounds familiar.

    I'm being irrational/emotional for wishing for anything better and, ideally, would not. Some of these people I work with are doctors and other highly-trained professionals in their field. They've learnt a different set of skills, an arguably more important set of skills, and it's probably good that they're not cluttering up their minds with IT tips and tricks (even if it would save them some time).

    To rant at the innocent perpetrators would be unfair (as well as potentially career/relationship-ending) so do it here - anonymously - safely. This thread is doing a valuable public service. Kudos to @FrostCat.

    Next on my list: closing windows when they didn't mean to (e.g. just to get at another window behind it and they're going to need this one back again in a matter of seconds).



  • Seeing a designer reopen the same file six times because they can't be bothered with minimizing the CAD program window while checking something on the internet makes me hurt inside. Bonus points for doing it on a workstation that they insisted they had to have but never even cause to sweat.

    Finding a bunch of personal pictures (some very personal) on the receptionist's desktop in the downloads folder because apparently things which are downloaded to a computer are all temporary or something.



  • @scrib said:

    Finding a bunch of personal pictures (some very personal) on the receptionist's desktop

    That's a perk of the job.



  • That depends on the receptionist (and her friends). Just saying: what has been seen cannot be unseen.



  • @Evo said:

    Guilty, here...I usually hold down ctrl/command and press C about 3-5 times. Guess it's part OCD, and part experience of it not being copied the first time. Imho, it still happens way too often...

    I don't know how, but my work PC likes to paste the thing I copied 2 - 3 times ago and not the most recent copy. I don't know how that could even be a thing. So naturally I tend to spam Ctrl+C a few times to make sure.



  • That's their tactic to manipulate you

    Also, the best way to generate a random string is to ask anyone to quit vim.





  • Our HR department maintains an xls-file with all employees (~500, we're a small university). One of the columns is "age". Once every year, they update that column by taking the birth date (another column) and the current year and then manually calculating the new age with pen and paper! This has been going on for ages and survived numerous process streamlining initiatives.

    Hopefully, only one person does this and not everyone using that file, but I would not be surprised if the latter were the case.



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg At our department, there is a huge table which contains all courses as rows, all study paths are the columns. The table is used as a master table to determine if a specific course can be taken in a certain study path (e.g. Intrroduction into politics might be part of political sciences, but not a part of sociology). There are around ~300 courses and ~50 study paths. Our secretary does not know excel, so she used word in landscape mode - every column is ~4 chars wide, but a lot of columns need comments, so the rows a very tall...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Oh sweet. Do I get a badge for that?

    Actually I constantly forget that that box now refers to this forum not the CS one.



  • Unlikely since it's really not the first time this has been the case. At least this time you didn't use the audio tag... or something to splice Monty Burns to the site background... Alex was not amused.


  • FoxDev

    @Arantor said:

    Alex was not amused.

    that's putting it mildly....



  • @accalia said:

    that's putting it mildly....

    Yes, I know. Dramatic understatement and all that. What can I say... BRITISH!


  • FoxDev

    @Arantor said:

    BRITISH!

    have a like, and some tea. ;-)



  • @accalia said:

    have a like, and some tea. ;-)

    I just finished the previous cup of Assam but I think I might just have another...


  • BINNED

    @LurkerAbove said:

    doctors

    Doctors are the wurst


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor said:

    Alex was not amused.

    But it was brilliant.



  • It was brillant, I'll concede that. But brilliant? Here? Not so much.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Well I thought the Burns thing was. Mainly because I hadn't even conceived that it was possible to mess with the front page outside of the simpler things like audio tags.
    Easily pleased, I guess.



  • This is why XSS is the danger it is... if you can get any arbitrary tag inserted, you can insert JavaScript which can do anything you could do.

    Messing with site CSS by way of JS is tame.



  • @Luhmann said:

    Doctors are the wurst

    That's because of the roll they're in.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor said:

    Messing with site CSS by way of JS is tame.

    Perhaps but it's way out of my area of expertise, which is why I'm always surprised/impressed with stuff like that.



  • It's my field - and I never fail to be amazed at how people who should know better fail to realise it. I keep having to beat people over the head with this stuff at times.

    XSS and SQL injections continue to be things that really should not be things.



  • That "not using scroll wheel" I thought was going to be the opposite before I zoomed in and could read it. User using scroll wheel to scroll to about line 7000 in a 10000 line file. Gah! This is where dragging the scroll bar is ideal. Better: use a keyboard shortcut like ":7000" in vim to jump to the approximate line, or use the editor search to find the text you are manually looking for.



  • Oh and we have too many places where there is a hidden form with a bunch of input fields outside it, with a button with onclick bound to copy values into the hidden form and submit it. Or do a ajax request. No chance of pressing enter to submit! :/


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Arantor said:

    Unlikely since it's really not the first time this has been the case. At least this time you didn't use the audio tag... or something to splice Monty Burns to the site background... Alex was not amused

    How did I miss this? When did this happen?



  • You're not alone.





  • I press Ctrl+C multiple times because sometimes I actually don't press it hard enough and it actually does not copy to my clipboard. It's an issue with how fast I press Ctrl+C. I've since gotten into the habit of using Ctrl+X,Ctrl+V to give a visual indicator but that doesn't work in all cases.



  • @Arantor said:

    This is why XSS is the danger it is... if you can get any arbitrary tag inserted, you can insert JavaScript which can do anything you could do.

    Given that you can fit it into Discourse topic length limit. That was the most challenging part.



  • *nods* But the point stands: you still have to be able to get arbitrary unsanitised crap in...



  • I'm not much of a JavaScript expert, but couldn't one easily add a "script" DOM node and set the src to some external webpage? I'd guess it's feasible in as many characters. If simply "<script src=... &gt;" isn't possible, of course, otherwise it'd be trivial. Or am I missing something here?



  • Wasn't the Monty Burns incident before the move to Discourse?

    If so, perhaps it was a contributory factor.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    They may have been some before, but this one was post-Discourse.



  • I thought I remember seeing it BD, so probably it was something else.



  • @LurkerAbove said:

    Wasn't the Monty Burns incident before the move to Discourse?

    If so, perhaps it was a contributory factor.

    Nope, it was here.

    @Evo said:

    I'm not much of a JavaScript expert, but couldn't one easily add a "script" DOM node and set the src to some external webpage? I'd guess it's feasible in as many characters. If simply "<script src=... &gt;" isn't possible, of course, otherwise it'd be trivial. Or am I missing something here?

    You'd need an external website, and I couldn't be arsed to set the script up somewhere else. Besides, a bit of golfing never hurt anybody.

    For posterity:

    http://i.imgur.com/YFnNOm9.jpg



  • @scrib said:

    Finding a bunch of personal pictures (some very personal) on the receptionist's desktop in the downloads folder because apparently things which are downloaded to a computer are all temporary or something.

    The usability of browsers is horrible in this regard. Normally you click on links to read them, right? However any link that leads to something the browser does not understand natively automatically downloads. Now the user starts to wonder what the hell is it doing. They just wanted to read the document.

    And then they discover the button at the bottom of the screen with the document icon and name. So inviting. So they click it and the document comes up (in separate window; never mind, they know how to close windows).

    And their work is done here and the button disappeared after they clicked it anyway. So are they aware the file is still available on their computer? No. After all, normal pages are not either. So when they realize they missed something there and want to see the document again, what do they do? Well, they click the link again.

    That's how people end up with prices.xls, prices (1).xls, prices (2).xls, prices (3).xls, prices (4).xls and so on in their Dowloads folder.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    To be fair, if the browser still has a copy (by content hash, of course), why is it downloading the file again?



  • I remember one particular user who used to click a folder in explorer, then move her hand to the keyboard to press Return to open the folder. Then back to the mouse to select the next folder. It did not even occur to her to use her left hand to speed up this very slow process...



  • @dkf said:

    To be fair, if the browser still has a copy (by content hash, of course), why is it downloading the file again?

    Well, you won't get checksum in HTTP headers, so it would have to do with URL and timestamp like with any other web resource. Well, it does for any other web resource, it should do for downloads too. But I would still prefer the download to be to temporary location unless explicitly requested as download (Save Link? As?).



  • You can change the default downloads directory, if defaulting to ~/Downloads or %userprofile%\Downloads is something that annoys you.
    The people with 100 Excel sheets of the same name in a single folder probably wouldn't care enough that defaulting to a temporary directory would be of any use to them.


Log in to reply