Can't learn, won't learn
I had a phone call at lunchtime yesterday from one of the senior consultants. I won't name her, because it's not relevant to this tale, but she's in her late forties, has worked for the company for far longer than me, is an expert on organic farming and has to some extent been instrumental in forming Welsh Assembly Government policy in that area.
A few months ago, I spent an hour with her explaining how to download pictures from her digital camera to her laptop computer. She wanted to learn what is, for pretty much anyone reading this, almost second nature. But she couldn't get her head around the most basic ideas of a hierarchical file system, let alone tasks like copying, pasting and renaming files. In the end, she wrote all the various actions necessary down in a little notepad, to the tiniest detail, so that she could download the pictures without me there to hold her hand.
Yesterday she phoned me because something wasn't working. She had her pad with her and was going through the motions, but Windows XP being the beast it was, it didn't want to play today. Finally, after about half an hour on the phone, I managed to work out what the problem was and she got her pictures.
Now we all have computing problems from time to time. I don't want to poke fun at this particular woman, but the thing that struck me was that even after several months she was still using her notes, still following the script. She hadn't learned how to do anything new. It was almost as if she was so afraid of her computer that she didn't want to have anything more to do with it than absolutely necessary.
My mother's the same. She loves her digital camera, but will not learn how to download the pictures. She's constantly asking us to email people, or look things up on the internet, but she won't learn how to do it for herself. I don't know why, and she won't explain it. I can offer to teach her, but she just refuses to learn.
I'm not entirely faultless here either. For years I refused to get a mobile phone on the grounds that I really didn't want people to be able to get in touch with me wherever I was. I finally bought a pre-pay one for The Horse Doctor just after we moved down to Wales. We still had a rather unreliable car back then and she sometimes had to take it to evening meetings, so being able to phone the AA* when something went wrong was useful. We've still got it, and I still haven't learned how to program numbers into it, or to send text messages.
Partly this is because we get no signal here at the house, or across the road at the office, so there are very few occasions when I have the chance to use a mobile phone. But there's still that luddite raging against technology feeling lurking in the background. Last summer I got a spangly new Motorola V3 (on a really good deal that makes it virtually free, which is just as well since I never have a chance to use it), because we realised that we most often needed to get in touch with each other when we were both away from the house. I've worked out how to put numbers into the phone book, and I used it on the great trip to the north coast to get internet access, but I still don't know how to send text messages. Not being a natural thumb-typist, I've never seen the point of texting - too old, I guess.
So I don't bother to learn because I don't need to learn. Nor does the perceived benefit of learning make the effort seem worthwhile. I've never really been into computer games either, for much the same reason. Not since Elite on the original BBC Micro has a game engaged me enough to learn the rules, the keys needed to make the thing work. This is an advanced manifestation of my innate laziness - just enough to get the job done properly**. Anything else is wasted effort.
But my senior colleague needs to learn to download her pictures. She needs to learn how to use her computer properly. And yet for some reason I can't quite understand, she can't learn.
Or is it that she won't? In which case how is it she gets to be a senior consultant?
*Automobile Association! Honestly, you people...
** and if a job's not worth doing properly, it's not worth doing at all.
A few months ago, I spent an hour with her explaining how to download pictures from her digital camera to her laptop computer. She wanted to learn what is, for pretty much anyone reading this, almost second nature. But she couldn't get her head around the most basic ideas of a hierarchical file system, let alone tasks like copying, pasting and renaming files. In the end, she wrote all the various actions necessary down in a little notepad, to the tiniest detail, so that she could download the pictures without me there to hold her hand.
Yesterday she phoned me because something wasn't working. She had her pad with her and was going through the motions, but Windows XP being the beast it was, it didn't want to play today. Finally, after about half an hour on the phone, I managed to work out what the problem was and she got her pictures.
Now we all have computing problems from time to time. I don't want to poke fun at this particular woman, but the thing that struck me was that even after several months she was still using her notes, still following the script. She hadn't learned how to do anything new. It was almost as if she was so afraid of her computer that she didn't want to have anything more to do with it than absolutely necessary.
My mother's the same. She loves her digital camera, but will not learn how to download the pictures. She's constantly asking us to email people, or look things up on the internet, but she won't learn how to do it for herself. I don't know why, and she won't explain it. I can offer to teach her, but she just refuses to learn.
I'm not entirely faultless here either. For years I refused to get a mobile phone on the grounds that I really didn't want people to be able to get in touch with me wherever I was. I finally bought a pre-pay one for The Horse Doctor just after we moved down to Wales. We still had a rather unreliable car back then and she sometimes had to take it to evening meetings, so being able to phone the AA* when something went wrong was useful. We've still got it, and I still haven't learned how to program numbers into it, or to send text messages.
Partly this is because we get no signal here at the house, or across the road at the office, so there are very few occasions when I have the chance to use a mobile phone. But there's still that luddite raging against technology feeling lurking in the background. Last summer I got a spangly new Motorola V3 (on a really good deal that makes it virtually free, which is just as well since I never have a chance to use it), because we realised that we most often needed to get in touch with each other when we were both away from the house. I've worked out how to put numbers into the phone book, and I used it on the great trip to the north coast to get internet access, but I still don't know how to send text messages. Not being a natural thumb-typist, I've never seen the point of texting - too old, I guess.
So I don't bother to learn because I don't need to learn. Nor does the perceived benefit of learning make the effort seem worthwhile. I've never really been into computer games either, for much the same reason. Not since Elite on the original BBC Micro has a game engaged me enough to learn the rules, the keys needed to make the thing work. This is an advanced manifestation of my innate laziness - just enough to get the job done properly**. Anything else is wasted effort.
But my senior colleague needs to learn to download her pictures. She needs to learn how to use her computer properly. And yet for some reason I can't quite understand, she can't learn.
Or is it that she won't? In which case how is it she gets to be a senior consultant?
*Automobile Association! Honestly, you people...
** and if a job's not worth doing properly, it's not worth doing at all.
Comments
I know that I can learn almost any program or function if I apply myself. So my waffling with blogger code and such is just pure laziness to actually learn it.
I haven't learned how to upload pages from scratch yet, but I have learned how to update web pages.
This reminds me of too many people I know. Stuck back half a century, unwilling to get with the times, or unable. And I'd better not name any of them...
Me, being the contrary soul that I am, promptly threw away the notes and just had a play instead. Whereas everyone else learned how to follow those step-by-step notes, by trying things out and getting things wrong, I ended up figuring out why all those steps were important, rather than simply knowing what they were.
So while everyone else struggled to get their stuff working, invariably because they'd missed a step, didn't know which one and therefore didn't know what to do to correct it, I could happily go off and play minesweeper instead.
Of course, the bitter twist in the tale is that I ended up getting tarred with the 'expert' brush, which has lumbered me with being the go-to guy on a dodgy system ever snice. So the real lesson I learned that day was 'never let on how much you know'.
Maybe your consultant is already an expert in that concept.