when will ppl realise that i’m not a computer expert i just know how to click on things until i find the problem
No, but seriously, this is one of the greatest skills Millennials have. I have gotten heaps of praise from my boss for being able to go to my desk, google for five minutes, and come back to fix her computer issue. A lot of it is that the vocabulary is something natural to us. We grew up with these systems from when we were kids–checking that the monitor’s plugged in, that we have the right drivers, that there’s a connection is something we learned young, an internal checklist that’s as natural as the one we use when starting a car–moreso, even. Lots of us have laptops, but no car.
Troubleshooting basic software and hardware issues is something that you can put on your resume. So is rapid skill acquisition, for clicking around in a new program until you know how to use it. These are what we’re good at, Millennials. Don’t feel ashamed of it.
@howtogrowthefuckup, @resumespeak, do either of you have comments to add?
Understanding how to correctly google something and get the result you are looking for is a skill we don’t recognize in ourselves until we see someone else floundering.
My mom and I hear a song on the radio with a female singer and the chorus is something about lilies growing on a hill. The radio doesn’t identify the artist.
When we go home, my mom will google, “Who sings the lilies song?” and if the song is popular enough the answer will be somewhere on the first page, maybe.
I will google “lilies growing hill lyrics” and the first link will be a site like AZlyrics listing the artist, title of the song, and all the words.
“Rapid skill acquisition” is the perfect description for what happened at my last job – I was brand new but within two months I’d figured out our homework/grading/online program almost as well as the tech department, and learned things about it that returning teachers had no clue of. I’m not a computer genius. I just spent time exploring until I figured it out.
Also: lots of us have laptops, but no car speaks to me so much. I have no effing clue how to troubleshoot a car, which I think was a common skill for older generations (esp when cars were more mechanical).
@typesetjez THIS IS WEIRD.
This is absolutely a skill that Millennials and Homelanders (is that the term we’re using for GenZ now?) have. Everyone in the Homeland Generation is a digital native and while most Millennials are not exactly, we did grow up in a time when technology became an increasingly more important part of our lives. We grew up alongside the internet and therefore understand it a little better because there was never the issue of things being different beforehand.
The Google thing especially is a skill that will carryover into the workplace and potentially bring you praise from your supervisors and certainly help you out at home, like in the lyrics example above. I work as a reference librarian in a public library, which means all of my coworkers are information experts and spend a huge chunk of their day looking things up. And despite only working their a year, I can find the answers to “simple” questions almost instantly, whereas it may take my coworker a few minutes or more to find the same thing. This isn’t to say she isn’t smart or good at research—she’s probably the most skilled person I know in that area—it’s just that I understand modern keyword search terms better. We Millennials (and Homelanders) just understand the best way to formulate a search, because it’s something we do all the time and have always done.
It’s the same thing for computer troubleshooting. It’s not that we’re all computer experts, it’s just that we have knowledge of what “usually” works and know the different little things to check. This is something we grew up with, figured out along the way, or, depending on how old we are, maybe even learned in school. Personally, I was lucky enough to be in the weird middle ground when basic computer skills were actually taught in schools, right in the sweet spot where computers were just popular enough that we might have one at home and just before they became normal and common knowledge. That wasn’t an option for our parents or anyone older, because the technology just wasn’t around for them to be familiar with early on.
Before I continue writing a novel here, the point is this: being familiar with technology, being able to do quick google searches, and being able to quickly diagnose a computer issue is a SKILL. It’s an ASSET to your job and your company and don’t let anyone tell you any differently. But, at the same time, remember that everyone older than you did not have these same advantages and that you need to be patient with them when they don’t get a google result immediately or can’t connect to wifi.
To get a little money on the side I’ve helped senior citizens (or even just middle aged people from time to time) learn how to use the new devices that their children and grandchildren would buy them, like tablets, smartphones or even just cell phones. (They always offered to pay - it started with my own grandparents and they recommended me to others) I never minded because hey, easy work for decent pay and it’s better than working retail because at least these people actually appreciate you.
Anyway, they almost always ask if I had gone to school to learn how to do all of this stuff. And are always BLOWN AWAY when they learn that I didn’t. Because to them I’m some sort of computer hacker genius for knowing how to do, what is to me, basic day to day functions.
Like one time we were listening to the radio and a song came on that the person didn’t know but liked. So I just took out my phone and shazam’d it. The way they reacted I’m pretty sure they thought I was magic or something. Or when my grandmother wanted to give me a recipe to give to my mom. She had it written down from a while ago, and I snapped a picture before she even had a chance to ask me to write it down so that she and my mom would both have a copy. When I explained what I had done and shown the picture to her she just couldn’t believe that I had already gotten myself a copy so quickly and easily.
Or when my grandmother wanted to decorate her new apartment with some nice landscape pictures, she was talking about planning a whole outing to go to a store and how she was so tired all the time and she didn’t have the energy - and then I showed her all the ones I could find on google images that you could just print off. When we were going through them she was like “Did you take all of these?” I explained I found them online. “Oh you must have had to search for a while!” And when I showed her how easy it was to find a bunch of images she was just floored.
Or that time I introduced some of my middle aged/senior coworkers to youtube…. that was a blast x)
Like these are just things I do all the time without thinking about it. And yet after doing these little boring everyday things, the person was amazed and went on about it for the rest of the day, even talking to other people about it, showing off this new amazing thing that technology could do.
It’s amazing how much of our day to day lives involve expertise that not even that long ago would have required post secondary education. And now we just see it as completely useless skills.
And the biggest thing? We ADAPT. Technology updates and changes CONSTANTLY. Every few months there is a change to how SOME part of our daily technological lives and we quickly adapt to it and learn how to use the new thing no problem. When we get a new phone, computer or tablet, we only have to play with it for little while and then we know how to use it no problem. When I tell the older people I teach this shit to that THAT’S how I learned how to use all of this tech? That I just ‘figured it out’ on my own? They just can’t wrap their heads around it.
The older generation thinks that we have lost the ability to learn, that we don’t know how to “read a book” any more. But that’s so fucking wrong! We are learning CONSTANTLY. We are in an environment where we aren’t being taught, but rather have to constantly figure out how to work things out for ourselves, because those that would teach us are too busy being ageist pricks who don’t even actually know the information that we need to be taught!
goblinvogue
