Golden Deer Pub Community Forums

Get well soon Reynard, we will defeat those viruses è_é
My throat doesn't hurt anymore but I'm still feverish, stupid nasal congestion...

^OH yeah. I was the secretary and bookkeeper for a small computer company for a spell a few years back (they built and serviced websites, computers, networks). The boss thought the Mozilla Firefox landing page was a GAME I was playing... and had a keylogger installed on my machine to make sure I wasn't goofing around on the job. He didn't know what a web browser was.

I did not stay there long.

Yeah. At the time, the download page had two or three colorful monsters peeking from behind some text box. So he thought it was some kind of game. He honestly thought IE was The Internet and any other way to use the web simply didn't exist. This was less than 3 years ago.

What a moron.

=I

I am glad to have the boss I do.

Here's a list of interesting phone calls that I have had and interesting experiences:

Frequent: 70% of these people use a search engine to type in a url and have never heard of address bar. I shit you not.

Frequent: we dread phone calls from people who claim to be savvy because would you believe they do not know what a nameserver is or there's a difference between one and an A Record. I get that normal people wouldn't know but when you claim to be a webdeveloper.... and the worst part is (and the reason we dread them) they are so convinced they know what they are talking about they will argue with us. ... *sigh*

Frequent: "browser" is considered tech jargon. >_> the whole conversation you guys are discussing right now is all too common, sadly, and is NOT limited to the senior community.

Average: People do not realize the difference between a domain name and a host package or understand how a domain can point to whatever you set it to. Which is sad since THIS IS THE PRODUCT THEY HAVE PURCHASED!!!! >_<

I don't feel that strongly about it. I certainly didn't understand everything when I first started out and not many people have need nor desire to be tech savvy - they just want to be able to go on google and search for something as simple as directions.

However, when it's a domain registrar that I am working for and the products are web products, I do think that the user should have at least a basic knowledge about the products they are purchasing: do a little homework.

I do feel that there is another category in my phone calls that I should mention:
the small businesses that hired a tech guy to create an online presence for them, then left leaving them absolutely clueless. I have had more than my fair share of these sad calls. Or this one senior couple who called me. The woman made these GORGEOUS quilts - her nephew did the online thing but he had been shipped out and didn't instruct them on simple things like their own due date. Website goes down, the accounts aren't even in their names, they are absolutely clueless, and they both have not opened a computer since the dinosaur era. These are sad situations, too.

sometimes i get the feeling i have to be some sort of fucking celebrity before people decide to notice me

I understand the sentiment, Trance.