My dad has a bunch of old friends that elected me to be their tech support, which makes me have to explain the basics of the basics most of the time. Trust me when I say that a lot of people in these forums have no idea how tech illiterate some people are.
I had a situation years ago where an old guy asked me to reset his android phone. I - unfortunately - complied because I made the mistake of trusting that he knew what he was asking, so I just made sure everything was backed up on his cloud. Result: he lost access to his photos, numbers, etc because he had no idea that he had a gmail account associated to his phone. Fortunately, his daughter knew and remembered the password so he recovered them.
Another situation I had with another guy was having to explain why stremio wouldn’t work on his iphone while his friends (with androids) could use it. Without going into details, he didn’t know what an “OS” was.
Let me repeat it because it’s relevant to this post: the guy didn’t know what an Operative System was. And he’s hardly alone.
In these kind of tech forums, I found that a lot of users don’t truly grasp how tech illiterates can be (and sometimes confuse that for lack of intelligence, but that’s another discussion). It’s hard for them to understand how most people don’t care what OS they are running. A lot of people will continue to use Windows 10 and not care they don’t receive more updates, as far as they are concerned, it still works and lets them do their stuff.
How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!
My dad has a bunch of old friends that elected me to be their tech support, which makes me have to explain the basics of the basics most of the time. Trust me when I say that a lot of people in these forums have no idea how tech illiterate some people are.
I had a situation years ago where an old guy asked me to reset his android phone. I - unfortunately - complied because I made the mistake of trusting that he knew what he was asking, so I just made sure everything was backed up on his cloud. Result: he lost access to his photos, numbers, etc because he had no idea that he had a gmail account associated to his phone. Fortunately, his daughter knew and remembered the password so he recovered them.
Another situation I had with another guy was having to explain why stremio wouldn’t work on his iphone while his friends (with androids) could use it. Without going into details, he didn’t know what an “OS” was.
Let me repeat it because it’s relevant to this post: the guy didn’t know what an Operative System was. And he’s hardly alone.
In these kind of tech forums, I found that a lot of users don’t truly grasp how tech illiterates can be (and sometimes confuse that for lack of intelligence, but that’s another discussion). It’s hard for them to understand how most people don’t care what OS they are running. A lot of people will continue to use Windows 10 and not care they don’t receive more updates, as far as they are concerned, it still works and lets them do their stuff.
And of course there is an XKCD about this: Average Familiarity (2501)
Title text:
Operative System?
It’s the thing that lets you do the things in your electronic thing
Operating System
Ahh my bad, bad translation
No worries I wasn’t trying to give you shit, I figured it was a translation error
Maybe go and quickly google what OS actually stands for, especially since we were just making fun of those who don’t know.
We were? I wasn’t
bad translation btw. In portuguese we say “sistema operativo”, thus the error
That’s good then.