The IT tale of an anti-tech user

[Renew Deal]

Working in an academic environment has been a big change for me after 20 years in IT in industry. And being the lead techie for our campus ERP system means that I get the calls that no one else knows what to do with.

One day the registrar turned over to me a call from one of our sociology professors, "Dr. X," who had a reputation of being very anti-technology. It was a well-known fact that his email box had been full for years, since he refused to ever get on a computer.

Dr. X's way of dealing with the campus' shifts to technology were to make departments such as HR do whatever he needed or send his assistant to deal with it. Other staff members on campus would usually just do what he asked out of sheer exasperation. The IT staff had tried on occasion to help him learn even a few basic skills or to interest him in technology, all to no avail.

Even though I was already aware of all of this, my first conversation with him still amazed me. It went something like this:
<snip>

Read the conversation here with a funny Nazi reference: http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/it-tale-anti-tech-user-169

[HopeHoops]

1. Been there, done that.

Some of the self-proclaimed "smart people" are really some of the dumbest.

[woodsprite]

2. My dad always said he figured Phd meant 'push here dummy'

Dad had an undergrad degree in Fire Protection Engineering.

Once I had to go to a classroom to help a faculty member with a multimedia cart that wasn't working. The faculty member made a big deal of introducing me as I went about checking cables, etc. Finally, I turned the machine on and it worked. He asked me, in front of his class, how I fixed it. I couldn't figure a way out of it. I had to tell him. I plugged it in to the electrical outlet.

[HopeHoops]

4. I like Bull Shit, More Shit, and Piled High and Deep as meanings for the degrees.

Yeah, the "is it plugged in?" question sounds really stupid, but it is amazing how often it solves the problem. About 30 years ago, one of the elders in the programming tank told me about a tech support call he took some time before that. The caller had a "dead" CRT terminal. He asked if it was plugged in and the guy immediately said, "of course". Clearly he wouldn't have had time to check.

So, the elder explained to the caller that the plugs are polarized and sometimes the polarity gets reversed if it is plugged in the wrong way. So, he asked the caller to crawl under the desk, unplug it, and turn the plug around before plugging it back in. He heard the handset being set down and about 30 seconds later came the tell-tale "BEEP" of a CRT terminal being turned on. "Yep, that fixed it," the caller said as he got back on the phone.

The terminal in question had a 3-pronged plug.

[david13]

3. It's really just pathetic. And the idiot teaches at the college level?

Sad indeed.
Assign a little kid to show him how to use the computer.
dc

[caraher]

5. Wouldn't work

He's making a point of not knowing. You can't teach someone anything they refuse to learn on principle, unless you remove the objection by persuasion or coercion.

[Recursion]

6. Dr. X's historical points are dubious

Artillery ranging was still analog in WWII; until the development of the Kalman filter digital tracking would have been hopelessly inaccurate. For that matter, the ancient Greeks had analog computers, using differential gears rather than the RLC circuits artillery rangers used. The IBM "computers" used by the Nazi's were for tracking their genocide, but they were not programmable computers in the modern sense. I think Zuse's Z machines were finally proven to be Turing-complete (ironic, since Turing hadn't developed the theory yet).