Tag archive: random

iGeneration

Well I’ve been itching to jot down this small experience during work this past week. First off you have to understand that I work at a technology dependent production and retail copy center.

Many of our customers seem to be so impartial from the technology that has woven itself into the very fabric of our lives. Surprisingly most are either in college or have higher education slapped across their foreheads and don’t even know what a memory stick or USB/Thumb/Jump drive can do (as opposed to CDs especially). They refuse to use the “help” menu when trying to figure out how to do something in a widley used program such as MS Word – such as making something bold. They cling and demand for others to solve their problems for them. As if any slight mental challenge or thoughtful effort will ruin their life. To the point that they’ve called managers on us!

I even designed a minimal verbage/highly illustrated diagram (with a good amount of arrows and bright colors) on an 11 x 17 sheet of paper and placed it next to each of our computers in our “self-service computer area” to explain in a very basic way how to scan, burn CDs, etc. A young, well dressed man carrying books (college level), approaches one of the computers, takes a minute to look at the space, then comes straight to me and asks me how to burn a CD! I literally pointed to the diagrams and read what I wrote on there and he did what he needed to do and was done. I’ve seen Veterans and much older customers hop on a computer and manage just fine – scanning, and plugging in their memory sticks… I mean what a shame!

Getting even more technical – graphic designers who have “designed business cards all their lives” complain that flattening their graphics and saving them as .PDFs ruins their work and therefore they give me some huge 800 Mb file to print – with no bleed information. Now if you are not familiar with printing large documents from a network to a large digital machine – this means that you will sit for exactly half an hour not less waiting for the file to spool to the printer. Not very fun at all. Especially when it is a copy center and not a press we’re talking about here.

(I might actually go into more depth about making things print ready later on.)

Not this one kid though. Nope. The boy is barely in 8th grade and talking to me about HTML and his little chart in Excel. He didn’t ask for any help as he was looking up solutions to get his homework printed – and once he gave up on printing it on his own he dug through ink cartridges to match his printer at home. His favorite subject was history he had said – learning from the past to live the future.

I’ve never been too fond of kids but the genius in him glowed. It was quite refreshing from the usual. Why can’t everyone else do things for themselves? Seek knowledge and be above the slackers. If I have kids, I can only hope they have the same ambitions to exploit the world around them.