Who said using computers was easy?
I’ve been a computer geek (umm . . . not really, but close . . . think of me as Leo LaPorte without the bazillion viewers) for a long time. I remember the days when people thought that the little tray that popped out of the front of your computer at the press of a button was a coffee cup holder. No, I’m not kidding.
I go back even further than that, actually; in the old days of MS-DOS the most common system error was one that to get you to acknowledge a problem read “Press Any Key To Continue“. I’ve had people tell me that they couldn’t find the “Any” key on their keyboards. Again, I’m not kidding.
Oh and by the way: Microsoft eventually addressed that problem by changing the message to read “Press a key to Continue”. The result? People have pointed out to me, thinking they were tech-savvy, that they could push keys other than “A”, and things worked just fine.
So I shouldn’t be surprised to see this video? Right?:
It’s the aforementioned Leo LaPorte taking a call on one of his netcast programs this week, as a woman tells him that she can’t connect to her wireless network. And . . . she had no wireless network, because she’s been . . . borrowing someone else’s bandwidth for over a year.
Time for the business moral: please lock down your wireless networks. I’m as egalitarian as anyone and love the idea of sharing, but you’re creating a real security issue if you don’t take care of this properly. You may have a reason to leave your wireless network open, by the way, but the reason can’t be “I just didn’t bother to lock it”. If you need help, The Computer Answer Guy can take care of you. You don’t even need to be local to us. In fact, we’ll talk you through this one for free.
Enjoy Leo. And tell him I said “Hi”.
Repost This Article
[...] Last week, this piece at TechCrunch asked “why AOL is still charging people for e-mail”. It made me think of a piece I write here a couple of years back; a woman couldn’t understand where her “Free Wi-Fi” had gone. [...]
[...] so quickly you can’t make a selection, don’t you think? It’s almost a “press any key to continue” [...]
[...] Believe it or not, that wasn’t an Apple rant. Yes, I have issues with the way Apple does business, but Macintosh computers, while not for me, are really pretty cool. It was about the fact that computers are too hard. I’ve described similar problems to this one a couple of times; Older People Can Have Quite a Difficult Time Using SmartPhones, and my favorite: Where’s The Any Key? [...]
[...] Besides receiving Jelly Bean on my Galaxy Nexus, this weekend I also received a notice that this story about the Nexus 7 had received its first traffic for the search phrase “nexus 7 can’t play music without wifi?“. We rank for over 8,000 search phrases on Google, because we practice the long-tail marketing techniques that we preach. But this one caught my eye because A) it’s wrong and B) I’m an old-school computer guy and it made me think once again of a truth: computers are too hard. My favorite example of that is this story about the woman who couldn’t find “her Linksys Wireless Internet Connection&#…. [...]
[...] This story about the woman who couldn’t find her “any key” always makes me think about that, and this morning my mind really started to roll when I saw this story in The New York Times, talking about how the iPhone 5 has started people down a road to having—and paying for—more and more cloud storage. [...]
[...] Self-promotion notwithstanding, It really is easy to get in trouble when if you aren’t paying attention to a lot of details that more and more businesses are overlooking as computers feel more and more commoditized. Using a service like Hubspot seems like a great idea, but isn’t, for most businesses. MegaUpload did something cool, but there were problems. Miss details, and you might as well go searching for your Any Key. [...]
[...] day will come where computers are simple enough to use and understand that questions like “Where’s My ‘Any’ Key?” will stop sounding so ridiculous (because they won’t be necessary), the truth is [...]
[...] it my challenge to bridge those worlds for decades now, which is why I find questions like “Where’s My Any Key?” so funny . . . and so [...]
[...] Your Computer Has No ‘ANY’ Key, and no coffee cup holder [...]
[...] down memory lane. Pinpointing how fast your downloads are running really can be hard, there are no “Any” Keys, and in general, computers are too hard to [...]
[...] side effect of this business change is that people are asking questions that they didn’t know how to ask before the ground started shifting under their feet.And while the questions are intelligent, the [...]
[...] So this isn’t about young versus old. It’s not about older people losing skills—or not having them. It sure isn’t about wardrobe choices. It’s about education. And education is broken. And education is broken because those of use who ‘know better’ simply assume that everyone else knows where the ‘Any Key’ is. [...]