You Think You've Got It Bad?
Try providing IT support by phone to my mother.
* Buttons, menus, icons, tabs, windows, title-bars, etc. etc are all interchangeably referred to as "The Thing"
* The acts of clicking-on, clicking-off, double-clicking, opening, closing, scrolling, maximising, minimising, launching, quitting, booting, rebooting, selecting, deselecting and so forth are equally comprehensively covered by "Go Into" or "Go Out Of"
* All software is referred to by either the picture on its icon, the manufacturer, or one of its functions, but never by the actual name of the application. The web browser may be identified by any content on any page it is capable of displaying.
* Dialogues are dismissed by clicking on either 'OK' or 'Cancel' at random and always without actually reading the alert message.
* Other domestic appliances are often thrown unexpectedly into the mix, for no sane reason.
So, each troubleshooting session starts with a ten to twenty minute Q&A session, just to identify what particular problem lies beneath:
"When I went into Apple, the pictures thing after the thing that comes up said something, so I went out of it and now Libre won't let me turn the spin drier off —and if I go into Poldark, there's a thing that keeps saying something and then when I go out of it it won't let me go into the other thing any more! "
Biting the hand that feeds IT
