What is simplest task/process you have had to explain/show someone how to do at work ?
Posted by Additional-Nobody352@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 91 comments
Hi,
What is the easiest/most simple task you have ever had to explain or show how to do in the workplace ?
Foe this we are bot talking about any complex admin, legal or manufacturing process but just the simple things.
I`ll start with some examples from my own experiences.
1) About 10 years ago i was working in the office for a facilities management maintenance company. We had a new starter who was a lady in her mid 40`s and i had to show her how to send an email.
For context this was using outlook so not a strange internal system.
2) Same company i had to show a man in his mid 50`s how to use copy and paste.
TwoBadRobots@reddit
I had to show someone how to make a cup of coffee for one of their visitors.
Negative_Nancy213@reddit
I sent one young lad on a drinks run when he first started work and he came back to ask me ‘how do you make coffee white?’
Also had to teach more than one how to use a vacuum cleaner. Including one that used an upright by repeatedly picking it up and placing it over the first rather than just pushing it along
Additional-Nobody352@reddit (OP)
One lad who i work with who is in his mid 20`s tried to make me a cup of tea once and it was like 95% milk it was like that episode of father ted lol
Additional-Nobody352@reddit (OP)
I can sympathise. I`m nearly 40 and some of the tea making skills of some of my younger colleagues leave a lot to be desired.
No-Accident6125@reddit
How to reboot a laptop.
How to untick a check box labelled "active" in the system I administer so that when searching, it also looks for inactive records.
How to resize a window on their PC.
How to share their screen on Teams (last week after years of remote working).
Anxious-Molasses9456@reddit
Showing someone that you need to open a 7zip file with 7zip not notepad
Delduath@reddit
My work occasionally sends .zip files to accountants, and it always shocks me when I get an email back telling me that they don't know how to open it. It's not just the general knowledge gap, but the fact that they didn't think to Google it or even read the text in the email which explains it in terms a child could understand.
keerin@reddit
Yes. This. The majority of people simply do not read, or do not process, even in a superficial way, what they actually do read.
This is especially noticeable (and painful) for me because a large chunk of my job is creating sales pages and marketing emails, targeted at a warm or hot audience (people who have indicated or specifically stated their intent to buy what we sell), and then dealing with the responses/bookings. I see this almost every day.
keerin@reddit
I went from working in digital agencies to working in a salon environment. I love my co-workers but their fluency with specific apps does not relate in any way to any wider IT or even basic technology literacy. Things I take for granted are seen as magical knowledge.
Same with our customers. We recently had someone **accidentally** book a video call appointment. This involved clicking on a link in the text body of an email (not even a call-to action button), visiting calendly, choosing a slot (!) and confirming all their details.
LanguidVirago@reddit
I used to do phone based tech support in the 1980s, when many people were having their first computer experience at work. 486 was the dominant computer at the time, some 286s still.
Every single day I had to explain to at least one person how to turn them on, and that they had to put ink in their Proprinter.
60sstuff@reddit
Electronic card readers. Look I get it sometimes it doesn’t work and the places change etc. But some people will literally wave the card above. Others I have seen trying to insert a card at the top. Other times I have repeatedly pointed to where the card will need to be tapped and they will flat out just ignore you.
catsaregreat78@reddit
In an accounting department I had to show someone how to sum in Excel. They’d worked there for at least 10 years by that point. And yes, they used a calculator to work it out and typed the answer into Excel.
ObscureRyan@reddit
Had to show an apprentice how to use Sellotape.
Candid-Bike-9165@reddit
.....how
painful_butterflies@reddit
OK we have a winner!
Candid-Bike-9165@reddit
Oh I have a good one
How to push a trolly in a straight line This was a high quality industrial thing in a factory the front wheels were fixed and the rear wheels were the ones which spun (same as an airport trolley) Controlling them was not an issue in the slightest
This guy just couldn't do it constantly crashes
He also couldn't count..... I'm not joking
ClarifyingMe@reddit
Someone in their 20s how to copy and paste. Last year.
pajamakitten@reddit
How to save a Word file for me.
Gen Z are far less capable with PCs than they are given credit for. They know how to use tablets and apps, however the idiotproof interface of them means they have little troubleshooting ability compared to Millennialsl, as well as less experience using Microsoft Office.
ClarifyingMe@reddit
To be honest with you I've had to suffer ridiculous tech illiteracy in every generation.
Yes, I think more in gen z but I think it's imbalanced as my most recent team had more of them.
The gen X's and millennials were terrible too though. One person didn't know how to save a new version of a Word document.
anabsentfriend@reddit
Last week for me.
I've tried to teach my mum. She just refuses to try it and copies everything by typing it into her new document.
ClarifyingMe@reddit
For me I just say "if you know it so well, please do it yourself". Aggravating.
parklife980@reddit
That stuff drives me up the wall. I used to have a colleague who would ask me to show her how to do stuff, then while I'm showing her she's moaning "no that's not how you do it" or "I don't want to do it that way". So why did you call me over?
ClarifyingMe@reddit
I had a colleague like this as well and I wish the Purge was real for people like this (even though in reality I'd be cowering in fear crying somewhere).
fantastic_cat_fan@reddit
I used to have a housemate who had to show someone at work how to copy and paste, but she didn't trust it, so stuck to her old routine of handwriting what she wanted to copy onto a post it note, and then typing this back into the computer. 🤯
anabsentfriend@reddit
That was probably my mum.
northernbloke@reddit
I'm not even joking, I got asked where the ANY key was.
GDH26@reddit
Was it Homer Simpson by any chance?
pajamakitten@reddit
There doesn't seem to be any ANY key?
Rexel450@reddit
I was asked why a password showed just asterisks.
Miketroglycerin@reddit
During the second lockdown, the shop i was working at was doing online orders for collection from the carpark. We had a lot of orders, and a lot of paperwork to go with those orders, a couple of hundred on the go at any given time. I set up a simple alphabetical filing system to make finding the paperwork easy. The number of times i had to explain that Jackson comes before Johnson etc, was driving me nuts, some people just couldnt understand that alphabetical order carries on beyond the first letter.
pajamakitten@reddit
I have had this too. I work with a lot of people from overseas and I have had to explain that we alphabetise by surname, not first name, several times.
knight-under-stars@reddit
Many moons ago I worked in fast food. You would not believe the number of people that do basic cleaning tasks in stupid ways, for example:
SweepTheLeg69@reddit
Most people just operate on autopilot. They don't actually think about what they're doing.
Ok-Set-5829@reddit
Also mopping themselves into a corner, I bet. (I never did that🤥)
Zanki@reddit
Where I worked years ago someone used washing up liquid to clean the floors. It was a slip n slide inside the store for weeks! It was snowy outside so it rarely dried out!
I had to teach a group how to clean a toilet. It's not rocket science. They didn't even know where to start. I was thankfully tasked with cleaning the staff room.
WanderWomble@reddit
I just posted the same.
lcmfe@reddit
Where to put an address and stamp on an envelope
dvb70@reddit
While that sounds simple I can see a whole generation never having had to do this. I don't find it too surprising there are lots of people who might not know how to do this.
lcmfe@reddit
I’ve had to show two different people, one was someone my age (late 20s at the time) and she was from Eastern Europe and hadn’t had to do it before. One was a younger guy around 19/20ish who hadn’t had to do it before either. Both understandable as how can you know if you’ve never been taught! On the flip side we regularly had post delivered to the branch so it’s not like they’d never seen a letter before
dvb70@reddit
Honestly last time I had to post a letter I had to think about it for a moment as to where the stamp should go. I am in my 50's so I definitely should know this but I have to sent probably one letter in the last decade so I can see even people who should know this stuff having to think a little. I went paperless for all bills long ago so it's not like I even receive stuff in the post to keep me familiar with it all.
phatboi23@reddit
i can't even think of the last time i've had to send a letter and i'm in my mid 30's.
parcels yeah but that's usually done at the post office and they handle the payment etc.
AmishHoeFights@reddit
Yup. I'm in my late 50s and i get around 10 pieces of mail per year (government, insurance, and Christmas cards). I've sent one letter in the last 20 years. I haven't used a landline phone in over a decade. I haven't used cable TV for longer than that. I haven't made a check, or even had a checkbook, since i bought my house 23 years ago.
But i did ALL those things regularly for the first 30 years of my life.
lcmfe@reddit
Very similar to me nowadays, I get very little post with a stamp on as even invoices are emailed nowadays for work. Back then we got a lot of post and posted a lot of things working for a bank that’s back office was way more paper based than it needed to be for the time
XSjacketfiller@reddit
Using a radio. Push the big button on the side, wait one second (or for it to make a little chirp), speak, release the button, listen to reply.
The amount of people in security (probably also retail, hospitality, etc) incapable of this. Saying that, the worst example I saw was likely only feigning their complete ignorance (by doing everything possible with the button except the above) in order to get out of the miniscule responsibility.
broccoliboi989@reddit
The other day a woman I work with asked what the phone number was for a different team. I said I didn’t know but she could find it online and just Google it, and she asked me how to do that
sagraham@reddit
Mid 90s - probably around 1994 I worked part time as a student in an office environment. At least once a day one of the other 'long term' employees who clearly wasn't used to working with computers would complain that 'the arrow on the screen had stopped moving again'.
In every instance I had to remind her that the mouse must be on the desk. She was always holding it about an inch above the desk.
TowJamnEarl@reddit
The hover is second nature to many women.
grandmasterflaps@reddit
I had to show an 18 year old how to use a sweeping brush. That took a good 20 minutes of instructing, demonstrating and reminding, mainly around the principle of using both hands.
As for shovelling up the resultant pile... More of it was spread around the floor again than ended up in the bin.
Delduath@reddit
I had a guy I was training once leave an obscenely easy job because he was asked to produce a single report once a month, that took around 15 minutes to do. For context it was a 40 hour WFH job and the KPIs took around 30 minutes a day, and the rest of the time was doing whatever you want. It was above average pay as well.
The first two times the guy pretended it wouldn't work for him, but I took over his machine and it worked fine. The next time he went over my head to my manager about how this wouldn't work for him and someone else would have to do it, manager was having none of it and made him share his screen, and invited me on the call. The guy pretended that he was clicking on functions that weren't responding, but quite obviously just wasn't clicking. I called him out and requested to take over his screen, the guy disconnects the meeting and quits. Quit over barely15 minutes of work in the easiest job he'll ever have in his life. I still have no idea what his issue was.
Scarred_fish@reddit
Very similar to you OP, on quite a regular basis.
There is a really sharp cutoff at around 23-26 where anyone younger is pretty much tech illerate.
BrieflyVerbose@reddit
What?! Why? What's going on?
I'm 38 so I'm at that perfect age where it was all being introduced into primary schools. I remember being shown Yahoo at like 9/10 years old and how to use computers? Why haven't the younger lot kept up considering the amount of tech that's around now?!
Are parents going the other way and holding off on technology with their kids?
Scarred_fish@reddit
Introduced? Dude I'm 52 and it was introduced when I was at primary school!
But yeah, decades apart but the point is still valid. We grew up with computers that were just the same as, and were used the same as, business machines.
Young kids still use tech, but it's very heavily phones and tablets. You don't have to know how to write a batch file to boot into a game anymore.
We get work experience 14-16 year old who can't use a mouse. It sounds crazy but it's true.
My brother is a teacher and the last of the PC's were removed from the school he works at and replaced with iPads following Covid as they're easier to clean.
It's a potential cliff edge that's only really obvious if you experience it.
BrieflyVerbose@reddit
Yeah but PC's were nothing more than notepad and paint along with some games before the internet. It's the internet that brought through for everyone and all the education that came along with it for a lot of people. Yeah there were computers but they were shite, or at least my experience of them they were overrated. I'm sure they could do more, but I definitely can't remember what.
Jesus that sounds like an awful decision by the school. Schools are supposed to set children up for the future, not make things more difficult.
Scarred_fish@reddit
Didn't you learn programming and how to use spreadsheets to greate graphs and analyse data, word processors pre WYSIWYG etc?
Although of course we all played games during breaktimes etc, there was a good degree of basic computing knowledge built up before things got serious at secondary.
All that basic stuff just isn't happening now and it's a problem waiting to happen, or indeed already happening!
BrieflyVerbose@reddit
No that would have been before my time. I grew up rural and my first school was tiny and had zero tech. And I mean zero, they still played the bloody piano for us and made us sing far too much instead of getting the important things like maths down! Then I moved school when I was 9 and there was one DOS computer that I could play California Games on and then quickly one with Windows 95 on it.
To be honest most of what I learned was by playing around on Geocities and Angelfire, there used to hacking websites that I was well into then I hit like 14 and discovered cigarettes, alcohol and girl and I never went back! Maybe those old computers did a lot more than I ever saw, I just never had anyone show me!
It still blows my mind that the school would remove all the PC's, that's insane. Actually,.I've just had a flashback to a drunken conversation with a friend a few months back who was saying his 11 year old son doesn't know how to use a PlayStation controller because everything is touchscreen.
Fuck. I'm old! 😂
dbxp@reddit
They're used to using apps and phones, and tend to see the internet as just a few large platforms
AppropriateIdeal4635@reddit
I have to explain the concept of time to people regularly when discussing hire orders and things of that nature
yearsofpractice@reddit
The older I get and the more experience of people I have, I honestly think that some people genuinely don’t understand that time passes and continues to do, even if you don’t want it to.
I’m being serious. I’ve known people that seem to think they can ‘negotiate’ with time, for example: Their work starts at 9am. It takes them 90 minutes to get ready and travel to work. This means they need to get up at 07:30. Today they want to stay in bed longer, so they do. When they do get up, it still takes them 90 minutes to get ready and get to work. They are late. When asked why, they’ll say “I wanted to stay in bed later. But also wanted to be on time for work. I really wanted both, but I am late and I don’t understand why”
It infuriates the life out of me. The worst is when a time-negotiator gets into a position of power and starts estimating project schedules based on wanting things to be done by a certain date. The wanting seems to be the main factor here.
Puzzleheaded_Drink76@reddit
One one that drives me mad is how to highlight a whole row/column in Excel. Clicking on the grey, not the cell itself. People seem oddly resistant.
PsychologicalDrone@reddit
We are very security conscious at my workplace, and we are constantly being reminded to lock our laptops when we step away. The amount of people still pressing ctrl+alt-del and clicking ‘lock’ when they can just simply press windows key + L. Even the official memo from IT advised to do the former method!
Only a really simple thing but bugs me nonetheless
YouIntSeenMeRoight@reddit
You’d be surprised. I have been using computers all my life (53) and have been working remotely for 15 years, and that is the first time I have heard of locking a computer using the windows button and L. Just lead a sheltered life I guess.
ben_jamin_h@reddit
Just last week I had to show my manager how to:
Copy and paste a link from a browser into an email
Copy and paste an image of the linked item into the same email
Save the link in a folder on his browser so he could easily access it later on
Use ctrl+c and ctrl+v instead of manually clicking 'copy' and 'paste' to achieve the first two
He's 50, I'm 40. He is paid 50% more than me and I have to do most of his job for him.
MiddleAgeCool@reddit
Not show other people, but shown. When I first worked in an office many, many moons again I had to be shown how to fold a letter to put it into an envelope without it looking like a drunken idiot had just stuffed it in.
AmishHoeFights@reddit
I dunno why but your story resonates with me... just the kind of dumb shit i did as a new hire when i was entering the workforce.
I once had a supervisor shake his head at the pallet of boxes i just stacked with boxes. I was to put 1 sticker on the end of each box. I had, but they were all crooked, like, by a LOT. Looked like a drunk monkey put them on.
Palsta@reddit
How to read an email without printing it first.
PsychologicalDrone@reddit
I regularly find myself having to explain percentages to grown adults. Particularly compound growth
For example, if I add 50% to something, and then I add 50% again, you will actually end up with a total increase from the starting figure of 125%
Also, “90% more efficient” is not the same thing as being “90% efficient”!
VolcanicBear@reddit
As a consultant I tend to work with people with a wide variety of skill levels.
I recently showed someone who I was assisting in automating deployments of Kubernetes what both alt-tab and ctrl-tab do.
markhewitt1978@reddit
You'd probably be able to find more people who don't know that than people who do.
VolcanicBear@reddit
Oh yeah definitely, it just surprised me considering the line of work really.
Similarly, I've amazed someone I've serious technical respect for by introducing him to shift-tab and all it's permutations. They knew of alt/ctrl-tab etc, just never knew you could add shift into the equation for even more efficiency.
As we say a lot of the time... You don't know what you don't know.
Not criticising, just surprised.
mysp2m2cc0unt@reddit
Nice. I learned something today.
Which_Performance_72@reddit
I remember showing a teacher that you could use arrow keys to move the typing line on word.
Tbf to her this was 2010 but tbf to me I was 6
Evitonia@reddit
recently, my ex big boss man at a fibre company asked me how to split the pages on a pdf document in adobe acrobat
Other-Conversation-8@reddit
i dont know if this counts by every single one of my mangers / colleagues do not trust the sum formula on excel and always check it themselves to make sure its right - its not been wrong yet! 🤦♀️
seajay26@reddit
How to mop a floor, how to use a mouse, how to slice a tomato quickly. That last one was a guy who’d just finished an nvq at college in cooking. Give him two hours and he’d make you a lovely looking sandwich but he was utterly useless in a working kitchen.
Apsalar28@reddit
How to turn a monitor on.
At the time I was tech support for an Army base. Got a call at home early on a Sunday morning by a panicking senior officer claiming "the entire network is down and nothing works"
After dragging my seriously hungover self through the 2 mile walk to the barracks I found a completely functional network, a running PC and a turned off monitor.
WanderWomble@reddit
Lots of teenagers how to mop and how to use the washing machine (which had one button to make it run and one to open the door.)
AzzTheMan@reddit
Take their computer off mute after complaining they couldn't hear in meetings. This has happened with a few people
PangolinMandolin@reddit
A soon-to-be-retired office worker needed me to show him how to make a table in Excel.
He had drawn his table, and all the figures, onto a page of A4 and wanted it replicating in Excel.
I proceeded to show him how to click in each cell and then told him to type in each amount so that it matched his drawing.
He didn't want formatting, or calculations, or "any of that fancy IT stuff".
Just exactly what he'd drawn, but in excel
ARealTim@reddit
It was about 25 years ago and I was leading a new team working in a call centre. We brought together people who had worked at different locations and some had previously been using old computers that just had a keyboard and a text-based display to run the main client record system. In the new setup the same application ran in a DOS box within Windows.
The staff who had used the old version had never seen a mouse before and had to be shown how it worked! To be fair it took them about 5 minutes to learn and then they were up to speed but I still remember the confused looks on their faces!
WitShortage@reddit
How to set up their computer to treat all their monitors as a single display, rather than duplicating the image across all three screens.
Or that in Excel, "sum" does not mean "a maths operation", it means "add up". The number of "=sum(a1*b1)" I see is quite distressing
Or that when they leave their desk, hitting ctrl-alt-del does not actually lock the computer unless they then hit enter, but actually, just using Win-L is way easier.
Bexybirdbrains@reddit
Started a new job at a call centre about 6 years ago and there was a woman in my training group, late 40s maybe, who had worked as a care assistant her entire life and had never touched a computer.
I had to show her how to log in, load up a program, how to use the Web browser, amongst other extremely simple and basic how to use a computer 101 type tasks. And I had to show her this every day up to and including the first day on the call centre floor.
I thought since the program we used to carry out our jobs was in house and we were trained from scratch by our instructor how to use it she would get the hang of it, but no. She was absolutely lost.
She lasted about a week struggling on with it before slamming her headset down mid call and storming out, never to be seen again.
She was a genuinely lovely lady, very kind and sweet, and I get that not everyone was like me and grew up with computers, but I don't know why she decided to jump from her caring role to a computer based role when she had no experience with computers at all. The whole time she was there she talked about how she might go back to the job she left for this one as her manager said she'd always have a place if she wanted it so I find it hard to think she was looking for something less physical, and the pay was not better by any measure.
Kian-Tremayne@reddit
The problem here isn’t that she had to be shown how to do something she’d never done before. That’s perfectly normal. But having to be shown how to do the same thing over and over again- that’s a problem. She wasn’t learning, she was just letting you do it for her. That behaviour very much is a problem.
thelajestic@reddit
So many computer related things.
I had a guy (mid 20s, seemed fairly competent) ask if I could double check a figure for him on excel. He had a table of data and wanted to count how many instances of a particular thing there were. He'd been going down the page counting each row manually 🙈🙈
Also have had to teach people how to open task manager, open their file explorer, save something in a specific location so they don't save it somewhere random and then lose it (which happens so very often to people at my work, as they then can't remember what they saved it as so can't search). Have had to teach people how to save a webpage as a favourite, how to access their favourites so they can find it again, how to accept an outlook calendar invite...
BritishBlitz87@reddit
I once had to show a new employee what a pie was.
To be fair, he had arrived from Nepal in the last month.
carlovski99@reddit
Not me - but I remember a workmate trying to explain how to double click to someone, over the phone. She really wasn't getting it, he ended up getting her to hold the phone near the mouse so he could hear her doing it. 'Just like that - but a bit more quickly','No - quicker than that','That was only one click' etc.
boudicas_shield@reddit
I help clients apply for a very, very specific type of niche government funding. The clients seek out us - we don't solicit them - and ask for our help in obtaining this very specific type of funding. I still very often have to painstakingly and patiently explain, over and over, what the funding even is and how it works at its most basic elements.
It baffles me that someone can be applying for several hundred thousands of pounds in very niche funding and be totally clueless as to what the programme they're seeking funding from even is, yet it happens weekly at least.
Rexel450@reddit
How to make a baked potato.
lxgrf@reddit
Diluting something to a 10:1 ratio. I ended up having to make a spreadsheet of 'if you need this much overall, use this much of A and this much of B', because they just could not get it.
whatmichaelsays@reddit
How to answer a landline telephone.
ShouldBeSomePlace@reddit
Restart their computer. It was running windows 11 to be fair, but still!
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