Ctrl + Shift + You're an Idiot

June 1st is going to be a big day for the Colorado Rural Health Center employees. That will be the day that I open their eyes to the big, scary world of technology. And I'm pretty sure it will be a big day for me too. Either spectacularly good (they'll fully embrace my tips and become more self-reliant and productive) or spectacularly bad (there are far more ways for this to go wrong, so I won't bother listing them).

I sent out a survey to them all yesterday. Ten questions to gauge their understanding of basic computer operation. I included questions such as:

If I said to you, “Add the folder called ‘Events’ to your Quick Launch toolbar,” would you:

1. Add the folder called “Events” to your Quick Launch toolbar, but only if I say please
2. Say, “I didn’t know I could add things to my Quick Launch toolbar."
3. Say, “I didn’t know I had a Quick Launch toolbar.”

Another survey question was:

I do the following (select all that apply):

1. Hit “enter” when my sentence reaches the edge of the page and then continue my sentence on the next line
2. Use the space bar repeatedly to create an indent in a paragraph or for a bulleted list
3. Open up the Calculator tool or find an actual calculator when I have a math problem to do
4. Never empty my desktop recycle bin
5. Save multiple versions of the same files in different folders

I never expected that I would learn so much from my survey! Here are the top ten things I learned from this exercise (in no particular order):

1. Our secretary answered the question "When I think about how comfortable I am with technology, I would say that I am:" with the answer "Tech-savvy enough to not need this training". She is the only one who showed this sort of confidence. That being said, she is also the one that asked me today how to turn on the digital camera. And what WiFi was.
2. On the other side of the coin, we have Rich. He's our unofficial 2nd in charge IT guru--1st being me...scary, I know. Before I was there, he ran the show. He: has never heard of a Quick Launch toolbar, has never heard of Find > Replace, has never heard of Paste Special, and uses zero keyboard shortcuts.
3. The most popular write-in question is "How do I do that stupid thing in Excel that makes everything add up?"
4. No one wants to fess up to being that person that hits enter at the end of the line...but I know someone's doing it because I keep seeing documents that have little green wiggly lines under the first word of each line as grammar check tries to convince me to capitalize them.
5. Sheri, AKA, the useless one with the bad attitude, thinks she's a pro, but also thinks she's modest. In order to show off that she knows lots and lots about technology while still staying modest and checking the "I'm competent but no expert" box, she requested that I explain If-Then formulas in Excel. Except she called them "What-If" formulas. First, if you don't know what they're called, you're not ready for them. Second, there is no way in heck the group is ready for that. Baby steps, people.
6. I should've broadened my scope of information to-be-covered. I should've included things like, the correct phrase is "Me neither", not "Mean either", as written by Sara in her email response.
7. I need to develop some common sense training. AKA, if you cannot print, your first thought should not be, "The IT guy didn't reconnect my computer to the printer" and instead should be, "I wonder if the printer has any paper in it?"
8. No one that makes more than $50k a year will answer an optional survey. Their time is too important for such things.
9. When we took a personality test a couple months ago, Shelly did not like her results so she just changed them. She said it was the fault of the test because the questions were not precise enough and she needed more information to answer them. When I got her survey back, each multiple choice question had a paragraph of text associated with listing all the conditions upon which she would choose which answer, as well as follow up questions she had for me. I'm sure her teachers loved her.
   
10. I have no earthly idea how I'm going to cram all the information I need to impart upon them into 15-20 min.

Stay tuned for the aftermath of this natural disaster.

Also, coming soon: My list of quotes from Austin. Here's a teaser: "Happy F***ing Mother's Day, Barry Bonds!" --the incoherent homeless man shouting about how the world is a beautiful place and we should all love each other.