“There’s a mute button?”
Today I’m going to have a rant. This is only my second post on our blog, and the first was also a rant, so I’m sure you can see the beginnings of a trend here.
Many people can relate to being “the tech guy” for your family and friends. Being called on for every little technical query is par for the course in my line of work, but I’m starting to become really frustrated with the attitude a large portion of the population has towards anything remotely technical.
My laptop is an old Dell Inspiron and has served me well over the years, although apart from when travelling, my mother gets sole use of it. One of the things I particularly like about it is the array of media keys on the front which allow you to adjust the volume, pause, skip etc.
Yesterday she called me to ask “why isn’t the sound on the laptop working?”. I asked her if she’d pressed the mute button by mistake. Her response nearly floored me. “Oh, is there a mute button?”. Now as you can see from the photo, the buttons aren’t exactly subtle and she’s been using the laptop for about 4 years now, how the hell had she not noticed an array of 7 buttons on the front and had the curiosity to investigate what they do.
If the sound from her TV had mysteriously stopped she’d have picked up the remote, had a fiddle and probably figured out that the mute button had been pressed by mistake, but because it’s a computer, she – like many others – immediately assumes that some virus with malicious intentions is keeping her from watching Big Cat Diary on the BBCs iPlayer.
Why are people suddenly so afraid of fiddling?
The human race has evolved because we’re curious, we want to learn, to discover new things, and yet at the moment it feels like we’re being held back by a lazy portion of our population.