More Tales of the Clueless

Over the years Dean has become reluctant to show his co-workers how to do much of anything on their computers, for several reasons. It takes ages to get them to grasp simple concepts, they don’t want to do anything differently from the way they’ve always done it, and rather than actually learn anything, they tend to keep asking Dean to “come and do that for me again.”

Their news guy gets a daily feed from the AP that includes news from the entire region. He wants only the local stories, but he prints the whole feed – pages and pages of it – then takes a pair of scissors, cuts out the few stories he wants, and tapes them together.

Dean finally couldn’t take it any more and braved showing him how to select the text he wanted, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into Notepad. It took most of the afternoon ("What do you mean, highlight it? What's a clipboard? What do you mean, launch Notepad? What's Notepad?") but he was willing to make the heroic effort to save this idiot from deforesting northwestern Montana.

So the next morning, news guy is saving several trees with his new mad copy/paste skillz, right? Umm, sort of. He called Dean over, pointed to the stories on the screen and said, “Okay, I want this one, that one, that one and that one.” Then stood back and expected Dean to do the copy/pasting for him.

Dean: “I showed you how to do that so you could do it yourself.”

News guy: “Yeah, but it’s easier for me to have you do it.”

Dean said, “I’m sure it is,” hit “print” to send the entire regional feed to the printer, as the guy usually did every morning, and walked away.

News guy: “Hey! You’re wasting all that paper!”