Bride of the Clueless

I have a friend who is utterly clueless about computers. She calls me now and then for tech support. The problem is usually something simple, but walking her through the steps to figure it out is torture because she doesn’t know the most basic terms and gets stumped when I ask her to do something like “launch your browser” or “right-click.” I still have nightmares about the time I tried to get her to ping.

She called the other day. She’d gotten a new computer the day before and it “wouldn’t work.” Apparently a technician had set it up for her the day before and it had worked fine. The next day when she tried to turn it on, “nothing happened.” I checked the basics – is it plugged in, is there power to the outlet, is the power currently out by any chance (yes, I had to ask), is the monitor turned on, when you hit the power switch do you see any lights or hear any activity, etc. That was all I had time for, so I said I’d have to call her back later.

She called back in a couple of minutes. Her computer was now on and running fine. What she had been hitting to turn it on wasn’t the power switch. She’d been pressing the Dell logo.