I used to work in Burbank and lived approximately 34 miles away, across Los Angeles. It could take almost three hours for me to drive home on a Friday afternoon on the freeway. This was before Covid, and traffic has only gotten worse.
Costco doesn't even accept Mastercard (credit cards), so they're kind of a unique case here where they intentionally choose to only accept one particular type of credit cards.
That way of teaching got us to the moon, created transistors, produced the internet, smartphones, quantum computers, the very AI that everyone is talking about, vaccines, sent probes into space, cured diseases, fed millions, jumbo jets, basically every single thing that society has come to depend on.
In another comment, I mentioned that I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy.” Even the rudest people tended to soften their tone when talking to me. I think when it comes to IT, most people’s default reaction is frustration. Trying to turn that frustration into a lesson can be frustrating at any age.
My approach was always: let me fix it first, then hand over the solution. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to follow up with “how did you fix it?” In my experience, 9 out of 10 people didn’t ask. The 1 out of 10 who did were often just making small talk.
The conversation was usually about how they ended up in that situation and what they wanted to achieve. I fixed they talked mostly to vent. That is part of the process.
In software engineering and professional culture, we often ask, “What have you tried so far?” That can be frustrating. The person you’re helping isn’t someone you have authority over—you either help them or you don’t. This cuts both ways, as they do not have authority on you to have you help them.
My thesis always has been people are generally polite. It’s not about manipulation or being overly conscious of achieving a goal. Impolite people usually are struggling with something internally, so you should pity them.
My Dad could never build the metal model to understand that common concepts like copy/paste would work almost identically across different native Windows applications; "How do I copy/paste in an email?", "How do I copy/paste in a Word document?", "How do I open a file in Excel?", "How do I open a file in Word?".
The lightbulb just never went on in his head. And this was in the 90s and early 2000s when developers at least used MFC - probably the period of peak UX design.
Things have now gotten so much worse since then. Now, I struggle to remember how to add an attachment in MS Teams, which I use every day.
Then that does not conform to the HTTP spec. GET endpoints must be safe, idempotent, cachable. Opening up a site to cases were web crawlers/scrapers may wreak havoc.
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