PCs and the evil mouse
I was there, the day the first PC came into our office. We'd managed very well until then with dedicated green-screen terminals, which only had a single Big Red Switch on the front, that simply powered up the monitor. The Department Manager, her 2IC, and three Team Leaders were all standing around this PC, wondering why it wouldn't work. They weren't impressed. This was rubbish! It wouldn't even turn on!

It was running Windows 3.1, just like my home machine. This booted remarkably swiftly from a hard drive, but the system had two On switches - one more than they were used to. The power switch on the base unit was a big, solid, up/down toggle switch, exactly like the one on the base of the monitors of the green-screen terminals. The monitor switch was a tiny, square switch, of exactly the same colour as the plastic around it, on the monitor itself. I listened to the whirring noises from the HD that told me when Windows was ready, then reached over and pressed the switch on the front of the monitor, which came on immediately to display the Windows desktop. There was a genuine collective gasp of amazement, and I was the IT guru for the entire department from that point on.

That, in and of itself, had its drawbacks. They asked me to write and present the course to train the entire department how to use the PC, plus Word and email. Yoink. But okay, it could be done, although I hadn't realised how much I'd absorbed in 10 years mucking about with computers since the days of the ZX81. Mostly, it wasn't too bad, and I actually learned a lot about dialling my assumptions way down when training.

But there was one guy I nearly killed. I delivered the course individually, as we only had one PC in the department, and they wanted everybody trained on PCs before they went to the expense of rolling them out to everyone. Now Allan was apparently intelligent enough to hold down a role at a major life assurance company, but he could NOT grasp the idea of the mouse. Everybody else had taken 10 seconds to grasp the basic idea of 'mouse = cursor'. Then a few minutes more to go over single-click to select, double-click to execute and right-click for secondary menus. They were all smart cookies. But Allan did not get it. He'd look at the mouse, and mentally measure some distance, then move the mouse that distance. Then look back at the screen, see how far he'd fallen short, or over-shot, look back at the mouse, move it again, look back at the screen... I could not make him watch the screen while he moved the mouse. Three times, he walked away from the training, because he got so frustrated that he couldn't make the PC do the simplest thing. It was shit, it was evil, it hated him - oh my word, the language he used.

On the fourth attempt, I brought in a shoebox, and cut a small hole in the end. I put the shoebox over the mouse and made him put his hand in the hole so he COULDN'T SEE THE MOUSE while he was moving it. I saw the clicky happen in his eyes as he realised he didn't need to. After that, File Manager, Word and email held no terrors for the poor chap.
(Leo Sasquatch hates being the grown-up, Sat 26 Sep 2009, 10:47, 3 replies)

Good solution!
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Sat 26 Sep 2009, 10:55, closed)

Click for this...
...partly because my uncle did some original research in this area in the 60's: Proprioceptive factors in operative time estimation.

If I'm remembering his conclusion correctly, if you give someone a positioning task, and eliminate all but one methods of feedback, then they very quickly adjust and do almost as well as with all methods of feedback enabled.

Or in Allan's case, it would seem, much better.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Sat 26 Sep 2009, 14:41, closed)

Nice work :)
Kudos for the creativity and patience.
(Scritty Bakerman., Sat 26 Sep 2009, 17:58, closed)