What in the world caused all of this?

I am not going to surgar coat it. This is a rant about some of the random stuff that happens that makes me wonder if students are really getting anything from their college education.

A patron comes up to me and asks me to help him fill out his US Bank form. What in the world made him think I was the person to ask? One I am not risking telling someone the wrong information and two a banker should help him with that. They get paid more than me to know all of that stuff and be bound by all the rules they are bound to and such.

Some I am walking around the computer lab last week cleaning up trash left by college patrons. As I am walking around I find a razor blade and a pencil that was obviously sharpened by said razor blade. WHY? There are cheap little pencil sharpeners you can buy for less than $1 and we have an electric pencil sharpener in the computer lab. Also I am pretty sure either of these are a far safer alternative to a completely exposed razor blade.

In the computer lab we will help people with programs all the time, but we are generally only expected to be knowledgeable in some of the more common use programs like Microsoft word and PowerPoint. New programs are being added to departments all the time and as a result to the computer images. Also some of these are only used for specific majors and such. Our supervisors do not expect us to understand SPSS (a statistics program often used in Sociology and Statistics in general) if you are an Art student or a Music student. Also some of these programs require a ton of detailed training to do a lot with them.

I hate it when students come up expecting me to know how to completely create an amazing affect in Photoshop (Don't get me wrong I can do some simple stuff with Photoshop because I have had some basic training when I took an entry web design class in HIGH SCHOOL). Also I hate it when they act like I am some idiot because I do not know how to do it. Hey stupid did you forget that you are the one doing this as part of a class and even you seem to not know how to do it.

It gets even worse when they want us to do stuff for them that is obviously part of the assignment. Like a girl who was learning to write in APA format as part of a class and wanted me to show her how to do everything. No I will not help you cheat and bypass the fact that your teacher wants you to know how to do this and you will not learn it if you do not do it yourself. I will direct you to the OWL Purdue site (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/), but I am not doing it for you.

Next fun thing to happen was when a girl comes up to me. She has a 6 page document in word and somehow has managed to get it to where all 6 pages are showing up at the exact same time. She wanted to fix it so that it would just be the one page view. Now if she had taken a moment she would have realized that:
#1 she could still type so it was just zoomed out
#2 she already had the "View" tab open and right smack in the freaking middle of it ,in a section labeled "Zoom", is a button labeled "One Page" with a picture of a single page as its icon. Just 2 buttons below that is a button labeled "page width", which has lines with arrows pointing outward on either side as its icon, that would have allowed her to even expand the view to show the page across the length of the screen. Instead of taking a second to not make herself look like an idiot she just wanted someone else to fix it for her.

Don't think college students are the only lazy ones. Between not bothering to read a single campus email they receive and then bitching when the Blackboard site is down even though they were warned 4 times via the email they are required to check regularly over a 2 month period. A professor came in wanting to scan some documents in. Now if she wanted someone to do this for her there are options for this on campus or in some copy shops. Here in the campus computer lab we will explain to you how to do it but we are not going to do it for you because we are here to help you learn so you don't need someone to do it for you every time. This is because when you have over 120 computers to monitor to make sure people don't destroy them and to ensure they get fixed when they are broken, it is hard to keep going back and having to help one person with something they should have learned years ago. Did she ask if we could show her how to scan the documents in? Nope. She logged into the computer and then point blank ordered us to scan them for her.

Anyhow that is my rant for the day.

Let me introduce myself

My name is Beth aka the EvilTechnoMonkey. Being born in 1986, I grew up with computers. I watched them go from the big bulky monster of the past to the thin sleek beasts they are today. I've seen them go from 8 bit to 64bit systems. It has been an interesting 25 years to say the least. My first computer at home was a Packard Bell (aka Packard Hell) with only 3Gbs of hard drive space, dial up through AOL, and a floppy disc drive.

Now my Sony Vaio laptop has a i7 processor, 8Gbs of ram, 500Gb hard drive (went smaller because this one had better speed and performance compared to some of the others offered and was cheaper than a Solid state though those things are beautiful), a 1Gb video card and 1080dpi monitor. It is a beautiful machine. My desktop I built is just about as beautiful though not as fast on the processor or the video card (I accidentally burned out the 1Gb video card I used to have and had to go with a cheap slower one temporarily).

I have loved computers and embraced how easy they can make life when you take the time to really understand them. Through this blog I will express some of the new things I have learned and when friends and patrons at the computer lab I work at ask questions I will post the questions and how to fix them on here to share with everyone.