SWMBO - the technoilliterate

I'd be writing instructions for every single thing on bits of paper for her. I'm guessing she doesn't 'get' one vital part of the concept, and so the whole subject is gobbledygook to her. 

I had to write instructions for my wife when we bought our first automatic car. Thankfully after two or three days of commuting she threw that piece of paper in the bin, but 18 months later she still won't touch the flappy paddles!

She's a tech author.........

Tony

I've tried that, including diagrams and screen grabs to illustrate it, but still no joy.  I love her to bits, but she drives me round the bend sometimes.

Been there & dun it.

But i have to ask how much exposure has 'erself had to PC before,  then how old is she,  maybe you need to give her some slack & realise she needs to do this very strange stuff in her own time

Think about how you learned to use a PC -  select any of the following

You starting from the early days of general PC use & it was so simple in those days

Had a work colleague(s) who was way ahead & took time to teach you

Learned in a formal environment/classroom with a planned schedule of instruction 

Then how long did it take you to get as good as you are today

I bought my wife a PC along with a book called "Laptops for Dummies"

I knew it was going to be frustrating (relative teaching always is) but I had been teaching professional/industrial techie stuff for years & I thought it was not going to be a problem. 

But teaching this stuff to a real begineer is harder to get right than anything I had done before - NB a frustrated teacher is not a good teacher.

After a rocky start I regrouped & spent time on showing her how basic windows works, where to find, what it looks like, how to open stuff,  how to shut down - that took a lot of time & book reading & going over & over.  

Then we worked on e-mails & focused only on that until she was 100% OK, plus kept building on more of how the PC works. Then spent time on MS-Word, then www.

Now 4 years later she can do all she wants - banking inc foreign transactions, stock market e-shopping/selling.  But 4 years needs patience. 

Dungassin,

Do the right thing... get her an iPad .

The i-pad solved a lot of our domestic tiffs.

Now Mrs L. hardly ever needs to speak to me

I've been there too. My wife has had her own laptops for many years now and I have no issue with her having no interest in how computers work. I wouldn't expect her to get into car maintenance for example.

However she has picked absolutely nothing up after more than ten years of having her computer as an essential tool for work. Not a thing. She has no concept of software updates, viruses, spyware or anything else. And no smart replies please. She's never had the option of a Mac.

She's mid 50s and very smart but very resistant to new technology.

Strange chaps women.

My wife tolerates my Macs for the sake of the marriage.

She did ask the brilliant question about how to be sure the mic is disabled on the HDX. . . Not exactly an illiterate question, as I think about it!

Interesting chaps indeed.

Outsource your problem to the Apple store "Pro" service. We finally solved this for my Mom when we let her go to the store (alone), pick out the computer she wanted, then have a year's worth of classes for about $100. Assume they offer in the UK as well. I could have written the same story as Dungassin before.

Mike B is so right.  I was showing her how to do things the way I would do them and got frustrated when she didn't "get it" the first time.

 I love her to bits, but she drives me round the bend sometimes.

+1. My wife not yours to be clear. My wife just seems to switch off when I describe how do do anything on the computer. It's the same when giving instructions for driving somewhere. This is a lady who ended up un Cornwall when driving from Devon to London, but she makes up for it in other ways.

I'm sure they get it. Much less work to play the fool and have you maintain those machines.

Trouble with my other half is she is an extremely clever person. For 20 years she held a very high pressure job working on IBM mainframe computers, BUT she has no common sense.

Best she ever came out with was one sunday morning she asked me to look at her car as the windscreen washers were not working. Did a quick check and found the washer bottle was empty.

When i told her this she said it was a design fault with the car and that the washer bottle should be big enough to hold enough water to last between services. I told her i would get a 150 gallon water tank and fix it to the roof of the car.

Mista h

Your wife, actually, has a good point there. It might seem daft but someone, somewhere, should be working on it. Same as why do I buy a computer and then have to scrub cookies from it to make it work better!

your dead right Jon,maybe we should do away with the boot on all cars and just bolt on a huge water tank.

Another gem she has come out with,she was ging to take the car back to complain about the lousy battery always going flat. She hardly drives the thing,often its half a mile down to the shops and back. Could not get her head round the fact that short trips just knacker the poor battery.

Mista h

So guys, I guess your better halves won't be looking at this forum then? Are you confident?

My wife, well, she's an absolute genius in all things. I mean, who really wants to know how to work those silly computers properly anyway?

Creep!  

I can recognise most of what has been said above from my own domestic setup.  Certainly the "if I appear stupid, then he will worry about it for me" ploy comes out from time to time in both the fields of computing and auto maintenance.

But the great advantage women have is that they don't mind appearing one-down. In my experience many blokes are also totally computer illiterate, but they need to prod around on their computers comparing hard disk and RAM sizes as if they were willies, and as soon as they catch a virus, scrap the machine and get an new laptop.

Go to PC World or local equivalent on a Sunday morning and eaves-drop on sales conversations.  The women always present themselves as less knowledgeable, while the blokes nod sagaciously at every bit of pseudo-technical sales pitch thrown at them.  (Often uttered by blokes who don't know much more about the product either).

But birds are still a good thing.  Fade in I'm a Woman, by Peggy Lee.

Don, rainy downtown York

Love all the replies.  I won't try to answer each point individually, but :

I have  been using computers since the 1970s - starting with DOS at work (used to use them for research purposes).  The first computer I bought was a BBC Model B (32kB).  Even taught myself to program in BBC Basic!  Wasn't that difficult, just annoying when a tiny typo made everything fail to load/work etc.

Preferred the BBC to the Apple II, having had to use that as well.   Eventually progressed through the Acorn range to the RiscPC, which I still think is one of the easiest and most intuitive machines to use.

Currently I am au fait with how to use Macs, iPads, Windows, and have even used Linux.  Only moved over to Windows machines because of PC games and unavailability of software to do some things on the Risc PC.  I have an iPad3, but to be honest I mainly use that for n-Stream, and much prefer to do my web-browsing on my PC laptop  (proper keyboard etc)

When SWMBO decided over a year ago that she wanted a laptop of her own (basically just for email and websurfing - especially Facebook), I tried to persuade her to have an iPad, which I thought would be easier for her to understand (and she's a one-finger typist), but she insisted on a Windows laptop - and even wanted a high spec one, which managed to talk her out of that bit, by persuading her that it was total overkill.

We started off with me trying to teach her the basics of how to switch on, install and run programs, and what the various icons around the windows are and actually do. (SWMBO "what are icons" - she still doesn't get that concept)   After much effort got her to appreciate that clicking the left and right mouse buttons (actually on the finger pad, but you know what I mean) do different things.  I have NEVER managed to get her to understand the concepts of keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop, holding down select and dragging scrollbars.

I bought her "Laptops for Dummies for Seniors" (she's 64), but I don't think she's ever read it beyond the first few pages.  I offered to send her to classes to learn how to do it : offer refused.  That would have meant me driving her to any classes, as she has steadfastly refused to learn how to drive (failed her test once, and never went to the second test as she had morning sickness - never been behind the wheel of a car since)

What really irritates is that I and/or my daughters etc can show her how to what she wants to do over and over again (I showed her the same series of actions 5 times in a row last night), but she just doesn't seem to retain it.

I've tried making up Idiot Guides which run as detailed recipes, with annotated screenshots, step by step instructions etc etc.  All to no avail.

To be honest, I wish she would just ask me to do it for her which would save me a lot of time, hassle and earache, but no, she insists on trying (and failing) to learn it every time.  I've come to the conclusion that her brain isn't wired the same way as mine and our daughters - who can do some things better on computers than I do.

I know what is meant about attributing things to design faults - she does the same.    Also has never been known to read an instruction manual for a new piece of equipment bought for her, but but gets angry if I don't immediately know how to sort out a problem (usually caused by her ignorance) with said item(s)  She honestly believes it is my job to read the manuals and then explain it to her!

Wouldn't swap her, but she can be SO aggravating. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...Women_Are_from_Venus

John.

From John's Wikipedia link above:

"One example from this paradigm is the book's assertion that men complain that if they try to offer solutions to problems that women want to talk about, women do not necessarily want to find solutions but only want to talk about these problems."

Hmm, so I'm thinking there might be more women on this forum than I realised.....

Tony

Read that book some years ago.  What it said was remarkably close to my own experience.

John

I show Mrs. Sniper how to do it once and she takes it all on board. Sometimes she watches me and spies what I am doing and she does it on her own laptop. Very bright you may think, however once on line she becomes a magnet for every totally obvious scammer on the web and even when I explain that the largest hotel in Canada won't have a yahoo email address and that I did not have a grandfather who died in South Africa leaving $55 million to his nearest relative and nannies in London don't earn 60,000 GBP with a car and air conditioning in her room she does not get it - 'how do you know for sure' she says. Bless her cotton socks. 

My wife is not bad at computers etc.

She is interested in how the respective device does the job she wants it to do, finds out and then does it. She is not interested in the device as an object or in exploring the million ways she 'might' have down it differently through all the various choices available.

That make her more intelligent than most of us I think, or at the very least more efficient!

Bruce