This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use “recent”), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don’t know typing.

Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.

I don’t mean “programming,” per se, and I don’t mean “scripting,” per se, and I don’t mean “piping together commands on a text command-line,” per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and © instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.

A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they’ve never used before and figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting down and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.

I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.

But I don’t want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that’s what the scanner does automatically.

But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.

But my company computer won’t let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.

But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don’t want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose “Print to PDF” and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.

I have a great custom workflow. I’m the most computer literate person in my office.

Please tell me this is sarcasm meant to push the limits of their statement.

Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.

The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.

The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.

She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.

There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.

Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.

She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.

Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.

The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.

I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.