Oh, San Jose. What chaos you have wrought in my life!
I am the Scottish flag in the conversation below:
This is a phenomenon I was discussing with Gracie yesterday, and then it came up in conversation with my coworker. Not only did San Jose saddle me to the most boring adolescence this side of Amish country, but it also saddled me to a life of always knowing more than everyone else about computers EVEN THOUGH I HAVE TWO DEGREES IN LITERATURE. This is a conversation with my co-worker, Anne, who is the exact same age as I am. There is no reason why I know these things and she doesn’t…EXCEPT SAN JOSE. That’s all I can think of that makes us different since I certainly didn’t learn this shit at Sarah Lawrence. I grew up in the fucking Silicon Valley with nerds at high school who built their own computers and she grew up in Alaska and now I am doomed to be the default tech support person at every job I ever have that doesn’t keep an actual IT person on staff.
Well, I say NO MORE. After I am done at this job, I will be moving to a new one where I play dumb. I will not try to be helpful in the least, I will just shake my head sadly and pound on the keyboard and pretend I do not know how to insert a picture into Word (!!! Seriously, my boss asked me to do this for her yesterday).
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Comments
I am also a victim of San Jose technology - perfect example is I just spent 10 min installing the Akismet wordpress plugin, which required an API key, which I had to get by logging resetting my wordpress account and all sorts of other lame shenannegans all so I could unleash Maryann’s comment that I accidentally marked as spam. Oh yeah, and I “run” this site.
They should have warned us when we graduated Lynbrook. “By default, this high school degree now means you will have to deal with other people’s stupidity about computers for the rest of your lives. Good luck with that!”
I understand this phenom all too well - why? Because I AM in SJ, and I have grown up within a, let’s say 50 mile radius my entire life of Silicon Valley. I clearly remember my dad saying he started us out on the computer when we were around TWO, TWO.
Not that I am super knowledgeable or anything, but I know how to format a POP mailbox if I know the server, and how to FIND the information if I don’t know it. Part of this comes from Silicon Valley, and part of it comes from being from the generation i am from I think.
Which, you know, is the same as yours. neiner.