You had to hold it up to a candle.

"There's an error message on my screen."

"What does it say?"

"I don't know."

This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.

I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can't count the number of times I've seen an error message that just says "an error has occurred" and you're left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone's app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it's the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like "An error has occurred".
- I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
  If the error message is that stupid, I'm 100% with you. I suspect that's the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
  However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don't understand that information, it's not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they're participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don't know because they have dismissed it.
  
  Almost every finished product I've seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you're technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it's not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol
  Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University's computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn't download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She'd attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say "see?! It's not working!!". I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking "no" 🤦‍♂️
  
  I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said.
  I shit you not, I've had a user do worse.
  I've done the same exact scenario as you with one difference. I told her the same thing you did. And then. She closed the message again. While I was pointing at it, and asking her to read it out loud.
  I.
  Pointed. At the screen. And said read this out loud.
  She moved her mouse to my finger.
  And closed the message.
  I.
  Can't.
  
  Hahaha for some people it's just a habit I guess.
  Or for some, like my mom, it's learned helplessness. She always misplaces her phone and keys (not because of dementia or something like that, just lack of attention) so my brother bought her one the Bluetooth tracking tags (air tags, but for Android). Since I work in tech, I'm always the one to set everything up. She said "Set it up for me, I don't wanna know how to use it..." as if it required zero user input after I had set it up 🤦‍♂️ I just looked at her and said "... if you lose you keys and need to track them down, how do you expect to find them?!”
  
  She said "Set it up for me, I don't wanna know how to use it..."
  The only proper answer to this is Then I won't do it. We're done. Don't ask me again.
  
  She has helped me out with stuff (school wise, life wise, financially, etc...) more times than I can count so I seem and feel like an ungrateful asshole if I just flat out say that.
  
  If you feel you owe her, don't complain.
  If you need the feel to complain, do something about it.
  You can't have it both ways.
  
  I do say something about it, but help her regardless. You can be annoyed about something but still help regardless of that fact.
  
  In that case I think the only thing to do is something like this.
  I asked you to read the message out loud to me.
  Instead of following my instructions, you closed the message.
  If you want me to help you with this issue, I'll need that you explain to me why you did that instead of following my instructions. I won't move forward until you do. I'll wait.
  
  Oh I did. Almost verbatim. Basically the excuse was they became flustered and misunderstood. Which is understandable, but still, damn... How do you pretend to be that helpless and earn a degree that qualifies you to save lives? Basic problem solving involves at least the attempt at a solution. Mindlessly repeating the task that is failing without changing any variables is bad scientific method, which we learned in like 6th grade.
  
  However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don't understand that information, it's not for them,
  THIS! THIS SO MUCH! And that's why I took over training all new employees. I teach them how to think. And every time I've fixed a problem, I explain to users what happened. As a result, my overall number of tickets has decreased and my users are now better equipped to solve their own issues.
- Quck note on that, many smart devices have trouble with wifi if the 2,4 ghz and 5 ghz have the same name. Rename the one of the two and it mostly works.
  
  Yep, thanks. I've split the AP into 2.4 and 5 GHz because a lot of devices will tell you that outright tell you that(it's ridiculous that they don't put 5 GHz radios in them instead of leaving it up to the consumer. My $2500 LG OLED TV from 2018 has a 10/100 NIC on it, they couldn't even be bothered to put a 1g NIC in it!)
  Still didn't help. I'm using Unifiy APs and it's something about them the devices hate 🤷‍♂️
  
  I literally just had a conversation with an IT friend who knows more networking than me (I'm more of a generalist), and he basically told me that Wifi is basically impossible to make as bulletproof as wired. I got so fed up with wifi periodically just crapping out.
  I'm like, "so... It's like printers all over again? Nobody can make one that just is bulletproof? "
  He's like... "Well, nothings as bad as printers, let's not go crazy here. But yeah, you can't make wireless as reliable as wired."
  
  Absolutely, you can't shield a wireless connection from interference like you can with a wired connection, that's why I prefer to use them, but everything wants to be WiFi only now!

I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said "my computer doesn't work, please take a look" and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:

The tower was off but the monitors were on
The tower was on but the monitors were off
Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn't blame them for this one)

These people were in their 40s and didn't know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say "I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!". After about a month of this I would just say "Hi", press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.

My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn't know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.

Not PC related, but I was a service technician for a company that sold ice cream machines and I had this one call that I'll never forget... This woman has a store built for her, we just came come to train her on how to use the machines (the important bit for this being a switch: day mode and night mode.) When you leave for the day you switch to night mode and when you come back you set it to day mode so it freezes. She calls us saying all the ice cream is too soft and almost liquid. She never switched from night to day... Like it's one step. Only one step. You come in and flip the switch from night to day lol
I felt terrible about having to charge her for it but I had no control over that.
- Haha nice. That was essentially like my job. I went from upgrading PCs all over a hospital to turning on computers in a small office building. I'd get a max of 10 tickets a day in 8 hours, half of which were power button related.

I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”

It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.

You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.

Back in the early 2010s I was helping a girl at my University's computer lab that I worked at that didn't know how to print from Microsoft Office. Granted it was like a year or so after they hid everything behind that stupid button in the upper right hand corner, but still...
Hell, i run Linux on everything and I hate technology, there are just so many helpful guides and everything is so easy to fix, until it isn't...
So funny story I recently remembed a situation in my early years of running Ubuntu 8.04(I miss the old gnome days), I spent MONTHS trying to get an ir remote to do various things on the computer(play/pause vlc, run apt-get, whatever random shit I thought of at the time) only for the whole thing to never pan out, the recent realization that I had tried to do such a useless thing(it was a laptop) and spent too many night frustrated in tears made me laugh.

They don’t know how to navigate file systems

that's a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.

tag-based file management in iOS.
Could you clarify what this means? I've never used an iPhone, so I'm not familiar with how they handle files.
Do they not use folders?
- It sounds similar to what google does where it uses a tag for categorizing instead of physical movement of a file into a folder system. Handy for exclusive use if everything exists for one purpose on the one os that uses it. An absolute pain in the ass when you need to conveniently back stuff up or require compatibility.
- They do use folders but I haven't known anyone except older people to really utilize them. Most people just search for them. It's flash memory and relatively few files so searching is faster then clicking through folders.
- file management up until very recently was very basic and even now is very limited. there is no access to any files that apps use besides downloads from Chrome and whatnot.
  there isn't really a downloads folder per se, only a downloads section. besides that, files can be tagged to help find them and folders are just something deemed unnecessary. everything is just saved into a "space". there is no implication that there is a root directory of sorts, only a space where files are and you let the phone search for it.
  when you save pictures from a website, there is an option to save as image, but in the photo gallery, there is an option to save it into the files app, implying that files and photos are different things. you can't access photos from the files app, you HAVE to access them from the photos app. this one really frustrates me.
  I have only used iOS in the days where the iPhone 6S was relavant and never went back, so do correct me if anything I said was wrong.
To be fair, there has been people unable to navigate file systems at all times.
- Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn't know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.
  Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.
  If your mechanic said, "I'm not much of a wrench person" you'd take your car elsewhere.
  If your typical office worker said, "I'm not much of a computer person" , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say "I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!"
Dont they also use cloud services that have folders?

“There’s an error message on my screen.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”

"I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I'm late on my project. Can't you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?"

My wife works as a TA at a high school - there are students there who can't even use a PC to do much of anything. E.g. she asked one student to minimise something and the kid asked "What is minimise?".
Even after explaining which button on the window minimised it, they had no idea you could do that. Opening a read only word document melts their brains when they can't figure out how to edit anything lol

You're in the same boat I am. I'm doing IT support and one user couldn't navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used "file open" dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word's open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.

It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn't even try to correct their methods. I was just like, "okay", and moved on.

It's not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things.... Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that's probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow.... They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not "get" that there's a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.

Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.

I hate hearing "I don't know computers" or "I'm not very good with technology" .... You use it every day. There's some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being "bad" with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.

Flashbacks to a few months ago when Adobe Reader pushed out an update that changed how the menu looks and I had an employee freaking out telling me he was "trying to do my PDFs, and it won't let me"... All because the menu didn't say "file" anymore, it was just 3 horizontal lines (and still in the exact same spot...). It took me like 10 minutes to understand what the hell he was trying to tell me his problem was, as he points to an open PDF document and tells me the computer won't let him "do his PDFs"...
I know it's fun to complain/rant about users, but to most people, computers are just a tool. You and I would probably agree that a good tradesman learns his tools intimately, but that's because our jobs are mechanically focused, so it's a requirement. People who work jobs like accountant can maybe be bothered to learn one application well and that's really due to a lack of training or education, you can't expect people to learn secondary skills unless they're led. I've been able to train the worst of users into people that can troubleshoot their own issues, though there are always users that say "idk, you're the one who needs to fix it" because in their minds we're impeding their progress. But most of the time users don't want to call helpdesk either if they can avoid it.
It's always a good idea to practice your soft skills with difficult customers and be compassionate because they don't go away the more you climb the ladder, you just have to deal with them less frequently. Something that someone once told me many 10+ years ago when I was starting my career was that were it not for the users/customers, we wouldn't have a job to complain about.
- Yep. I definitely agree that if users knew everything, there's basically no need for the admin team. Most of us would be unemployed.
  I'm not trying to say they are a burden, it is simply confounding that someone who works on computers every day for work, who needs to get into network drives and open everything from word to excel to PDF, and so much more, doesn't even have the ability to competently navigate the file system using Explorer.
  The only thing that I cannot abide is the willfully ignorant crowd, who will refuse to listen at every turn.

The more infuriating cases were "I don't know, I pressed Enter".

We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they're connecting to isn't there.

Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn't got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.

Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.