I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
Not sure about having a 12-year-old as a consultant in Emergency Services, but it is good to have a 12-year-old to assist with a computer once in a while. (I know you are referring to how young the staff appear to be.)
I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
Not sure about having a 12-year-old as a consultant in Emergency Services, but it is good to have a 12-year-old to assist with a computer once in a while. (I know you are referring to how young the staff appear to be.)
[Serious comment]
Actually, a 32 year old would likely be more useful.
Back in the early days of motoring, to be a motorist you had also to be something of a mechanic, as failures were so regular you had to be able to manage some repairs on the fly. Now cars are so much more reliable and easy to use, this is no longer the case.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in IT - modern consumer kit is so much more user friendly and complex internally while simple at the user interface, that you no longer need to have any computer engineering knowledge to use one. We are seeing Gen Z and Alpha coming athrough now with excellent *user* skills but less understanding of how computers actually work.
Or as we cynically say in IT - if you make computers so simple that any idiot can use one, the any idiot will.
"If you make your code idiot proof, the world will produce better idiots".
I would like my medical staff to be younger than me - I mean, I am old and losing it. My GP is younger than me, which means, hopefully, she will continue working through my early dotage and not retiring just when I need help.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in IT - modern consumer kit is so much more user friendly and complex internally while simple at the user interface, that you no longer need to have any computer engineering knowledge to use one. We are seeing Gen Z and Alpha coming athrough now with excellent *user* skills but less understanding of how computers actually work.
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
When I first worked on a computer, my instructor told me to not be afraid to press any key, but, understand, if I press the wrong key everything would crash. Now, the kids have no fear. They never heard such instructions. Most computers now have recovery systems that get one pretty close to what one was doing before the crash.
When I first worked on a computer, my instructor told me to not be afraid to press any key, but, understand, if I press the wrong key everything would crash. Now, the kids have no fear. They never heard such instructions. Most computers now have recovery systems that get one pretty close to what one was doing before the crash.
I spent a long time looking for the 'any' key I was being told to press!
I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
When my daughter was a toddler she had a hospital appointment. I'd have been about 32. The doctor recognised me, but I did not recognise her.
I was one of your Brownies she explained.
Clearly something was going awry in the space / time continuum if I was old enough to have been a Brownie leader to someone who was old enough to be a doctor!
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
Translation needed for italicised content please.
A simple spreadsheet is one used solely as a table for holding information, with no calculations, macros, vlookup, pivot tables or anything fancy.
A meta-skill is one that enables the acquisition of other skills across a broad range. A bit like reading.
JFGingI 'Just Fucking Googling It' from the classic nerd response to being asked a mundane question 'Just Fucking Google It'.
Subject Access Request. The exercise of the right under the General Data Protection Regulation and implementing legislation to see the data an organisation holds about you.
Shrink the resulting PDF files. In order to redact information about third parties (or that's covered by other exemption from the right to access) we first convert all relevant files into the Portable Document Format invented by Adobe many decades ago, which then allows us to use the redaction tools built into Adobe's flagship PDF creation and editing tool, Acrobat to blackout anything that shouldn't be disclosed. Unfortunately, the process of creating and redacting the files makes them take up a lot of disk space. Acrobat has built in tools that will make the files take up less space, at some small cost to the quality of the content. It also has the ability to run these tools on a big list (a batch) of files one after the other. I have been able to assemble the list (queue up) of files and press a button that tells Adobe Acrobat to do the same thing to all of them, which it does, each one in turn (crank through them).
Resource hog. A computer, any computer, has a finite amount of processing capacity and space to store the data it is working on (resources). A program that uses more resources than you might think are necessary for the complexity of the task it performs is a "resource hog". A core i5 with 8GB of RAM is a respectably speedy machine for writing ordinary documents, a little light photo editing and web browsing. It is, however, insufficient to the task of processing the files mentioned above with any kind of speed.
I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
When my daughter was a toddler she had a hospital appointment. I'd have been about 32. The doctor recognised me, but I did not recognise her.
I was one of your Brownies she explained.
Clearly something was going awry in the space / time continuum if I was old enough to have been a Brownie leader to someone who was old enough to be a doctor!
Not really. People forget how young some of the leadership is in Brownie pack. You might have only been 12 when you were a pack leader with Brownies i.e. a Guide who is helping out. So if she was 10 then she could have been just two years younger than you.
This is an extreme case. I started as a pack leader at 14 back in the days when you could be a Guide until 16, then became a young leader before training formally as a Guider from the age of 18.
I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
When my daughter was a toddler she had a hospital appointment. I'd have been about 32. The doctor recognised me, but I did not recognise her.
I was one of your Brownies she explained.
Clearly something was going awry in the space / time continuum if I was old enough to have been a Brownie leader to someone who was old enough to be a doctor!
Not really. People forget how young some of the leadership is in Brownie pack. You might have only been 12 when you were a pack leader with Brownies i.e. a Guide who is helping out. So if she was 10 then she could have been just two years younger than you.
This is an extreme case. I started as a pack leader at 14 back in the days when you could be a Guide until 16, then became a young leader before training formally as a Guider from the age of 18.
I became a Brownie leader when I was a Ranger Guide, and left that pack when I went to University. So I think she was 10 when I was 18, and 24 when I was 32.
When I first worked on a computer, my instructor told me to not be afraid to press any key, but, understand, if I press the wrong key everything would crash. Now, the kids have no fear. They never heard such instructions. Most computers now have recovery systems that get one pretty close to what one was doing before the crash.
I am becoming increasingly nostalgic for MS-DOS, as a result of hours spent twiddling my thumbs waiting for all the pictures to load on my browser, trawling through pages of guff to find the information I want, etc., etc. Yes, it would delete all your work instantly if you hit the wrong key, yes, you had to learn all the commands (and type them correctly) before you could do anything, but it was so quick! *sighs wistfully*
And don't get me started on predictive text. It isn't even clever enough to predict what I'm going to type next in English, let alone French or German.
I well remember 'The Mighty Micro' and the BBC programmes [sic] about the BBC PC. 16K? Wow! They are available still in the BBC archives.
We had a Sinclair ZX 81 controlling lab equipment.
Those were the days! Windows? Pah!
Comments
Not sure about having a 12-year-old as a consultant in Emergency Services, but it is good to have a 12-year-old to assist with a computer once in a while. (I know you are referring to how young the staff appear to be.)
[Serious comment]
Actually, a 32 year old would likely be more useful.
Back in the early days of motoring, to be a motorist you had also to be something of a mechanic, as failures were so regular you had to be able to manage some repairs on the fly. Now cars are so much more reliable and easy to use, this is no longer the case.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in IT - modern consumer kit is so much more user friendly and complex internally while simple at the user interface, that you no longer need to have any computer engineering knowledge to use one. We are seeing Gen Z and Alpha coming athrough now with excellent *user* skills but less understanding of how computers actually work.
Or as we cynically say in IT - if you make computers so simple that any idiot can use one, the any idiot will.
I would like my medical staff to be younger than me - I mean, I am old and losing it. My GP is younger than me, which means, hopefully, she will continue working through my early dotage and not retiring just when I need help.
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
I spent a long time looking for the 'any' key I was being told to press!
When my daughter was a toddler she had a hospital appointment. I'd have been about 32. The doctor recognised me, but I did not recognise her.
I was one of your Brownies she explained.
Clearly something was going awry in the space / time continuum if I was old enough to have been a Brownie leader to someone who was old enough to be a doctor!
A simple spreadsheet is one used solely as a table for holding information, with no calculations, macros, vlookup, pivot tables or anything fancy.
A meta-skill is one that enables the acquisition of other skills across a broad range. A bit like reading.
JFGingI 'Just Fucking Googling It' from the classic nerd response to being asked a mundane question 'Just Fucking Google It'.
Subject Access Request. The exercise of the right under the General Data Protection Regulation and implementing legislation to see the data an organisation holds about you.
Shrink the resulting PDF files. In order to redact information about third parties (or that's covered by other exemption from the right to access) we first convert all relevant files into the Portable Document Format invented by Adobe many decades ago, which then allows us to use the redaction tools built into Adobe's flagship PDF creation and editing tool, Acrobat to blackout anything that shouldn't be disclosed. Unfortunately, the process of creating and redacting the files makes them take up a lot of disk space. Acrobat has built in tools that will make the files take up less space, at some small cost to the quality of the content. It also has the ability to run these tools on a big list (a batch) of files one after the other. I have been able to assemble the list (queue up) of files and press a button that tells Adobe Acrobat to do the same thing to all of them, which it does, each one in turn (crank through them).
Resource hog. A computer, any computer, has a finite amount of processing capacity and space to store the data it is working on (resources). A program that uses more resources than you might think are necessary for the complexity of the task it performs is a "resource hog". A core i5 with 8GB of RAM is a respectably speedy machine for writing ordinary documents, a little light photo editing and web browsing. It is, however, insufficient to the task of processing the files mentioned above with any kind of speed.
Not really. People forget how young some of the leadership is in Brownie pack. You might have only been 12 when you were a pack leader with Brownies i.e. a Guide who is helping out. So if she was 10 then she could have been just two years younger than you.
This is an extreme case. I started as a pack leader at 14 back in the days when you could be a Guide until 16, then became a young leader before training formally as a Guider from the age of 18.
Some of them might be grandparents by now!
It was bad enough as a former secondary school teacher to realise that one of my former pupils is married with four children.
I became a Brownie leader when I was a Ranger Guide, and left that pack when I went to University. So I think she was 10 when I was 18, and 24 when I was 32.
I am becoming increasingly nostalgic for MS-DOS, as a result of hours spent twiddling my thumbs waiting for all the pictures to load on my browser, trawling through pages of guff to find the information I want, etc., etc. Yes, it would delete all your work instantly if you hit the wrong key, yes, you had to learn all the commands (and type them correctly) before you could do anything, but it was so quick! *sighs wistfully*
And don't get me started on predictive text. It isn't even clever enough to predict what I'm going to type next in English, let alone French or German.
We had a Sinclair ZX 81 controlling lab equipment.
Those were the days! Windows? Pah!