does google (or any other technology) make you look like a genius?

[J.Brown]

i have become known in my family for an ability which everyone on this website has, but many people do not....the ability to find things/goods/services/answers through the magic of the interwebs!!

my father-in-law drank a great bottle of pinot that he loved(something from archery summit vineyards) at bandon dunes and wondered if i knew how to track some down.

presto, a bottle showed up at their door the next business day and i have continued to astound and amaze, LOL!

i find things for them and others like this all the time and have become a go to guy for my family and friends thanks of all things to google.

i find this hilarious, but i like doing it so........i was curious is there some technology that you use that makes the people around you think you have some super skill??

mine cracks me up, but i was curious.

i gotta go, i am off to find route 66 the b&w tv show on dvd.

cheers. J.

[zasterguava]

learning more in a 1 hour revision session on the internet than 50+ hour lessons.

[amplify]

I have never run across a non-techie human being IRL who ever considered typing the content of an error message into a search engine to find out what it meant. They understand typing, they know what google does, yet they can not seem to put it together. Even after I do it in front of them, they never do it the next time they get an error.

People are stupid.

[J.Brown]

error message is a great example.

i was just told that i should open my own business in "finding things".......oh if it was only that simple.

any good photoshop or spreadsheet stories?

[MicroBob]

"i was just told that i should open my own business in "finding things"

Wow. That's just so precious.

Being able to operate a remote-control or set the resolution on my mom's computer (so that everything is bigger) and show her how e-mail works somehow turned me into Mr. Computer Genius.

Showing my mom how to shut-down the computer by clicking the Start menu in the corner instead of just pulling the plug and letting the battery die EVERY time she was done using it bewildered her.
"Yup, doing it the way you were doing probably damaged your old computer a lot."
"Wow?!?! How on earth did you know that?"

I also sent her a link to an article from USA Today I thought she would be interested in.
She said she wouldn't click it because she heard that clicking links was really bad.
I explained, "Mom, it's a regular old USA Today article. I'm not trying to infect your computer."
"So it's okay to click a link. They said on the TV that this was a really bad thing to do."
etc etc etc.

Cue my computer geniusness again to explain some really basic stuff.


FWIW - I don't know if I can figure out the complexities of photoshop or spreadsheets to save my life.
Those things confuse the crap out of me so I would be on the unfortunate-ignorant end of the "Wow, That's Amazing!!!!" comments.

[Kimbell175113]

My mom always has the urge to print everything, and is amazed every time I dig up something in My Documents or whatever instead of going to the ol' file cabinet.

[boomshakalaka]

Im in culinary school and we had an assignment to write up a standardized recipe for some crap we made in class. I worked with this girl because, well.. shes cute. She asked me how to put in a degress sign. And I told her, "alt+0176". It took her a second to get it since she kept pressing ctrl, or letting go before she finished entering the sequence. But once she got it she turned at looked at me like I had just parted the red sea. She was smarter than most people though because she then realized that alt+combo of numbers = a given character. She spent the next 5 or 10 minutes trying her luck and giving squeals of excitement when she got a "rare" character, such as an accented letter.

[Victor]

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[Maulik]

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I lol, ldo.

[edfurlong]

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This kinda blew my mind.