Head Tale

So I'm on the road doing computer & Internet training and I thought I'd pass along a couple humourous moments from the past couple weeks…

– tonight, a woman wants to know an Internet radio station she can listen to while doing housework.  I say that Accuradio is one of my favourites and after loading it up, I semi-randomly click on the station “Classic Soul” . What's the first song that starts in a roomful of elderly women and me?  “Let's Get It On” by Marvin Gaye.

– I've ranted and raved about the end-of-term evaluations at FIMS before so it's a bit of payback now that the shoe's on the other foot and I'm being evaluated by people who come to the sessions.  I got off to a bad start on my first night when I'm pretty sure it was the elderly couple who looked fairly confused no matter what I said who gave me all 1's (the lowest score out of 5) and all 2's on the anonymous feedback form (the rest of the feedback ranged in the 3-5's and one generous soul gave me all 5's)    . 

– whoever gave me all 2's on the four or so categories we ask for feedback about (instructor's knowledge, material covered, length of session, etc.) ended up giving me a 3 on the final line – “overall rating of session”.  Go figure.

– Shea made a good point that those low ratings could just be people misreading the grid and I saw how easily this can happen when I heard one elderly lady at another session murmuring to herself as she filled out her form: “Length of session – oh, it was about an hour I think” and promptly checked the “1” box which, as I mentioned, is actually the lowest rating we have.  (I guess she was just happy she didn't get the 5 hour session!)

– an elderly woman (notice a trend here?) had a Facebook account that her grandkids had set-up for her but didn't know how to use it so I logged in to give her a guided tour of the site.  Who's listed as one of her few friends?  One of Shea's relatives!  I guess not too surprising given the theory of six degrees of separation (in fact, I'm sure I read that Saskatchewan is so small that it's actually only two degrees of separation for anyone from this province.)

– I taught did not teach anyone how to use BitTorrent after they mentioned that they used Limewire at home.  That would be wrong. 

– I realise now that calling the one-on-one help session “Ask The Computer Guru” instead of “Ask The Computer Expert” was maybe a bad idea.  A person at my first session spelling out “What's a G-U-R-U?” was my first clue. 

But in the end, it's all good and I'm loving this assignment so far.  Someone wrote me the other day and mentioned that some library should “invent a “visionary” tech and public service sorta job for you.”

Hey, I'm not arguing and if anybody out there reading this is in a position to make that happen, I'm willing to talk!