The incident I'm going to be narrating is a classic example of how technology diminishes the comprehending ability of human brains.
We have a college intern who recently joined our team to do a project as a part of her course requirement. First look of her – She's smart. She carries herself well, is able to communicate well, is able to understand when we explain the concepts to her and at the end of the day delivers what is needed of her.
Being in HR, most of our job gets done over MS Excel. So obviously anybody who joins us would be expected to have a decent knowledge of it. This intern (let's call her V) was given a large chunk of data (obviously in Excel) and was asked to make some sort of sense from it. (Poor gal!) She was shuttling between multiple excel files simultaneously. She was lost amidst the huge chunk of data given to her and the multiple excel files. She looked like a walking zombie who needed a serious break from the computer table. After some time there was a groan of frustration from her end. When enquired by a colleague, she said that she had put in all the data required into the Excel sheet, but now all of a sudden the keyboard was not working and she couldn't work any further. Another colleague tried to pitch in & help her. Both of them tried innumerable things checked all the connections. Everything was working fine, but still her keyboard was not working.
Now I being a true Libran, I believe in bringing harmony at my work place, I thought I could pitch-in with my indigenous brains and find a solution to this problem. So I opened a word file and keyed in some random alphabets and it worked fine. When I showed the same to Miss V, she was kinda confused. How could it work in a word file & not in an excel file??? So I asked her to open the particular excel file in which she was finding it difficult to type. When I saw the file, I couldn't control my laughter. I burst out laughing. (I'm famous for being extremely loud on the floor)
Actually she had taken a screen-shot of the excel file and had copy-pasted the image in an outlook file. Now a person who is a little tech –savvy would have understood by now that, one cannot type on an image. Poor gal, she had been staring at the excel files for such a long time that she was not able to differentiate between an actual excel file and the screen shot image of it!
Statutory warning: This incident does not depict the IQ level of Miss V. Rather it depicts on what prolonged usage of MS Excel can do to a person's comprehending skills!. She is a fellow blogger like me and u can find her blog here
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