Don’t assumes something should be common just because you thought it is.

It has been for a lot of peoples taking the advantages of the modern technologies and making them as a very common thing and any of them that do not learn to use / adapt to the technologies seems are outdated. You can see young children playing game consoles as it is just piece of cake to them. Children, Ah Gong, Ah Ma talking on handphone and sending SMS or chatting on Messenger or surfing the net. Every things just seems to be normal and common such that everyone seems to be using them and become the “Common thing” of our lifes…Sometime, it even became something you will get frustrated with just because someone that you tried to teach doesn’t seems to able to learn it.

I used to think what is so hard for someone to adapt to the technologies, why it is so hard for my mother / in laws to navigate and click on the mouse and I thought they are just probably not technically challenged and all these are just too new / advance for them. I have a chance to witness something very special today that made myself to adjust my mindset… that I have been very wrong on always / easilly assuming things that I saw, I used and everything else to be “Common stuffs”, “General Knowledges”. I have to admit that, Sock Peng has always being the first line of victims when she came across things that I thought is common and she does not know about it.

So, what the big deal of stuff that I got to experienced today… here goes the long grandmom story.

There is this Mr. M in our Hardware (HW) R&D department. He is the key designer for a piece of HW that is very important in our product. How important is this piece of HW and Mr. M ? Let say that if he resigned from our company or by any reason could not continue his work, our company next generation line of products will not make it to the market and our company will lost couple of millions in that product line and I will lost my job as well. So, I guess you will understand how important he is. ( for the photographers out there.. he is equivalent to the person that designing ASIC in each brand like Digic, Venus & etc)

I have been visiting his cubicle for many times since my work is supporting the HW he is designing and his technical knowledges are really strong and I had to admit that most of the time I only understand probably about 20% of the stuffs he explaining to me when I asked him some questions. he has 2 Computers in his cubicle with 3 Gigantic LCD for him to work on his RTL codings for the HW. So, he has been requested by our Software Lead and his Manager to give a short training on his HW designs so that the Software guys can know how to support the HW he is desgining and also the other 4 of his Piers to be able to support the HW while he will be gone for 3 months holiday starting in June.

So, this is where I was surprised by him that… he does not know how to use Microsoft Windows, does not know how to use any of the applications on a window and does not know how to navigates with the touch pad on the laptop his manager helped to setup for his presentation. I was seeing exactly the same face, same expression of him as of my mother trying to make the touch pad works, tryig tapping the touch pad very hard to get the clicking to works.. he is then making a joke out of himself telling everyone how his kids make fun of him whenever he has a remote control in his hand trying to figure out how to operates the TV channels / DVD player.

So, it was then I realize / remember that he has been working on the Unix systems all of his entire career as a very respected, experienced expert HW designer… and MS Window is just something he has not learned and used.

He helped me to realized how much I have taking the advantages that, I have being a Software Engineer for so long & all of the User interfaces of any products seems so common / easily / logically in place for me to figure out without reading the user manual and why others having problem on getting to use them… I guess I have to starting to understand that not everyone will have the capability to handles stuff easily when it is something new to them.. and it may take a very long learning curves for every different individual depending on how fast / good in adapting to new experiences… regardless if he / she is a well trained technical person or just a normal consumer.