The seven habits of highly incapable technotards

June 10, 1:55 PMLife in the Cubicle ExaminerDudley B. Dawson

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Double clicking the Internet since 1997.

They say that technology has a learning curve.  Technotards are the reason for this.  A technotard is someone who is severely technology impaired, and more importantly, completely incapable of learning.  They ignore simple logic.  If their TV is unplugged, they spend two hours staring at their cable box.  Staring is a favorite troubleshooting technique among the technotarded crowd.  The simple concept of "If x=y, then A, else B" is simply too much to handle.  Sadly, many of Corporate America's cubes (and all of its offices) are filled with these technotards.

To celebrate their stupidity, I present to you the seven habits of incapable technotards:

1.  Unable to lead a a meeting requiring a conference call, online conference, or LCD projector. 
Technotards are able to take one hour meetings and turn them into the worst 60 minutes of your life.  Read What happens when a technotard leads a meeting?

2.  Misplacing or losing emails.
Within a few months of starting any job at a large corporation, you are introduced to the term "email jail"   Large corporations seem to be the preference among technotards, especially those who are incapable of archiving or deleting emails.  As a result, they have at least 50 bounced emails per week.

3.  Placing 'The' before anything technology related.
Perfectly described in The Onion article "Google Launches 'The Google' for Older Adults", technotards (not just old people) love to add 'The' to the beginning of everything computer related.  The Excel, The Oracle, The Email are just a few of the phrases you might hear come out of the mouth of a technotard.  Related item: Technotards that refer to SQL as "squeel".

4.  Using your ISP or work email address as your personal email account.
This is a sure fire way of determining if someone is a technotard.   If you ever receive an email and it has @comcast.net, @cox.net (although I like that one), @netzero.com, or perhaps the worst, @aol.com, you can be sure that they are a technotard.  These people still call it "webmail", and they stay away from GMail, Hotmail, and YahooMail for self-described "security" reasons.

5.  Emailing large documents and refusing to use a shared network, such as Microsoft Sharepoint, or other file sharing resources.
Technotards are either not aware of the existence of shared servers or they have not yet mastered that skill.  They just got comfortable with The Email and it wasn't too long ago when someone showed them what the paper clip meant.

6.  Using the printer as their primary method of storage.
Technotards do not process the concept of storing documents on a hard drive.  Explaining the idea of storing information on a hard drive that they cannot physically see is 10 years down the line.  These people use 80% of the paper supplied by your organization.  For more on people that love to print, read What is an office tree killer?

7.  Believing that the Internet is actually something stored in their computer.
A large number of people at the workplace, over the age of 50, are still unable to grasp the concept of the Internet.  They still seem to believe that anything appearing on their monitor is stored somewhere in their computer.  For the severely technotarded, they believe that same information is actually inside the monitor and not the computer.  They are still blown away by the 1996 Encarta CD-ROM that included multimedia.  To this day,  they still ask others if they can "download the Encarta CD-ROM off the Internet".

Honorable mention:
- Forgetting passwords on a weekly basis.
- Being afraid to click on anything because you think it might make the computer explode.
- Triple clicking on icons (for those that are not afraid of the computer exploding).
- Asking other people questions that are easily found with a simple google search.
- Having no idea how to turn the cell phone ringer to vibrate.
- Receiving a text and trying to talk into the phone to ask who sent the text.

If you know a technotard, send them this Let me Google that for you link.   They'll think someone took control of their computer. 

Do you have additional habits exhibited by technotards?  Feel free to add them in the comments section below.

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'Seven Habits' is a recurring article appearing in Dudley B. Dawson's Life in the Cubicle column at completely random moments.
View the Seven Habits of: Highly Effective Slackers | Highly Annoying Emailers | Disrespectful Work Poopers | Morbidly Obese Coworkers | Typical Bad Managers | Highly Effective Interns | Defective Conference Call Leaders | Incapable Technotards | Highly Anal Employees | Highly Arrogant Employees | Highly Disengaged Employees

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