Young workers don't know how to use office printers, scanners, ancient desktop PCs
In Kate Beaton's excellent autobiographical comic Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands(opens in new tab), there's a moment where an older worker asks for help with his emails. They're all coming out with weird gaps in them, so he turns to Beaton, a tech-savvy young person, for help. She explains the problem: he's been adding breaks by pressing enter at the end of each line because he's used to typewriters and doesn't realize the computer handles line breaks on its own. It's a touching moment of bonding in an otherwise pretty grim story.
It's not the kind of thing that happens in the offices of today, according to a report by The Guardian(opens in new tab). In fact, it's sometimes the other way around, with one 25-year-old publicist saying he turned to older workers who were veterans of the copy room for help. «Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,» Garrett Bemiller said, explaining that his first time using the photocopier in his New York office, «It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.»
According to a survey of adults aged 18–26 by Dell(opens in new tab), «More than 1/3 of Gen Z feel that their school education did not prepare them with the technology skills needed for their planned career. 56% received either very basic or no digital skills training.»
While the popular image of young people is digital natives who know how all technology works, it's a narrow stereotype. A generation who grew up using apps on their phones and owning laptops aren't going to magically know how to use the scanner, printer, or workhorse desktop PC in the office, which is why we end up with posts on the Sysadminhumor
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