School have just highlighted how unemployable I am...

[grannyinapram]

Failed at the most basic task today- I couldn't figure out Video calls so now my little boy missed out on his first school lesson. It reduced me to tears.
I'm going to need to find a job in a few years and this just highlighted how behind i am compared to most. I can use mumsnet and kind of email. That's it.
I don't even get word anymore because I only know the old word from when I was at school.
I did an online course a few years ago and you had to go through the website to submit your work and use email and I used to cry every month because no matter how many times DH showed me I JUST DONT GET IT. I hate this, I feel so behind but I literally can't remember how to do 'simple' tasks. I even had to have phonecards from universal credit when we signed on for a bit at the start of lockdown.
I'm in my mid 20s.
Why don't I get it?
Been a sahm for 8 years now. I'm at least 8 years behind.

how do people just know how it works? oh god I'm crying again...

OP it sounds like you are feeling a bit panicked about this and it's becoming a really big problem for you.

IT is one of those things... a bit like Maths... which does make some people panic! How many times have you heard someone say "I can't do Maths. I just don't get it"... and it's because they have found Maths difficult in the past, maybe they struggled at school, it made them feel useless and so they've developed this mental barrier to even trying. Whenever it comes up they immediately go "I can't do it!" like a knee jerk reaction.

I think that's what is happening with you. You are having difficult experiences with tech and you're putting up this mental wall against it because it's making you feel s**t

You need to slowly break that down by re-engaging with what you CAN do. If you can do email and mumsnet, you have the ability to do anything you need to do on a computer. You just need to learn it slowly and not beat yourself up if you don't get it straight away.

Maybe when lockdown is over you could try an evening class in IT at your local college. They can be really good for just taking small steps to getting used to basic things like Word.

You CAN do it.

Computers will not become obsolete. You just have to calm down, stop crying and get on with basics. We all had to.

Re takeaway. It's actually better that way because ordering direct from restaurant means they won't have to pay about 25% to JustEat😁

I used to feel like this when I started a job that used a very tricky computer program that was designed specifically for that workplace so there were no user guides to refer to.

You know what I did? Wrote down every tiny little thing step by step and made my own user guide! Just typed it up in bullet points - "click on the little square, then click on the three dots" , that sort of thing.

Now I've left everyone wants a copy of my user guide!

Just get your husband to help you write it all down step by step for the school lessons and refer to your sheet of paper every morning, soon it will become second nature.

OP you're not the only one. I've 10 years it experience and am a chartered it practitioner. I've just bought a new version of Office for a laptop and can't for the life of me find out how to get one of my favourite buttons visible. I have a desktop upstairs in an unheated room and even though it's been about 6 degrees upstairs I've been using the old version in preference.

You're not alone by any means

I think it would really help for you to write things down in a notebook. It should be really simple. Such as
1 turn on comp, and draw a pic of turn on button.
2 click on x this looks like , pic drawn of key or keys to press.
Do this all the way through, it does not matter how long the list is, or how simple it is.
Work through all the way from turning on to off.

For each task start a new page.

If you can do this with someone with you coaching you.
Then, whilst they are still there, go through the whole process from on to off.

Keep practicing each day.

After lockdown try a class room based course, where there is a physical teacher to help you.

Good Luck.

Totally agree with practising when no deadline. Whenever you want to join a Zoom call you're usually joining with seconds to spare. Start 10 minutes before, and give yourself time to get in, it's not that easy when things pop up on the screen and you have to guess what they mean. You can also try it when your dc don't have lessons - it doesn't matter if you join a call when nobody else is there, either the host isn't there to let you in, or if it's a call that you can just join, you just click leave again - but at least you know you can do it.

Your kids should be able to get the hang of it very quickly too and then they can help you.

I think part of issue is people expect you to know as you are young. I do SlimmingWorld via zoom and at start lots of older ladies were frightened to try but as lockdown carried on more tried and everyone was kind and helpful. Doreen you’re on mute - press the button. People accepted it was new to them and were kind whereas you don’t get that at your age. (Not saying all over 70s not good with tech just some ladies in my group) I’m in my 40s and not technically minded I can be shown and forgot. One of my lowest points lockdown one was not being able to get some tech working (and I felt letting my daughter down) I went for a walk and cried. But can use pc fine for job, Instagram etc. If I can you can. How old is DC? If DH will show you both in a none time pressured fashion and you practice together you’ll be fine. When my DD was 3 we had this fancy Logitech tv remote I could never use and DD used to show me. I find some how to videos assume prior knowledge - I agree with writing down step by basic step.

While writing step by step instructions has its place, unfortunately it's not a good long term solution. To continue with a travel/direction's analogy - it's like learning how to get from station A to station B via tube by just learning to take specific lines and changes. The moment a station is closed or a line is faulty, if you haven't learnt to read the tube map, you are stuck.

A very simple introduction that explains what you are doing is far more helpful long term and will allow you to "play". For example, my mother really struggled with saving, and then subsequently finding, documents. Until I was able to help her see it as no different to filing. If she saved something on the desk top, it literally is like leaving it on the desk. But she could also choose to file it in the equivalent of the Filing cupboard, in the folder for home insurance.

In word, once you have a document open. Try just using your mouse to look at all the drop down menus. Click on each one to see what happens. You dont have to go through with the action. Eg, the first drop down menu is "file". Withjn that you can see options like "open" or "save". Manh are intuitive but click on them to see how it looks. You can cancel or click elsewhere on the screen at any time to get out of it.

OP my mother left school with no qualifications, never did any college courses or anything, always refused to get a phone because she claimed she couldn't know how to text etc.

Well now she has an iphone and an ipad, she can figure out skype and zoom. She can figure out how to do internet searches and she can work alexa and the amazon fire stick and netflix.

For the sake of your son, you need to practice. If you can use the mumsnet app then you can get the apps for Zoom, Skype and all the other platforms.

Its honestly not that hard. you're over thinking it. Just practice.

You could always call the school and ask for alternatives.

Then when lockdown restrictions get lifted, do a course in basic computing. most libraries do them for free or low cost.

This sounds so similar to DP. He has dyspraxia.

Oh, and google classrooms etc are the work of the devil!! No one gets it at first!!!!

I had to teach dm and ddad to use video calls etc. i went to their house and gave them instructions (written instructions) and showed them how to do it. then i sat in another room with my laptop and they called me.

could you get dh to do something similar with you?

with regards to the emails etc - just do some practising. send emails to dh. send attachments. etc.

it is easy to do. but if you haven't done it previously i can see how its daunting. but just give it a go.

there may be online courses - i think the OU do some free courses.

I also think that people in their 20s are actually the worst off re computers etc. The assumption is that it was just "there" for them and while it's TRUE they grew up in houses where tech was present etc, it hadn't gone completely mainstream. It's only in the last 10 years tops that decent computing skills have been properly incorporated into schools and I would argue it's still not uniform or consistent.

Older people (like me) came in early when things were relatively simple still and when teaching assumed zero knowledge. But people of your generation are expected to know without actually having been taught.

Deep breath. If its Zoom or Teams you should have been sent a link to the lesson and you jjst click on that. At least the ones I do are!

But it might not be you. In the first lockdown we spent a whole morning trying to get ds into a Teams meeting - alo g with being talked through it on the ohone. It wasn't us!!

Have a look at your local college I bet they do evening schools in non covid times. If like me you are nit naturally good at this kind of thing you'll find face to face lessons more manageable. Don't worry, it'll be ok x

Sometimes we have a block on something and when faced with that issue, a wall comes up and says ‘nope, don’t get it’.It sounds like yours is technology. Mine is maths. This was demonstrated to me through my job when I did something with a local school and they said they’d give us a maths GCSE question just to see what their students were doing at the moment. As soon as the school had said that, my wall came up, I couldn’t do maths. It was a percentages question but my brain couldn’t even comprehend the question properly. However, I do use maths in my job. All the time actually. Even working out percentages. If I’m honest, that’s the biggest part of maths in my job and I have no issues with it. I’m actually the one telling my colleague how to do it. But phrased in that different context of a maths GCSE question and my brain just said no.

You’ll use tech more than you think you do. As you say, you’re on MN. You probably also surf the internet for other things besides MN. Try increasing what you do but do it in a fun way with your kids, get them to write a story or make a homemade card in word with them. Get them to make a picture in paint. You’ll find you know how to do more than you give yourself credit for but it’s also easier to learn when it’s in a more practical way, than just through a course. You’d also be surprised how technologically incompetent many professionals are. My colleague (the same that I have to help with percentages) can send email but can write a presentation, doesn’t know how to format a word document or use excel. I’ve also had colleagues who have offered to trade their skills for mine - they were prepared to write a full funding proposal for me if I did their PowerPoint for them and they’d already decided what they wanted to say, it was just making it presentable and branded.

If you are unemployable, then many of my Lecturer colleagues should be sacked.

It takes time and practice, as others have said.

And don't be afraid to make mistakes.

I'm supposed to be proficient in much of this stuff and messed up the connection on a remote consultation with a GP.

theskillstoolkit.campaign.gov.uk/

These are free at the moment so if you would like to do an hour course they are free and may help build up your confidence. I knownits difficult with children but may help you!

If your DH had to show you multiple times how to email during that course a little while ago I'm afraid to say that's a bad sign.

I'd try and do another course as I can't imagine many workplaces wanting someone who can't even use a basic such as email, word, excel and zoom...

I think one of the issues with computer literacy these days is that everything is a bit obscured and "too easy" - so you can end up knowing how to do something on one particular system, but don't really understand what's happening "behind the scenes" when you press this or that button. So if the interface has a complete makeover, or you need to use a different system one day, you're lost, rather than being able to say OK, I need to achieve X and looking for a button or menu option that sounds like it might be related to X.

If you can gain a bit of understanding about the underlying systems of IT it becomes a lot easier to navigate things, IME. It's not too hard to build that up from scratch, but it can be tricky to know where to start, and difficult to follow if you're not interested in something.

I would recommend just picking a really simple task - let's say, drawing a stick man in MS Paint, saving the document, retrieving it later, maybe printing it. Paint is very simple as programs go, and since the document is something silly (a stick man picture!) it really doesn't matter if you mess it up. It would give you a grounding in how programs in general work, the file system, looking for and identifying buttons, using menus and dialogue boxes.

Once you've got the basics down you can then play around with the different tools to see what happens - can you make your stick man change colour, change the background, give him a speech bubble with something to say inside, use copy and paste to make lots of stick men?

These skills are then transferable to other programs because most computer programs use the same kinds of features - buttons, menus, text boxes.

Get checked out for adhd/add op this sounds very familiar (my adult dd felt very similar about some things and has just been diagnosed)

www.psychiatry-uk.com/right-to-choose/

You sound like my mum. She's 50 years older than you but has always flat refused to use technology. When I was a child she wouldn't use a hole in the wall cash machine. She won't use self-service tills in the shops, has never sent an email, bought anything online, browsed a website. Doesn't have any phone apart from a landline. She managed to get away with it while working as she was in an occupation where computers weren't used, and retired before they became widespread.

She could do it if she wanted, but totally resists the idea. You could do it too, if you wanted to. At least you're online and reading MN. Just build from there and try to do new things. You are going to really struggle if you continue with this "I won't / I can't" attitude as computers aren't going anywhere.

What you said about not being able to use laptop at a teenager also resonated with me. My mum was funny about technology - oh we don’t need that, viewed it as bit common think. So in 80s we were only family in our street with no vcr, microwave etc. Not due to lack of money. So I never was naturally comfortable with stuff and maybe attitude rubbed off on me that it wasn’t for me. I can remember a friends mum and friends laughing at me at a sleepover party re my ineptitude with putting video on stuff like that stays with you.

Just to say I thought we had got on top of Teams last week but it's caused problems again this morning and my DD is in a state because she's missed a meeting. I had a go at signing in on my own laptop according to step-by-step guide school sent, and it didn't do what the guide said it would, so dead end. I emailed school with the help address they gave and it bounced back saying it didn't exist. So I just felt the rage and frustration all over again. And have now missed out on doing my own work.

I hate this crap! OP you may benefit from a class or some such, but honestly, so many people are struggling with this.

I use a computer everyday for work. However, until lockdown, I had never even heard of Zoom or Teams. DS14 had to show me how to use Teams as they had started using it for homeschooling. DH uses a computer for the internet, but not for work and still can't use video-calls. Unless you're using these systems regularly, it can be really daunting.