Learning a New Program Has Never Been Easier

For about five years now I have been trying to carve out some kind of presence on the internet, on and off, mostly on. Before that stretch my computer life amounted to word processing, email, and balancing my checkbook with software. At one point I even got a handle on spreadsheets, though that skill came and went. You might wonder what any of this has to do with My Everyday Psychology. Well, I kept chasing those "work-at-home" setups and pouring in money I had worked hard for. A couple of them turned out to be straight-up scams. And the tutoring I paid for mostly flew right past me and was a struggle to actually put into practice.

A big chunk of the trouble was the format. Someone would dump a pile of material on me all at once, and I was expected to go off and try it solo later. My notes were useless to me afterward, and following along on the screen while something was being demonstrated never clicked. The moment I hit a wall, and I nearly always hit one, there was no one to ask. So I couldn't finish what I was supposed to be learning, and by the time the next session rolled around I was so detached from the last attempt that we basically started from zero again. They must have figured I was hopeless.

What I actually needed was someone working with me right there on my own computer, on my own sites, fixing the real problems that kept tripping me up. That's what finally happened. My consultant, Michelle (a woman tech helping a woman user, how about that), let me stop partway through a session to test whether the thing she just explained worked when I tried it myself. It did. Once my brain was full, I asked whether I could save the back half of the session for later, after a few days to let it all sink in. I had booked two hours. She said that was no problem at all.

It ran as a set of step-by-step instructions where I could fix my mistakes as they happened and actually watch a correct, finished result come together. We stuck to the problems that were mine. I learned the things I didn't already know and skipped the basics I didn't need. The rate struck me as fair, worth every dollar, and I kept wishing I'd stumbled onto them years earlier. They answered a prayer, plainly put. I had worn out every other kind of resource, and nobody I found knew the first thing about what I was trying to do. Years back I even signed up for computer classes at the local junior college. They were so little help that I quit an online course simply because I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

If you're a computer dropout like me, barely hanging on in a world that keeps getting more technical, there are programs, WordPress (which I'm typing in right now), Excel, PowerPoint, and others, where you can get real help from someone who knows them. The TutorGrams page lists the programs they cover. They even walked me through adding this hyperlink myself. No burning hours on features you'll never touch or don't need yet.

I'm not computer literate, and I wasn't raised in the electronic age, but I live in it anyway. Remember what I've said about the phrase "I can't"? It freezes you where you stand, and you'll never get anywhere leaning on it. Maybe you'll end up hiring somebody to handle some of this for you. Even then, wouldn't it help to grasp what they're doing and to catch it when something's off?

I'm a book person through and through. I've always believed I can move faster and go deeper with a book than with a DVR recording or a webcast or a CD. The catch is there's no one-on-one in any of those, and certainly no practicing in real time. When you do get to ask questions, usually in a group, you'll get one or maybe two answered, and the rest sail over your head or cover ground you already know or things that don't matter to you yet. Books have their own failings. They often stop short, or they assume you already know something you don't, and they can't keep pace with how often WordPress changes. I know you tech folks are out there, and you know you've got your own slang and you skip steps, probably things you do without even thinking. It's the same problem as instruction manuals: written by people who don't need them, for the people who do. Something's backwards there, isn't it?

Say I'm driving from Redbud, IL to Oak Park, IL, out near Chicago. Don't start me in some city close to Redbud, like St. Louis, MO, then drop me somewhere in Chicago and assume I'll find my way. Start where I am and carry me up to where I need to be. Go ahead and write the instruction book, but hand it first to somebody like me, who's actually going to use it and doesn't already know what you know, and let them try it. To this day I can't find the page in my car's manual that tells me how to reset the clock when the time changes.

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