Today, I put a bunch of PDFs into a USB stick and went to a store ask to have them printed. I organized the PDFs I had downloaded from the Internet in two folders: one contained all PDFs, and the other contained a copy of a portion of the PDFs that I really needed printed, just in case something happened.
At the store, a man in red glasses took the USB stick and asked me which PDFs I wanted printed. The store's PC was running Windows 7, even though it's 2024. There's nothing wrong with that. I wish I was still running Windows 7. I told him the folder and he double clicked on it, displaying its contents in the Windows' File Explorer.
He asked me if it was all of them, to which I replied yes. He then started opening each one and inspecting its contents. I wanted only some pages printed, not the cover page, for example, so he had to open each one of them and type the page numbers to send them to the store's printer. Some PDFs only had one page to be printed, others had a few, 4 pages at most.
The PDF reader kept crashing after a few seconds. The screen tearing made me believe that old PC was struggling to render the large images in the PDF. He complained about it. I asked if it was low on RAM. He concurred.
After the PDF reader crashed so quickly he didn't have time to sent it to the printed, I told him he could print the other folder instead, with just the important PDFs, in case things weren't working out. He told me that would only be necessary if I was in a hurry. I looked around the store while he kept printing them.
After a while, he asked me to take a look at them because it seemed the PDFs were out of order. He said he was printing in order one by one in the file explorer, and they seemed to have changed order, so I had to check what was printed and what was left. He opened each PDF and checked the printed pages to see which pages were printed already.
I told him it would be a good idea if he created a folder to place the PDFs that he has confirmed to have printed, so the only PDFs left are the ones he still has to print.
He said: I don't know how to create a folder, and continued checking the PDFs.
I think I muttered a word in surprise at the moment. Maybe it was "quê?" or "como?", both of which would translate to "what?" in English in such context.
Several thoughts crossed my mind in sequence.
The first was shock:
How do you NOT know how to create a folder? You literally opened a folder just now. This man does understand the concept of folders, but not how to create them? How does this even happen? He's printing my PDFs. He's this store's PDF printing manager! He's probably clicked to open a bunch of folders already. Has he never created a folder in his whole life?
The second was curiosity:
I should ask him how he doesn't know how to create a folder.
The third was denial:
Actually, I probably must have heard him wrong, and if I asked him something like this, I'd just embarrass myself by making such outlandish assumption. "This guy thinks I don't know how to create a folder," he will probably think of me. Surely he knows how to create a folder, it's just that there was some sort of miscommunication error. Perhaps they don't call it folders these days anymore, just like "My Computer" has become "This Computer." Not that this is relevant to someone who uses Windows 7. Maybe he thought I meant to create a folder in the PDF?
The fourth was acceptance:
I guess some people just don't know how to create folders. People are forced to use computers whether they want to or not. That doesn't mean they learn to do or are taught even the most basic computer tasks. Clearly this hasn't hindered this man's job so far, so what difference does it make if he knows how to create a folder or not?
After checking the PDFs for a while, he told me it would be a good idea if I checked them myself and "created a folder." So I went behind the counter, while he went talk to his coworkers. The store was about to close.
I saw the "new folder" button on the Windows 7's ribbon. I didn't click on it even though it would be faster since my hand was already on the mouse. I clicked on the window to give it keyboard focus and then pressed Ctrl+Shift+N to create the folder.
Looking back, I don't think I was being smug or asserting my own technical superiority, specially since there was nobody around to witness it. Deep down I just felt that, there is a man who can't create a folder even if he wants to, and here I am able to create one without even clicking on anything. It would be a waste if I didn't use this knowledge when I had it and others didn't.
When the man came back, I showed him the PDFs left remaining and taught him how to create a folder. After he finished, he told me if I knew how to use computers, I should have put all pages I wanted to print in a single PDF so he could just print the whole thing at once instead of having to open each file one by one.
I'd like to think we both became wiser that day. Because if he already knew how to create a folder I'd feel really embarrassed.