[snprbob86]

- Email can have multiple recipients and reply vs reply-to-all

My mother has been using Outlook at her office for over 5 years. When I send an email to both her and my father, she replies only to me and frequently ends with "tell your father..."

-Copy and paste

Somehow, she understands CUT and paste, but can't make the mental leap to COPY. She typically cuts, pastes it right back to where she came from, and then goes to paste it again elsewhere.

--

Despite all this, she used to work with a 100% text mode CLI app for requisitioning with airline tickets as a travel agent. She was an expert at esoteric commands and had a little notebook that co-workers had photocopied and bound as a reference manual. She didn't understand a thing that she was typing, but she knew which magic incantations worked and which didn't. I noticed that she was doing the equivalent of calling functions, piping data, storing variables, etc., but to her it was "I type this in, and instead of 'CITY' I write the actual city name. Oh, but if the city name has a space in it, I need to type \ before the space. But if I type a \ anywhere else, it can crash the whole computer."

[nooneelse]

That last bit reminds me of an old "Practical Guide to UNIX" book that I happened upon in a used bookstore some time back. I started looking through the examples for the various command line functions and most all of them were put in terms of something a secretary might want to do (type up notes, find files using various types of searches, split files up and distribute the parts along various organizational lines, collect together such parts into new files and format those to look better when printed, even the basics for how to script anything they found themselves doing on a regular basis). It got me wondering if secretaries were able to use such books and become command line gurus back in the day? Maybe they weren't and that type of book was a total failure.

[listic]

> Somehow, she understands CUT and paste, but can't make the mental leap to COPY. She typically cuts, pastes it right back to where she came from, and then goes to paste it again elsewhere.

That's a pro trick, I think. I consider myself a power user and I switched from copy+paste to cut+paste+paste a while ago. It gives me an extra kick of making sure the copy worked as intended.

[nandemo]

Clearly you should set up a mail filter that forwards emails with "From: Mom" and mail body containing "tell your father".

[pufuwozu]

I don't think that's a great idea. A mum/mom could always send an email saying "DON'T tell your father!"