Maybe it’s because I’m just recovering from attending my 35-year college reunion, but I had a memory return of being in the college computer lab and telling someone to use the mouse to move the cursor, so they picked it up and waved it in the air.
That Star Trek IV scene was a reminder that a computer mouse isn’t as universally intuitive of a device as it might seem.
(And on a tangentially-related note—I’ve been driving a Ford Mustang convertible this weekend and the fact that some screens are touch screens and some are not has been a bit of a source for confusion to me. I think I don’t have the same issue with my Prius because there the steering-wheel cursor keys control a screen that’s on a different plane from the main dashboard. Also, I really miss my radar cruise control.)
> Maybe it’s because I’m just recovering from attending my 35-year college reunion, but I had a memory return of being in the college computer lab and telling someone to use the mouse to move the cursor, so they picked it up and waved it in the air.
I've seen this behavior in people that have seen other people use mouses for over a decade before, especially my Mom. It's my personal universal sign to immediately stop teaching that person anything. If you get shown a mouse move across a table like a pug, get explained that moving it up and down, left and right is a relative motion and you pick it up and wave it in the air you are just signaling that you do not want to learn.
My mom and her friends pestered me for years as a teen to show them how computers work and how to use them. When I tried to teach them the basics they were dismissive as if the computer had to conform to their way of thinking how the interaction should work. I learned to not engage with those people at all. Funnily enough, a decade later after they actually wanted to learn it they figured it out themselves.
Late 90s/early 00s, I tried to show my grandmother how to play cars on my Performa 5200. Her natural hand position — presumably from a lifetime of pen use — rotated it 90°, which meant the mouse movement absolutely did not follow her wrist movement.
I rented a Toyota Camry for a week. I didn't like the implementation of radar cruise control - we were driving in the hills around San Luis Obispo and the car ahead would go around a bend, the car would speed up, we'd go around the bend and the car would slam on the brakes.
I guess that if it'd been a hybrid that things would have been better since it could use regeneration rather than braking. I love adaptive cruise control in my Bolt.
That Star Trek IV scene was a reminder that a computer mouse isn’t as universally intuitive of a device as it might seem.
(And on a tangentially-related note—I’ve been driving a Ford Mustang convertible this weekend and the fact that some screens are touch screens and some are not has been a bit of a source for confusion to me. I think I don’t have the same issue with my Prius because there the steering-wheel cursor keys control a screen that’s on a different plane from the main dashboard. Also, I really miss my radar cruise control.)