trinityvixen | More oddities from the new guy

Am I just paranoid or is looking over someone's shoulder at what they're doing on the computer really fucking creepy? Today, I was watching The Colbert Report in a tiny corner of my screen, and the New Guy (hereafter referred to as N.G.) looked over at my computer and asked if I was going into the Army. Context: Colbert was doing a mock trial of basic training to get ready for his Iraq shows, so there were dudes in fatigues. But still? Why would you assume, from one video, that I was necessarily contemplating participating in the activities that take place in the video? Why do pictures of planes = I know people who are dead in plane crashes!?

Also, he's asked me twice now how to do basic--and I mean cripplingly amateurish--things in Excel and Word. He wanted to move a few lines down on a spreadsheet. I was like, "Er, copy-paste?" I got a none-too-well-defined demurral. I say, "Copy, paste, erase the duplicate row?" and he goes "Yeah, but..." That's it. Yeah, but, and mumbles. I then say, "Uh, insert a row?" That does the trick! (!?)

Then he wanted to know how to get back to typing outside of a table in Word. (He made a table; he couldn't get out of it to keep typing normally.) He has a different version than me, so rather than dick around with the seemingly minor but probably annoying differences that would prevent me from telling him how to do it, I just suggest "Copy-delete-carriage returns-paste in the middle." (As in, copy the table, delete it, hit return a billion times, paste the table in the middle, then voila! You can type outside the table again.)

It took him roughly two minutes (no exaggerations here) to figure out how to select the table properly to copy it. And that was after he whined about how he didn't want to delete the table because what if it didn't copy right? I was like, "Undo function is your friend, dude." If I'd known how much trouble he'd have with the copy part, I might not have been so flippant. I'm still a little scared that he regarded the undo function as something of a revelation.