Helping Out

A good friend of mine recently switched from PCs to Macs and was having trouble figuring out her new photo tools. She asked if I could come over and give her a quick tour so she could send photos of her new baby out to friends and family. I said I'd be happy to go over and hold her baby help her out!

When we sat down, I realized that because she was working with a new Mac laptop, everything from her operating system to her iPhoto was a newer version than I use. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though, because whenever I wasn't sure about how to do a task, she got to see how I went about figuring it out. (Looking through different menus, pulling up the help area, and searching on Google.) Plus I got to learn some of the new features myself!

It reminded me that the best way to really learn something is not only try it out yourself, but to teach it or share it with someone else. It also reminded me that some tasks become almost invisible. She had told me before I went over that she couldn't cut and paste in a basic Word doc or email, and I had no idea what might be causing such a basic problem--until I got there and we realized that she was using the keyboard shortcut Control-V, Control-X when on Mac computers the shortcut starts with the Command key. So simple, but it didn't occur to me until I saw it in action. It's one of the things that makes answering tech reference questions on the phone so tricky!

Oh, and I did hold her baby the whole time I was there. She didn't need any technical assistance, though. :)