I had a patron today who needed help saving things to a thumb drive. I showed him how to pull up the save as box, pick the right drive, and save his document.
A few minutes later, he asked for help again. I showed him again, but I noticed the document had the same name and thought he was just trying to save changes to the document. I even asked a followup question which seemed to confirm this. I showed him the save button and said, "Once you've saved the document once, you can go ahead and push this button and it will save the changes." The patron was youngish, probably just a few years older than me, and he'd acted like he just needed to refresh his memory about how to use the devices. Case closed.
Except it wasn't. About half an hour later, I was coming back in from moving my car (oh, how I love downtown parking) and J came to ask me about this patron. The tech services guy was helping him because he claimed he had 10 documents saved, and he could only find one.
Well, the reason he could only find one was that once he'd saved a document, he was deleting the one he already had and starting a new one. And then, instead of using the Save As button and renaming it, he was pressing the save button and saving over his changes.
How could I have anticipated this? I'm not even sure. It would never occur to me to create documents that way- in fact, I'd probably keep them all as one document and go down to the next page to make things easier for printing. But surely there's some way I could have helped this man.
Thankfully, he'd only been there for about half an hour, so hopefully recreating his work wouldn't take too long, and we added to his computer time. I learned a lesson though - make sure you talk the patron all the way through the problem. When it comes to computers, don't make assumptions based on what the patron probably should know or what seems like common knowledge. If you're new to computers, none of it is common knowledge.
