Modern 4 Horsemen of the Apocolypse
My personal three horsemen of the apocalypse are weaponized incompetence, learned helplessness, willful ignorance. The fourth horseman is a free space that could at any time be filled by lack of critical thinking skills, misogyny, racism, bigotry, hubris, etc.
while the glaring issue of attention span is one pillar, I think another hidden one is mutual respect.
If I'm on a helpdesk call and this person has never met me or interacted with me before I'm essentially a tool to them. Someone they can express their grief to and hope to get an answer because to them "I'm the expert". This feeling compounds when a lot of people just assume I have full view and knowledge of their setup (OS, apps, website, keyboard/mouse, etc). It's as if they called and I'm already caught up to speed and all the preliminary questions are just a slog script that can be skipped. But it is us as IT professionals to diffuse the tension. A little bit of sympathy or a joke relating to how "the internet is terribly slow on my machine. I'm gonna dump some coffee on it" breaks that tool barrier. This also softens the relationship and let's the user know that I'm not some omnipotent tech entity that can whisk away any problems.
I'm here to diagnose and problem solve step by step In a weird way this has given me a silver lining to look towards with the increase of AI. Even my own personal use of AI I still detail out my problem and explain what I've attempted to solve it. A user that gives the "didn't work" or "still slow" to a chatbot is only going to get garbage generic answers. At this point it's beyond tech literacy and just plain old critical thinking
Self reflect, do you yourself sometimes sound like a robot?