Are you one of those people who can figure out how to use something almost instantly?

I was able to do it with most of my cel phones.. and laptop… not so much an ultrasound machine.

I think there just might be an open perception involved not so much an ability. Its just observation and a bit of trial and error.

I have always thought of myself as the kind of person who was a natural at tech, until I got my BlackBerry, when I discovered that my 12-year-old daughter is much quicker than I.

Yep.

Except trying to program the time on my microwave. Drives me nuts.

Give me ten minutes with a new gadget, and I’ve got it down. Same with most tools. I think it’s a spatial thing either way.

I develop a mental framework of the operating systems of my phone, computer, etc when I first sit down with it, which makes it much easier to learn how to find what I need quickly. When I get a new phone I figured out some things in the first few days that friends who’d had the same phone for months didn’t know how to do with it. I like to explore menus!

I think I adapt pretty well. I switched from PC to Mac a couple months ago, and it was no problem.

Yes, it’s pretty easy for me. I’m one to get into something & poke around to figure things out & let the instruction manual lay for a while. After I get the basic gist of something, then I go back & read the fine points.

I’m not great with technology, but anything mechanical is a snap. I think of it as a sort of mental acuity for how things interact with each other and the space around them. I can study something for a minute or two and have a good grasp of how it will work. For instance, having never driven anything bigger than a pickup truck, I was forced to drive a big old stake bed truck. Said truck was also pulling a 16 foot trailer with a bulldozer on it. At night. On an unfamiliar highway. >:(
I just walked around the whole contraption for a minute or two, figuring out the axle situation, and the hitch situation. I drove it like a champ. My husband’s male coworkers were duly impressed. :P

I can understand something after navigating it for a bit, I like to look at all the features and mess around with the new toy. But, I don’t like new techie things and choose not to learn how to use most of them.

My father types with like, one finger…it’s the most painful thing to watch. I have to type a lot for him, and so does my mother. But, he is insanely smart when it comes to mechanical things (he’s an electrician, HVAC tech-mainly, can do plumbing and almost anything related to those subjects)
My 80 year old grandmother wanted a computer to use Facebook, and she can’t even get it to connect to the internet. It was basically a waste of money.

Yes, it’s happened many times. A teacher will have a problem with a projector ir speakers, and when they ask me fir help it fix it in literally 20 seconds LOL!

When I get my laptop on two weeks I’m not going to even read the manual. unless i’m really stuck

I am definitely one of those types of people. I love to examine what I’m working with and figure out what makes it work. Since I have that kind of knowledge, I can figure most things out as soon as I look at it. It makes me angry when people have to ask for help because they don’t know how to operate simple technology.

@Facade: Yet another reason I lurve you.

We were the last class to graduate art college without computers (hello Letraset type). Photoshop et. al. had just come into use and it was quickly sink or swim for us.

As such I am self-taught in Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, Dreamweaver and about a dozen other pieces of software.

Ironically, I’ve been teaching those same software for almost ten years now at three different colleges.

Usually

Mechanically? No. If it has a monitor and buttons, I can usually pick it up within a few minutes.

I seem to pick up the apps that I want very quickly but can’t be bothered to learn the things I don’t need. I was the 1st teacher in my school to have a website. Eventually there was a clunky school site that allowed teachers to have one page where you could post pix and paragraphs. In the last 5 years they have changed the school site twice requiring teachers to rebuild individual sites. I’m still using my original site and just linking.

We have had a perfectly good gradekeeping program but a new district wide system is supposed to put everything in one place including lesson plans, seating charts and grades. The class in a box and everything accessible to parents and students. Of course there are major glitches and parents demanding to know why L’il Precious got a B+ instad of an A- on his essay. I’m sticking with the program that just gives me a letter grade.

Ahh-yep! I’m adaptable like that at least with software and programs and so on. I can’t write them, but I can use them. And my learning curve with gadgets is pretty small, too.

Yeah, I do pretty well. Manuals? I don’t need no stinkin’ manuals!

Worse comes to worse, I take it apart.

Quite the contrary. I’m not the hands-on guy.

Yeah, some things come naturally to me. New software, new sites, phones, computers, tv’s, etc. Mom always has me help her with anything electronic.

No I am not. LOL