Okay, not really.  But it sure seemed that way.  The MS Office students ask for help ten times more often than the Web Design students.

Okay, that sentence probably deserves a little explanation.  I’m in an Adult Education retraining course (most of us are unemployed) and there are two available courses of study: Web Design and MS Office.  And I will freely admit that I have a bias against the Office students from the get go: who would choose Office over the chance to learn HTML, CSS, the Adobe Creative Suite, PHP and Java? I’m sorry, Excel has its uses, but it just can’t compare.  My *very* biased theory is that they’re not smart enough to handle the web design. (Which I realize is unfair, and bullshit to boot, but I never claimed I wasn’t elitist.)

Anyway, the Office students, especially the newest batch, are ALWAYS asking for help.  (For the Twitter peeps: yes, Shitzilla is one of the Office students.)  I always assumed it was because they were idiots.  One of the more socially awkward Office students enlightened me at the break.  (I didn’t realize we were having a conversation, but he likes to randomly walked up to people and have conversations at them.) Turns out they have the world’s worst Word text book, and it occasionally skips steps, doesn’t give them keyboard shortcuts they’re apparently expected to know, etc.  (We have one of those in our course too.  The second CSS text is one of the worst books known to man to read, and I struggled through it for weeks until I found out everyone else was just doing the exercises. I kind of wish I’d learned that 11 chapters ago.)

Anyway, the Office students aren’t universally located south of the middle of the IQ curve like I originally thought.  But you can be damn sure I’ll write about the exceptions in the near future!