People don’t read signs. But they also don’t read warnings and important information on their screens anymore, either.

A man vents about his usual routine working in tech support.

It’s baffling.

If you’re here, you have no problem reading, so read the whole story and see what people are saying about it.

90% of my job is reading on-screen prompts for people because they saw words and gave up

Kid brings me his laptop, saying he’s trying to launch a program but a popup keeps blocking it. I take a look.

The popup says ‘This program cannot launch while [other program] is running. Close [other program] and try again.’

I ask kid, “what happened when you tried that?”

He gets embarrassed and says “Oh…I didn’t…” So I have him close the other program and try again.

Guess what happened…

Magically, the problem goes away.

A woman comes over and says she’s trying to log into a desktop, but it’s not working.

I walk over and take a look, having her type in her username and password.

She does so, and a popup says ‘Password must be changed. Click Continue to change password.’

She says, “See! This keeps happening, I don’t know what to do.”

He had a hunch.

I say, as politely as I can, “Well, see here it says to change your password. So let’s do that.”

I click Continue for her.

Box one: Enter new password. Box two: Confirm new password.

She is confused by the two boxes. “What do I do?” I had to point to each sentence before she would read them.

It keeps happening.

A girl comes over and says the printer won’t release her job.

I walk over to look at it. She enters her password and the que opens, displaying her print job.

Then she stands there. “See? It won’t do anything.” I click the button that says Print.

Her job releases. She is embarrassed.

Please. Please just read.

Please read things on your screen before freaking out.

Good reading comprehension can save you a lot of trouble.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this.

Exactly.

We can’t even expect it anymore.

Wow, this is getting serious.

It makes you ponder.

Error messages need to be delivered in short video format.

That’s a nice way to do it.

A pro tip.

Guiding them to figure this out on their own is a good move.

Reading is a superpower nowadays.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.