Funny MSN convo

I'm trying to teach a friend UNIX and I thought you guys might get a kick out of this:

Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
ok yes the home directory (/home/elizaforyou) is where you are after login
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
cd changes directories
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
man <command> will get you the help page on any command
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
mkdir will make a new directory
eliza says:
but it says missing name for redirect.
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
ls lists the contents of a directory
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
when you go to look up the IP?
eliza says:
what ip?
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
wwhen did you get that error hun?
eliza says:
when I typed man<command>
Matt (working on the UNIX station) says:
oh honey the command you wanna look up goes where <command> is
eliza says:
uuuuffff

She's learning :D

lol. Sounds like my parents!!

Sounds like the user that called into our Call Center needing tech support....We told her to right click on the 'My Computer' icon. She 'Wrote' Click On her computer.We were talking about that one for months.

To be fair, the computer industry uses
a vocabulary that seems to come from
another planet.
People educated in the ordinary way
should be forgiven if they sometimes
don't get it.

try looking up the ordinary definitions of
terms like "virtual" "partition" or "back up"
I didn't know a computer had a reverse gear!

I have to agree with Rcgreen. The words used in "computer land" are the same words we use in day to day life, all with different meanings. I think that a little bit of slack needs to be cut for those who don't use it as much as we do. It can be very confusing, and the world is moving more and more quickly towards computer dependence, which is forcing people who never had a desire to use a computer to have to use them, if not in their day to day lives, then certainly at work.

It may be hard to remember, but there was a time you didn't know as much as you do now.

Deb :D

The problem is different in french language.
There's no confusion because computers terms are in majority in english.
In fact, I have learned english with computers terms and I discovered after their traditional significations.