Computer illiterate people

There is one thing in life that always has amazed me. People who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, but still continue to talk on the subject as if they were experts. Let me give you a couple of examples:

A customer and I were discussing a free word processing program called Open Office. (A great program by the way www.openoffice.org) I told her that she could just use that program instead of paying hundreds of dollars for Microsoft's version. She then said
"I've got windows ME. I know its not as good as office 2003, but it is still good." "Umm wait a minute. Did I miss something?" I thought to myself. No I didn't. It's pretty sad when you cant tell the difference between an operating system and a word processing program.

Here is example #2:
My UPS guy gave me this flyer that he found. It was an add that a student had made in an effort to sell his laptop. It read something like this.

Laptop for Sale!
Dell dimension 2000
20 Gigs of memory
Only $200

Wow. I don't know about you guys, but I have never seen anything with 20 Gigs of memory. If the add was true then he had a monster laptop. To tell you the truth I think he was a little mixed up and meant 20 Gigs of hard drive space. I think that is a little bit more reasonable.

I have some confessions to make. I think that I often make this mistake myself. You know pretending that I'm cool, but then finding out that I am just kind of not very bright. Here's a good example. One time I was in Mexico and I decided to be cool. I was going to say in Spanish to the pretty Mexican girl that I liked her sandals. I proceeded to say "Me gusta sus cucharras". For those of you who don't speak Spanish that means "I like your spoons". Phrew. Talk about a sticky situation. I was extremely lucky that she knew I was a moron. She just laughed. A lot.