America's expectations for its leaders have always been low. We've had presidents who needed help with basic tech, and we were okay with it. But now, we face a terrifying prospect: a leader who might know how to convert a Word document to a PDF.
    • DJDarren@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      43·
      2 months ago

      My HR manager is also 60 and routinely publishes the company newsletter as a .docx.

      Nothing is a given in this life.

      • greenskye@lemm.eeEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        Also the new intern might not be able to do this either. There’s a surprisingly narrow age range where this skill set is expected

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        Yeah but the career politician part means that she hasn’t had a job since McDonald’s that didn’t come with at least half a dozen underpaid assistants, so it’s a fair assumption.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        2 months ago

        and routinely publishes the company newsletter as a .docx.

        This is good or bad?

        Using an easily editable format seems good. Microsoft though

        • DJDarren@thelemmy.clubEnglish
          10·
          2 months ago

          A) Why would a newsletter need to be editable?

          B) The vast majority of our staff access the newsletter via their phones, and will not care to install an app just so they can read it.

    • Landless2029@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      She was also a lawyer early on in her career. I’m sure as an office gopher she handle plenty a PDF, printing, copying faxing and DOCX.

      • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        2 months ago

        How old are you?

        Kamala Harris was already middle aged when the DOCX standard was released or the workflow of converting a word to pdf became common. All of that stuff really didn’t hit mainstream until the Obama administration. It would have probably even been longer for a legal office to adopt it.

        I think it’s safe to say she knows how to use Microsoft Word (or something like Lotus Notes), print a document, and even scan something to a pdf. I bet you could also teach her how to use ether “print to PDF” function fairly quickly. However if you just plop her in front of a computer and tell her to go at it I think the most likely result is Kamala swearing at the ribbon interface…

  • bazus1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    We’re fast approaching that golden age where every president comes standard with PDF creation skills.

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      181·
      2 months ago

      I dunno, mobile devices aren’t “computers”, and Gen-X gets ignored so hard it’ll likely be skipped right over, and we’ll jump immediately into Idiocracy (it’s what plants crave).

      Although I bet Pete Buttigieg knows how:-).

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        Harris’ birthdate is October 20th 1964, she’s pretty much Gen X, having had to deal with the 80s crap as a teenager/young adult, hell, 1965 is the first year for Gen X

        • dendrichor@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Douglas Copeland originally defined Gen X as starting ~1960. That tracks with Gen Jones - 1960-1964 - a boomer subset that had a very different experience from that of classic boomers. I have seen Obama described as a Gen X-er and he’s older than I am.

    • ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
      14·
      2 months ago

      Not with their average ages creeping up. It’s the same generation of of people over and over.

    • Admetus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      A generation or two ahead and it’ll be hard for presidents to operate the holographic interface/brain interface and find typical functions.

    • blibla@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      they gotta dtop being 80 for that tho otherwise it’ll take another 20 years or so

    • ditty@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      For sure Obama could convert a Word doc no problem. Hell, Cheney Bush Jr. probably could’ve as well.

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        271·
        2 months ago

        With his youthful, tech-savvy vibe, many assumed that Barack Obama knew this stuff. But when pressed about how to convert file types, he responded, “What do I look like, some kinda fuckin’ nerd?” His honesty was refreshing. After all, converting a file shouldn’t be the president’s job. That is what interns are for. (Recent surveys show 90% of interns’ work hours are spent combining, condensing, and converting documents in a way that doesn’t crash the aging government servers.)

          • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
            7·
            2 months ago

            I mean… kinda (a hot one:-)?

            Edit: receipt:

            img

            img

            Conclusion: nerds rule, conservatives drool 🤤!

              • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
                2·
                2 months ago

                It’s okay, you must still be recovering from that coma that you simply must have been in for 8 years to have missed this hot bod:

                img

                img

                Michelle forgives you though, bc she now has this hunk of man meat all to herself finally, and therefore so do I:-).

                Also, we can be so easily distracted these days by…

                img

                img

                Wait, what were we talking about now? :-P

    • taiyang@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      To be fair, Teddy only managed to convert to PDF by sheer gumption. No matter how many clippies he faced, he never gave up, never crashed his Word, and always disabled OneDrive before anything else.

  • Lizardking27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    I’m pretty sure you can just select pdf when saving the file in word.

    Edit: lol wasn’t really commenting on the politics of this post, just being pedantic about word processing software. Please don’t read any political meaning into my statement lmao.

    • egrets@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      2 months ago

      One candidate is 78 years old, types in all-caps, and forgets what he was saying halfway through a sentence. For my money, I think it’s a fair bet that the difference between a PDF and a native MS Word file eludes them.

      On second thoughts...

      Come to think of it, a regular client of Epstein’s teenage human trafficking ring probably know more about ‘PDF files’ (ahem) than most of us.

    • Dwemthy (he/him)@lemdro.idEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      Right, but keep in mind how low the bar is for politicians. They have people for this.

      Are we sure this isn’t the first presidential election where a candidate even knows what a pdf is?

    • grysbok@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      And reminder: “save as PDF” is better for accessibility because it keeps tags and structural metadata. “Print as PDF” strips that and makes accessibility nerds sad. (This comment brought to you by me, a librarian/webadmin armpit-deep in updating several sites to meet the new ruling on digital accessibility for government websites in the US)

    • jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I believe the point is that deep in this digital age the only President that’s actually used a computer before was Obama (probably).

    • Admetus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      It’s like the principal in my school hitting return many times to get to the next page.

      I did an office IT course which was next level: making sections which enable you to change every bit of the page format without altering other sections.

      At the time it didn’t seem to matter but that course was instrumental in saving so much time and hassle.