Being a technologically advanced girl, sometimes it baffles me how people still don’t know the basics of computer–installing a software, burning a CD, copying PDF texts and formatting fonts in Word or PowerPoint.

And don’t give me the excuse “I’m too old to learn,” if you’re still working in 2009, you need to keep up with the world.

I’m not asking you to crop photos for Facebook, or set up a Twitter account to link with your Flickr. These are workplace basics that you need to know to survive.

I have been to so many meetings with marketing managers, sales managers, god-knows-what managers and I can’t even count how many times their PowerPoint presentations are shown through the editing screen, not the full-screen viewer. So when they had to change a page, they had to click one from the list on the side. Then why didn’t you just make a Word document? And one just almost happened today. If I hadn’t introduced the magic of F5, it would have been very embarrassing.

I remember having a meeting with a very famous and respectable hotel chain, who came to present to us their new venture. Brought in professionally dressed team, who then instead of whipping out a laptop to connect with our projector, they rolled out a stack of four presentation boards, with taped printouts on them.

Is it just Thailand? Is it only the Thai companies and employees that refuse to go along with the world’s development? Most job postings nowadays the very least require a knowledge of Microsoft Office, and to know there are still people of some form of authority and seniority in a company who are clueless about these basics, it’s just shocking.

Maybe because most Thai bosses are treated, and expect to be treated, like gods, and the trivial tasks of learning to bold your texts are just too beneath them.

I’m glad that so far I have only been blessed with new generation bosses who see employees as teammates and not subordinates. If I had to work in a working environment like the one I had a meeting with today, I would rather live in a cave than having to grin and bare with big-haired, silk suit wearing all-knowing beings’ constant stream of “how do I make the alphabets darker?” or “please make it big big on the screen” kind of surprises.