A lot of Americans know how to use a computer.  My grandmother doesn't, and that's fine.  She has no use for strange electronic gizmos, and my grandfather was a bit resistant to change, as evidenced by his frequent criticism of "rock and roll music" as "a bunch of weird guys just jumping around and screaming".  But even my mom and dad are computer literate.  My mom knows how to use fancy things like mail merge (I have no idea what that is), and my dad was one of the first people I knew with an internet connection. 

With this is mind, it pains me to see people who should be adept at using computers instead having trouble performing simple tasks like copying and pasting.  I work with people who have been using computers since mainframes, punch cards, and vacuum tubes.  And yet these same people don't understand how to do basic things in Microsoft Excel.  One woman was a very important person on a big project, and she knew about useful little Excel tidbits like using a single quote at the beginning of a cell to force it to display text instead of a formula.  Yet she wasn't completely comfortable with using Enter, Tab, or the arrow keys to move to different cells.  She would type something in one cell, click another cell, and start typing there.  After a few seconds, I almost had a nervous breakdown.  One of my professors used to open a separate instance of a program for each document he would open.  So he would open Microsoft Word and File - Open a file.  When he was done with that file, he would close Word, reopen Word, and File - Open another file.  It was more than painful to watch.  Another thing that gets to me is people's inability to find files on their computer.  They'll be working on something and save it in a location that's easy to remember and find.  Then they'd struggle through minimizing all their windows and displaying the desktop so they could find the link to Windows Explorer.  When they couldn't find the icon that literally says "Windows Explorer" (even though My Computer and My Documents do the same thing), they'd clumsily bumble through the start menu and open and close every single subfolder.  Then when they finally found Explorer, they'd try to find their file in the Windows folder or some other place that never stores files you're working on.  I think I had an aneurysm while watching this. #technology