Hurray For The Young!

It pays to tell younger people when you are having IT annoyances.  My latest annoyance: I would keep inadvertently zooming or shrinking the text and images on my laptop screen and had been ever since I converted to Windows 10.

My assistant, who is much younger and more tech savvy than I am, was able to correctly describe the problem, discover that other people are also having it, find a solution (a tweak in the track pad setting in my computer that I had adjusted when I bought it, but not re-updated after switching to Windows 10), and implemented it in less then ten minutes.

It was such a simple fix to something that had been annoying me for a couple of months and that I personally had spent at least a couple of hours over that time period without avail.  The key difference is that he thought to look at the track pad's role in the problem, while I had been focused only on the display settings in trying to solve it and in trying to describe the problem when describing it to others, and thus was overlooking a critical piece of evidence.

This is interesting, in part, because something very similar is a common problem for non-lawyers dealing with legal issues.  Very often what lawyers have, and non-lawyers do not, which is the focus of both final examinations in law school classes and on the bar exam, is an ability to spot the most important issue presented by a set of fact and to ask questions to elucidate the critical facts which the client had not realized were the important ones.