Many years ago, in my first tech support job, I was helping a bright young student submit an online assignment. It was clear very early in the conversation tha

Many years ago, in my first tech support job, I was helping a bright young student submit an online assignment. It was clear very early in the conversation that she was bright, so I –very unconsciously– made some assumptions. After much frustration at my inability to diagnose why she wasn't able to submit her assignment, I broke down and told her to tell me exactly what she was doing, step-by-step. It turned out she was successfully navigating to the webpage and filling out all but one of the text fields by tabbing to the field and typing in her response. But when it came to pasting her essay into the webform (from the word processor), she assumed that by selecting the browser's edit-paste menu, it would put the essay in the essay field. It genuinely would have never occurred to me that a browser's edit-paste functionality would _know_ which textfield to paste text into. Likewise, it genuinely never occurred to her that a copied essay would be pasted into anything other than the only text field large enough for an essay, and the only text field which was labeled "essay".