Tell me where it hurts…
I’ve come to the conclusion that providing tech support via phone or email is a lot like being a medical professional. The customer/patient describes their symptoms, and we diagnose accordingly. Which is why it always strikes me as funny that people expect to email us with a generic question like “Why can’t I get into your website?!?!” and expect a lucid response that addresses the issue.
It’s like walking into a doctor’s office, not offering a description of any symptoms, and grabbing your doctor by the collar, desperately crying, “Why do I hurt?!?! Tell me WHY I HURT?!?!”
Popularity: 8% [?]
January 19th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
The reason is probably two-fold:
1. People discuss medicine with other people. People do not discuss Web stuff with other people. [Those who do are "geeks".]
2. There are centuries of practice behind modern medicine. Behind modern computing, years.
January 20th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Leave it to the engineer to punch holes in a perfectly good humorous analogy.
January 21st, 2005 at 9:42 am
I was helping a friend with his mac on Monday. He was using an old copy of IE, and of course the security certificate expired. Since Microsloth isn’t making IE for the Mac anymore, we had to move him to something else. After I’d installed Netscape 7 for him, he said “OK, let’s shutdown so I can try it myself.” I proceeded to the “Special” menu, where I chose “Restart.”
“Oh, this is going to take much longer,” he said.
“No,” I explained to the novice. “A full shutdown is actuall longer. But it’s not really by much. You probably won’t notice a difference, really.”
“No, this is way longer. I usually just use the control tab, and disconnect from there.”
AHA! He didn’t want to “restart” at all! He wanted to “reconnect.” I explained to him the diffference, and I think he caught on that the words actually do mean different things. Maybe not to a neophyte Mac lawyer, but to a computer guy it does!