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Scott Kurtz Blasts Comic Strips on Tech Support
Posted by
Roblimo
on Tue Jan 04, 2000 01:50 AM
from the cartoonist-vs.-cartoonist dept.
from the cartoonist-vs.-cartoonist dept.
J. FoxGlov writes "Scott Kurtz, creator of the game-centric comic strip PvP, released his first rant with the new domain. It's his view on comic strips about tech support, and specifically names User Friendly and Absurd Notions as examples of strips that just aren't funny. 'Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. It's just plain wrong.' Read the rest of the rant here." I fit many people's definition of a clueless (Linux) user, but I still find User Friendly funny. Do you? Or do you think Kurtz is right that it's not nice to knock people who call tech support, even in fun?
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User Friendly is not funny. Period. (Score:2)
--
Well.... (Score:2)
Anybody who has any type of tech support/helpdesk job will LOVE his (Illiad) work. My friend thought UF sucked until he accually got a job at an ISP. He is addicted to it now
I Also question the Penny Arcade guy for going after User Friendly for this. I could understand a cartoonist mad at another cartoonist if he does something REALLY wrong and REALLY offensive, but this? It just seems petty to me.
He's simply wrong. (Score:2)
Second, User Friendly is often funny, not because of they making fun of the clueless people calling technical support, but because of the superiority of the people answering the calls.
I've done technical support.
Anybody who believes you can train just anybody to do proper/good top level technical support in 2 weeks is an idiot. I can show a 4 year old how to put a PC together from scratch. I can't show a 4 year old how to properly troubleshoot it. And having some guy on the phone follow a flow chart isn't the same thing.
Yes. Newbie user jokes are cruel. But then, some users are stupid too. I'm sorry, but the 'cup-holder' jokes, and the 'power outage' jokes are all too real.
And if you think teachers don't crack jokes about kids when the kids aren't around then I doubt you think they are human.
Clueless??? (Score:2)
There are two things that you laugh about--things that are funny, and things that are true. I think that newbie-bashing by tech-support is hilarious because it trashes the tech-support more than it does the newbies. Have you ever called tech-support and were told that the widget you just payed $1500 for works, you just have to not be an idiot to make it work?
If you do not like a certain type of humor, you are not forced to participate in it. That's what the back button is for on your web browser.
I, for one, cannot stand Jay Leno, because I think he is a mean bastard. I just don't watch him. It's that simple. If you don't like User-Friendly, don't buy the book.
Just my opinion.
He's whining. (Score:2)
Pure and simple, the guy is a whiner. If he truely didn't know anything about computers when he started tech support, then just was he doing on the hell desk? Simple, being an id10t. He didn't belong there.
Computers are substantially more complex than driving a car. Admittadly, they're also substantally less dangerous if you misuse them, but we don't require a license to operate a computer. Instead, anyone with a few hundred dollars can get a computer and then begin ranting that those of us who spent years learning how to operate them are idiots and can't make them functional.
Bullshit. They're perfectly functional if you know how to use them. I'm not talking about elitism or "read the 400 page manual," but simple "what the password is" or "the CDROM is *NOT* a coffee cup holder."
I've heard several (sometimes good) jokes about tech support being dumb or obstructionist, but the fact is most tech support folks *HAVE* to know what they're doing and even more often than not, they have to follow obstructionist policies passed down from above. It's a matter of truth and ability.
Users have the ability to learn. I'll go out on a limb and say they don't *WANT* to learn. They want computers to be as easy to use as a pen and paper. It *WON'T* happen. These people expect to just sit in front a computer and use it with no other studying/learning, yet they wouldn't assemble something without following instructions.
Give me a break.
ignorant support people... (Score:2)
So, I'd say I agree with Kurtz. The horror, the horror...
Technological Illiteracy vs. Just Plain Dumb (Score:4)
I work in a computer cluster here at Georgia Tech, and I'll give you an example I've seen. A fellow in his mid 40's or so was working with M$ Word in the cluster, and trying his damndest to get a printout of something he had brought in on disk. I watched him poke around for a good 20 minutes, and then come ask me for help. He explained that he wanted to get a copy of what he had on the screen, and had been selecting 'copy'. Later on, he asked my help again to enlarge the fonts, he had been zooming into the document and couldn't figure out why it was the same size.
Now, many people would be tempted to laugh at this guy, but honestly, I think he was making some pretty intuitive guesses for someone who probably had zero previous experience. I was pleasantly surprised, and glad to help him out.
The other noteworthy group, and those who warrant ridicule, are those who abandon all semblance of common sense when it comes to computers, or worse, they actively seek to avoid learning or trying to learn, because, in all honesty, it's considered fashionable by many to be clueless about computers. A customer of mine a few years ago brought his computer in for repair no less than 4 times, because he had tried to cram a CD-rom into his 1.2mb floppy drive. I asked him why he had gone to so much trouble to force it when it clearly didn't want to go in that slot, and he said he thought it was supposed to be hard for some reason. *sigh*
At any rate, there's a big difference between people who are clueless about computers, and people who are just stupid as bricks. Stupid people, since stupidity is usually a voluntary state, are always fair game for a little ribbing.
PC strikes again (Score:2)
If we only pretend everyone is a genius then soon everyone will be -- right? If you really think that I have a nice bridge... This notion that it's unfunny to point out that people make stupid mistakes is just more of the idea that laughing at people or giving them bad grades makes them stupid or keeps them ignorant. [Note: Causality reversal warning - remove head from ass before proceeding. Failure to comply may lead to a humorless existence in a dark smelly place.]
It may not be *nice*, but *please* don't tell me it's not funny!
Wrong on Several Counts (Score:5)
Yes, I used to work tech support and, yes, I'll admit that it is not a difficult job and most anyone could do it. I'll also say that I took enough ridiculous calls to write my own comic strip, if so moved. They were funny.
You're right that your plumber doesn't make fun of you... at least, not to your face. But I assure you there are Plumber calendars all over the place that make fun of all of us. You would be surprised at the industrial humor market. For just about every career in existence, there are cartoons and jokes that poke fun at their customers, coworkers, managers (Dilbert, for example). And they're funny.
In fact, I distinctly remember a teacher that I had in high school who was very proud his copy of the "Far Side" episode which featured a kid pushing as hard as he could on the door that was boldly labeled "PULL". It was funny.
Perhaps you're getting my theme now. It's funny. Perhaps you get it, perhaps you don't. You know what? I don't even like "User Friendly" that much. There are some good ones, but it doesn't do it for me the way Dilbert does (perhaps because most of my silly memories have to do with silly managers).
Anyway, we certainly have enough to do in this world without telling each other what we should or should not find amusing.
That's my take.
RP
Re:I think hes probably correct (Score:2)
Honestly, I don't think UF pokes fun at all at the users; I think it pokes fun at the staff, and makes light of their reactions. I actually have been called with some of the questions in UF, and I can say that I had much more.. err.. animated.. reactions once the customer was off the phone. There are people out there that will make you scream, wince, and have you swearing at the end of each day you will quit tomorrow, and then come in the next day to do it all over again.
And who said at the beginning of all this that having a bit of fun about it prevented us from helping people? Back at my last job I spent hours working through relatively simple TCP/IP problems on the phone, and then I laughed my head off. It's a sort of release from having to slow down our own thoughts and ways of doing things, to do things another way and another pace - without it I think all ISP workers would have started getting even with customers. (Another thing the UF characters have yet to do.)
I think people just need to calm down. It's a comic! Laugh, or don't laugh. It's not really offensive from my standpoint, and doesn't warrant an attack on any artist's principles.
Here's something to think about. (Score:3)
What's the 3rd most stressful job (in terms of clinically depression, suicide, alchoholism or other chemical dependency, divorce rate, etc)?
The most stressful is air traffic controller.
The second most stressful is a doctor (specifically surgeon).
The third most stressful is running help desk.
I shit you not.
Complete Agreement (Score:2)
The thing that most tech support employees don't recognize is that without people less knowledgeable than you, you'd be out of a job. When you insult the person who thinks their password is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk', you're insulting the people putting money in your pockets. At the company I work for, customers aren't referred to as 'users' because many don't understand that as anything but a negative term. We don't make fun of the customer who doesn't understand why he needs a new init string in his modem. We don't call them names behind their back because you never know when that information may be subpoenad and you get caught red-faced.
Tech support is about helping people. It's not about solving their problems, but getting them to solve their problems. Tech support employees are educators, because the more education they do, the better they serve their company.
So if you think User Friendly is funny, why don't you sit back and think how much you knew about computers when you first sat down at one, and then try to think of how that feels when you can see everyone else around you doing what you should be able to do. Guess what. Your poop stinks, too.
Hate (Score:2)
0.001% x really large number of people = not insignificant number of Haters
It's the cost of fame, realizing some people will hate you no matter what. Everything offends someone - including *the* Everything [blockstackers.com]. Even being completely Politically Correct offends people.
Don't feel sorry for Illiad, I'm sure he likes what he does and realizes the Haters are in the minority. Feel sorry for the people that need to hate.
UF is hillarious to me. Do I care what Scott Kurtz of PvP thinks of UF? Hell no.
Re:Complete Agreement (Score:2)
Tasteful humour is about making fun in gentle ways - ways that reveal weaknesses but don't permanently scar.
I don't think UF, Dilbert or most strips do any real damage. A little humiliation keeps you humble.
Someone who can't take a little being made fun off is likely also someone who blames all of their mistakes on someone else.
Re:User Friendly is not funny. Period. (Score:2)
Oh just what I want, someone telling me my opinions.
I find UF quite funny. You do not.
I like Dodge's Neon, you may not.
I like coffee, you may not.
Need I go on? If we all had the same opinion, it would not be an opinion then now would it.
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
Everyone is dumb at some point (Score:4)
Sounds a little defensive to me . . . (Score:2)
Anyone not smart enough to stop reading the things that annoy them, well, lets just say that when i realized bad news was making me feel depressed, I stopped reading news of war and destruction. This guy is still reading tech support humor? WHY???
That aside, if I were him, I wouldn't have admitted to being barely able to turn a computer on at the start of a 4 year tech support career.
Heck, i wouldn't have admitted to having worked for that long in tech support.
But the fact that many of the people in the tech support industry are hired at that level of technical ability is disgraceful, and i wouldn't have admitted to being a part of the problem.
Indeed, the analogy between tech support and teachers is very close. Some are very good, some are acceptable, and many are woefully unqualified.
I didn't last two whole years in tech support, nearly went nuts. I clawed my way through freelance contracting to full time systems administration just to get away from the pinheads. And when i say pinheads, I don't just mean the callers, some of the cow-orkers were just as bad.
Some of them barely knew how to turn a computer on. They were essentially useless, and generally damaging to our customers, so we taught them how to build computers instead . . . .
I don't think I'm ultra inteligent, I'm not even a very good speller. But during my tech support days, Dilbert, et all, made it possible for me to vent steam and survive.
In retrospect, maybe that was a bad thing. I would have been better off getting out of that industry sooner.
I guess what I'm saying is, this guy sounds a little antagonized. Maybe we should stop picking on guys like him in our comics & stuff.
Re:... (Score:2)
Re:Well.... (Score:2)
People who call tech support usually do **NOT** want to learn. They also want a fix to their problem only. They do not want to be taught about the workings of a computer.
The same people continually call tech support because they fail to independently make an effort to learn. This is similar to teaching at a school, except with tech support, the majority of the students are bad students. They also do not want your opinion or view. They want a fix. They want it now. They will get it or they will take their business elsewhere. They are often stubborn. Did I mention that they are not open to a detailed explanation of how things work? They are also on completely different levels. You do not know what level they are on. You must therefore simplify at the beginning of the call, otherwise they may get lost...
How I should feel? (Score:2)
Nothing is funny or not funny. Things strike some people as funny while others find no humor there at all. The very idea that people should not find something funny is utterly preposterous, and anyone who thinks that they can rationally argue anyone out of laughing is even more so.
I think we're seeing some serious humor impairment here.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Its called FRESHNESS (Score:2)
I don't blame the creators for being clueless, at least they're trying and hopefully learning through their art. Its these self-styled geeks who have given conformists a new standard to look up to who are to blame and keep creators' ego flying. These strips are like little monotnous cultural "ME TOO!" badges that a significant number of technies use to identify one another. Its the electronic equivilant of,
"Hey you like Jewel too?"
Unsure what a good strip is? Goto www.e-sheep.com. Enjoy.
Re:Complete Agreement (Score:2)
I guess being a complete idiot is a job then. I happen to remember several strips where people are obviously suppost to be complete dolts.
Yes I started out as a newbie, everyone did. I dont know everything there is, and I never will. I will always ask for help. And if it is a dumb ass question then I guess they can make fun of me too.
Some stuff is just funny. My roommate convinced several people that if they held a CD up to their ear and spun it fast enough, they would hear the music.
Get a mental image of that and tell me its not even mildly humorous.
We don't make fun of the customer who doesn't understand why he needs a new init string in his modem.
Well, thats because its not funny. Now, for example, what if that user was calling a long distance number with their computer for internet access and they didn't understand why their phone bill was so high when they got it. (assuming they knew the number was long distance) "Well, I thought it was different because it was a computer dialing the phone"
After the initial shock of stupidity, its funny. Yes this did happen to someone I know. She learned from her mistake tho, something that the true morons dont do.
Bah, I'm tired of typing.
---------------------------------------
Clueless users are clueless for a reason... (Score:2)
Let's illustrate from an example from consumer electronics: setting the time on your VCR. Any half-competent geek will figure out it's under the menus somewhere (since you've probably been roped into setting the time for friends, family, and people who've flagged you down when driving past on the interstate). For everyone else, that's why they pay some poor people to write a manual in really simplified English and 6 other languages. Most of the manuals written since the 1980s actually make sense. Even my mother (no technical genious) can set the clock and set programs on several different brands of VCR... because she has the good sense to read the books in the first place.
I think Illiad is making fun of the mentality that you can just open the box and it will do everything on its own. Maybe the Internet makes people think they don't have to read the book... I dunno. I don't analyze most of it.
But I do know UF is funny. Besides which, many of the strips have nothing to do with users... they deal with the boneheadedness of the computer industry, or corporate culture in general. And then there are the dust puppy plots...
Bah. (Score:5)
Re:Technological Illiteracy vs. Just Plain Dumb (Score:2)
But these lame strips will keep going on because of the huge conformist self-styled geek culture. The same way Family Circus is for the middle class Xtian crowd UF will be for the geeks. Not funny, hardly creative but they're "one of us." In other words: crap.
Re:"In" Jokes (Score:2)
e.g. chmod president@whitehouse.gov --paranoia=2 --horniness=9
Like, duh! Everyone knows that one, right?
dave
Re:How I should feel? (Score:2)
--
But the asterisks were funny. (Score:2)
Actually that strip [userfriendly.org] didn't really have the user stupid, but rather clever.
When I make dumb mistakes, I laugh at myself. It's good to do so. I almost became a Darwin Award, by changing the Power Supply without unplugging the power cord (I was in a hurry). I look back and laugh. Noone got hurt, but it took a notch out of my pliers.
Funny too, is that when I call tech support, I usually find out that the person I'm talking to doesn't know any more than me. And thus tells me to do the things that I have already done, and does not believe me when I tell them "I did that already". I usually have to repeat the steps and give my diagnostics about the problem to get them to pass me on to someone who really knows what they are talking about. At work, I almost refuse to call tech support, because they usually frustrate me. And at the end, I have to figure every thing out myself.
I recently had my cable modem go down, and when I called tech support, I had to go through all the steps with the support guy, checking for conflicts with interrupts and such (which I did in the first place) before he would believe me that the modem was bad. Finally I got someone that knew what they were doing to bring me a new cable modem, and everything worked fine.
So relax, and if you don't think it's funny, then go off and read Family Circus!
Steven Rostedt
Humor (Score:2)
But this does not make humor wrong. It's like a vaccine of mini-hurt to cure the big hurts of life. Humor is healing. When we laugh at our stupid mistakes of previous years, we are healing ourselves of those stupid mistakes.
Of course, there is humor that hurts too much to be tolerated. Racist jokes and cruel pranks are just examples. But if we eliminate all humor that hurts people, we are left only with puns and wordplay. We don't need to be political correctness police. User Friendly is a great strip, and genuinely funny.
If we're not allowed to pick on people, all we will have left are our noses. Ouch! That hurt!
Has he never heard of "irony"? (Score:4)
Scott seems to miss the point entirely on his way to his politically correct rant. We're not laughing at the "dumb" user. We're laughing at the comedy of the situation itself. The sheer outrageousness of the moment.
I'm sure he's offended, on behalf of women and minorities, by "All in the Family" because of the Archie Bunker character's overt racism and sexism.
I'm sure he's offended, on behalf of people with low motor skills, by Chevy Chase's "Saturday Night Live" pratfalls.
I'm sorry, but I'm offended by hyper-sensitive people who over-moralize everything.
We're not laughing a new users. We've all been "new" at one time or another (unless someone has discovered a way to imprint complete educations on a fetus prior to birth). Everyone who's worked tech support has gotten at least ONE really wierd situation (though I doubt anyone's used a permanent marker on a CRT screen in a good long while).
We're not picturing that other person. We're picturing OURSELVES in this situation. Like a guy who's assmebled computers for a living for years having absoloutely no luck getting a computer to boot up, only to find out, after severe, agonizing troubleshooting, that he's forgotten to plug the power supply into the motherboard.
One one level, people are going:
"Yeah, I've been in that techsupport position."
But, on a deeper level, they're usually thinking:
"God! If I were that user, I'd just DIE!
Again, not lauging at the person, or even the stereotype. They're laughing at THEMSELVES. Now if you cannot laugh at yourself, can you laugh at anything else without being a hypocrite?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:You need a sense of humor upgrade (Score:2)
I checked your wepage and it looks to me you bought conformist geek culture hook , line, and sinker, friend! Oh course you LOVE UF, you have much in common with 2 dimensional characters who criticize everyone who doesn't buy right into their smoke and mirrors futurist fetish.
UF and such are about as funny as Family Circus is to middle-class Xtians, which is not at all when you're not part of the silly conformist game. Its boring, badly drawn, and repitious but you and others like it dig it cause its a "ME TOO" badge.
I think its pretty ironic that you're telling others to 'upgrade' (major geek word here) their sense of humor when your own has stalled at the media produced fantasy of futurism and geekdom.
User Friendly IS funny. (Score:3)
B) People who claim it's not funny don't get it.
The same could be said for many other jokes, of course.
I suspect that those who don't find User Friendy to be funny either don't have the necessary referrents or suffer from an excess of political correctness.
Regarding the former: Some User Firendly strips aren't stand-alone. You have to have seen quite a bit of the strip's history to get the running gag.
Regarding the latter: Of COURSE "children learning to read" are funny. It behoves a teacher not to ridicule them to their faces. But that doesn't mean the teacher has to ignore the humor. And one of the things about Tech Support is that an endless supply of users making the same ignorant and/or dumb mistakes can be frustrating. So a support person will from time to time WISH they could do what the characters in User Friendly do, when they come up with a snappy comeback, sabotage the luser, or otherwise blow off steam.
If you think the humor of User Friendly is occasionally black, try listening to medical workers or policemen some time.
Some things HAVE to be funny, because otherwise they'd be too painful.
Re:PC strikes again (Score:2)
Fond Memories (Score:2)
a) First using computers (or, in the case of Dilbert, first learning to be a PHB
b) Doing tech support for friends & family (1-900-GrantFix
c) Setting up & running ISP's
d) Setting up & running a tech company
These days, I also use them as a sanity check - eg - "Hell, I almost did that the other day - better check my hair in the mirror for pointy bits!"
:)
Re:Everyone is dumb at some point (Score:2)
But I do agree with your original assertion: there is a difference. Where the difference is, is somewhat of a point of contention (like art and porn, everything's relative to the viewer).
I also agree with your last assertion: if you don't like UF, don't worry about it, and certainly don't publicize it. You're increasing its readership, and that would seem antithetical to your cause.
When I started out... (Score:2)
Now I use Linux as my main OS, have been for a couple years, everyone asks me for help, and it's really annoying.
Why, you ask?
Because I read the manuals, documentation, I learned how it worked, I spent the time to figure it out, and I feel these people are just getting a "free ride" by asking me instead of going and doing it on their own like I did. I didn't know anyone locally with a PC, I had no one to ask until some months later.
Sure, now and then there is no sufficient documentation and I'm forced to ask, but I make concious efforts to learn on my own, these people don't, they don't care, they want it working and they want it working now. Reading documentation is like severing a limb. "Why should I read it when I can just ask you?" is a question often posed to me.
Welcome to the society of instant gratification.
Now if you ask me, this is a Bad Thing(tm), and poking fun at them may be a subtle way to get them to see that its not all that "cool" to just ask people instead of going to even make an effort of SOME kind to find it themselves, especially about something like computers which touches everyones lives now.
Not to mention, I find UF funny usually, and this political correctness rant buddy posts is just crap as the strip isn't usually about tech support calls at all! Only a small minority of them are.
-- iCEBaLM
Well, here's a rant of my own. (Score:2)
Personally, I've laughed at jokes about whites, blacks, blonds, women, men, preachers, sex, death, baldness, and just about everything else under the sun. Almost every bit of humor out there can be offensive to someone, so deal with it.
As for this Scott guy, I'm more offended at him slamming his competition directly like this. Do you hear professional comic strip artists going around talking about how their competitors suck? No, you don't. Sometimes they lampoon each other's strips, but they don't trash talk. Since Scott is 'in the biz' so to speak, I think people are perfectly justified in ignoring his rant as nothing more than an attempt to get cheap publicity for himself and knock the competition. His conflict of interest here makes everything he says about other people's comic strips suspect in the extreme.
Another thing - I've never heard of this guy before, so I checked out his site from the link /. provided. Scott's strip was about as funny to me as Family Circus, which is to say it was boring as hell. Gee, a guy gets his eye hurt with a Nerf dart and so calls in someone else, who is a big furry monster of some kind, to play his game. What a snoozer. That's about as flat a joke as I can imagine. Kind of like Al Gore trying to make a joke. The kind of safe and sanitized humor I expect from someone who is making sure they don't offend anyone. I also checked out Absurd Notions, which I had also not heard of. Absurd Notions at least raised a chuckle or two out of me. Pvp was just painful. Also, the page for the current strip on Pvp was poorly designed. I had to search for the navigation buttons. Once I went to the previous strip, suddenly there were clearly labeled icons for navigation at the top. He also buries links in the midst of text that you have to read to figure it out. I've seen people who literally barely know how to turn on the computer turn out better designed web sites than that.
Humor lets us deal with taboo and dangerous subjects in a socially acceptable way. Comedians take the absurd, frightening, and frustrating and lampoon, satirize, or turn it into parody. Cartoons like UF and Absurd Notions just do that for a more specific target audience than most. As for Scott and his Pvp strip, all I can say I'm surprised that given the Quaalude effect his comic strip had on me, that he is popular enough that anyone even knows he exists, let alone being worthy of a /. article.
Re:Your rhetoric is getting 'monotonous' (Score:2)
Yes I did consider that, if you read my 'hysterics' you'd see why it isn't funny.
Yes, we all have opinions, I like to post mine.
Your post on the other hand has no substance other than admiting you don't know what the main part of my post is about, acknoledging that UF is repitious and telling me I have a right to an opinion. Which all adds up to little more than nothing. You could have spared your fingers.
Re:(You are) Just Plain Dumb (Score:3)
And just WHAT makes you so sure I was typing with my HANDS ?
Target audience (Score:3)
A co-worker thinks it's a laugh-riot and reads it every day since I turned him on to it.
I really like Pokey the Penguin, but he thinks it's too stupid and badly drawn (which is kind of the point). Pokey is ironic, and I like irony.
"Peanuts," by means of comparison, is universally understood and appreciated. It speaks to the human condition-- everyone can relate to Charlie Brown feeling like "the goat" or Snoopy daydreaming about being a World War I fighter ace.
IMHO, the Bastard Operator From Hell series is much funnier than User Friendly because you laugh a little about the luser on the phone and then laugh a lot at how mean a bastard the BOFH is. In other words, it is about the life of an abominable human being rather than the gullibility of his victims.
As a cartoon, the drawings in UF add very little to the story since the characters are mostly expressionless.
The Five Premises of UF
- Regular people are lusers (ho hum)
- Phone techs are misunderstood
- Managers are unnecessary idiots (Dilbert)
- Microsoft sucks
- Quake rules
If you don't agree with most of these premises, User Friendly doesn't have much to say to you.Re:Wrong on Several Counts (Score:3)
Agreed. I would say that the teacher would be 100% in their right to laugh at the child if the child turned around, and with an air of unquestionable sincerity yelled at him that he didn't have to understand nouns and verbs and spelling and punctuation -- he just wanted to read! After all, what do his parents pay the teacher for?
Maybe if clueless newbies (and I use that term with no trace of apology) took the time to attend sessions with actual computer trainers instead of expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter for 7 bucks a month, there would be less making fun going on. The indignancy of newbies when computer software doesn't work the way they expect it to can be very humorous. If I were an automobile manufacturer, I'd find it pretty damn funny if a customer came up to me and told me that I should just make the cars fly instead of go on the road, because driving on roads is just plain tedious. Oh, and it should still get the same MPG.
Mr. Kurtz totally misses the point here. He seems to me to be yet another in the long line of people who are greatly offended by this or that and insists on not laughing as loudly as he can. Frankly, I'm sick of his type, and I wish they would crawl back under the rock from whence they came.
Re:Technological Illiteracy vs. Just Plain Dumb (Score:5)
The thing is with such jokes the point of the humour isn't "some people are so stupid". The point is that, "someone who has no knowledge of a subject will say and do things that are absolutely HILARIOUS to those who DO have knowledge of the subject." This is the basis for the fish-out-of-water comedy routine archtype. It's the basis for one form of ironic humor.
Sadly, a lot of people need to feel superior about themselves, and they take this sort of humor as an oppurtunity to prove it to themselves. That's a shortcoming in the person who's reading/listening/seeing the joke, not in the comedian. Instead, you should be laughing at the irony of the situation.
A classic example are teacher jokes. When the joke has some 2nd grader makes some silly statement about some topic he/she is just learning, you don't laugh at the 2nd grader for their ignorance. Generally speaking you think, "aw, kids say the damndest things!!!" and laugh about the irony of the kid's statement.
We laugh so we don't cry. (Score:4)
However the users don't always have that attitude.
Users treat tech support people like an inanimate component of the computer system -- actually worse because most users know better than to damage a valuable piece of hardware; however they think nothing of repeatedly abusing a valuable person who is trying to help them. In the end it is very hard to keep a person who is facing dailiy emotional abuse productive.
When I got my first job as an MIS director, I reoriented our budget from development to training and support. I hired the best people I could find for tech support, with real skills, both technical and personal. And you know what? They burned out.
Finally I hired a woman to run my training and support who, while nice enough personally, was a total bitch-on-wheels when it came to people who weren't learning what they were supposed to. I got complaints, but as far as I was concerned the people who were complaining had used up their credit (the people who got along with the new trainer were the people who got along with the old ones -- the complainers were just getting a taste of their own medicine). When I hired people who were unfailingly nice these users emotionally abused them and didn't take advantage of all that training they said they wanted. After I hired a strong woman they may have fought with her, but they learned the things their supervisors said they needed to know and they got better at their jobs.
Now that I am older and, hopefully, wiser, I realize that I probably should have made it my job to come down extra hard on abusive users. Back the when I was young and idealistic, I thought that people should be trusted to come to a reasonable accomodation on their own. I didn't realize back then that when sweet reason fails, you have to kick the shit out of someone -- and that's the boss's job.
Unfortunately, people doing tech support at a place like an ISP don't have this option, and the users know it.
We laugh, so we don't cry. And, some of the things that the more naive users do are funny! Like the time one of my buddies diagnosed a balky mini by figuring out that it was plugged into a dimmer switch that was turned up half way. Respect is how you handle the customer. Finding what the customer says or does to be funny is not fundamentally disrespectful, so long as you handle their problems professionally.
Difference between ignorance & stupidity (Score:4)
Obligatory story: I've worked my share of tech support in the past. In this particular case, I was working tech support for a school administrative system. I got a call from a school technology coordinator. "My middle school can't get their data to me via modem", so I said "okay, have them make a floppy". Shortly thereafter, I got a call from a school counsellor. "My disk drive is spitting out my hard drive," she said. So I spent five minutes verifying that a) she was trying to make a disk at the middle school to give to the high school with her graduating students for next year, because her school's modem was on the fritz and the central office told her to make a disk instead, b) she was talking about a 3 1/2" floppy disk, and c) her computer actually had a 3 1/2" disk drive (don't laugh, many of the school administrative computers dated back to the early 90's and had Xenix on them, and not all of them had 3 1/2" drives). Finally, I verified that d) she was not putting the disk into the tape slot. I said "There's two slots on your computer, one for the disk and one for the tape. The one for the tape is the big one, the one for the disk is the little one. Are you sure you're putting the disk into the right slot?" She said "Of course I am! I'm not stupid, y'know!".
So I sat there holding a 3 1/2" disk in my hands (I'm 100 miles away from the lady in a call center, of course), trying to figure out what she was doing wrong.
"There's a little wheely-looking thing on the disk. Are you putting it in with that facing DOWN?"
"Of course!" she replied.
I stared at the disk a bit more, turned it backwards, and pushed it into my floppy drive. Voila, it popped back out!
"There's a little slidey thing on one end. Do you see that little slidey thing?"
"Yes."
"Are you putting that end in FIRST?"
A slight pause. "Oh! Nobody ever TOLD me that that end goes in first!". A little more pause. "Don't tell anybody about this, okay?".
Of course I told the technology coordinator, when she called me back and asked what the counsellor's problem had been! And of course the technology coordinator repeated the story at the next user group meeting. And thus I got my revenge for putting up with stupidity for forty-five long excrutiating minutes.
That's right. Stupidity.
When I encountered my first 3 1/2" drive, I didn't know which way it went in either. I tried it sideways. Didn't work. I tried it upside down. Didn't work. I tried it backwards. Didn't work. FINALLY I tried it the way that DID work. No problemo, I was ignorant. I wasn't embarrassed or anything. I learned.
But the point is that I was *NOT* stupid. And the lady with the backwards 3 1/2" disk was, for not trying some other way to put the disk in when her first way didn't work.
I always treated people with respect if they made calls that occurred because of ignorance. I was always supportive of intelligent people who called me with questions that made them feel stupid, saying that's okay, you'll get the hang of this, etc. Sometimes they did some pretty stupid-sounding things, but I'd look at the documentation (typical sucky documentation), shake my head, and note that I'd make the same mistake myself if I didn't know about computers and was trying to go by the documentation.
But occasionally I got someone online who was a real candidate for the Darwin Awards (i.e., the world would be better off if they were removed from the gene pool). Isn't it better to make fun of them instead of going postal and seeking them out with an assault rifle and forcing the Darwin Award For Person Who Should Not Breed upon them?
And finally: I nominate for the Darwin Awards *ANYBODY* who says that working tech support is something that can be done with little training and no prior knowledge. Yeah, you can do tech support that way if you think that customer service is what a stallion does to a mare. But such a "tech support" person would a) not had a clue, and b) never been able to diagnose the problem through that big long decision tree that I went through to figure out what she was doing wrong. The idea that "anybody can do tech support" is why the only answer you ever get when you call Microsoft tech support is "reformat your drive and re-install Windows".
-E
Re:Technological Illiteracy vs. Just Plain Dumb (Score:3)
I love users like this (no sarcasm intended).
Why do I work with computers? Because I love learn, and there is no other field where you can spend so much of your time learning. I think of users like this as true "gurus" in the original sense of the word. They are your best teachers. They show you just how incredibly arbitrary the things you believe to be obvious are; they teach you the folly of your UI ways.
Nobody in his right mind complains about users like this, because you gain so much more than you give to them. Their problems are easy, but their insights are profound.
Re:Complete Agreement (Score:4)
I worked in tech support off and on for a couple years. I learned a lot about user interface design (a million and one things wrong with the Start menu, for example), a lot about patience, and a lot about how other companies conduct THEIR tech support. But I also learned the difference between the "good" caller and the "bad" one.
Good callers may not be easy to solve, but by the time they're off the phone, your headache is caused by their PROBLEM, not THEM. Good callers are calling you because they know it's your job to help them; they understand their place on the scale, they're a little intimidated by the computer but will actually absorb information if you explain things on their level. The best ones are the ones where you say "exactly!" after they finish your sentence for you. We may joke about the technical problem they have, or the description they give of the problem if it's particularly amusing, but it's hard to joke about the person.
Bad callers are the ones you'd probably hate if you met them in ANY situation. You know - the people who tear down "out of order" signs because they block the pop machine's coin slot, then complain that it ate their money. The people you'd expect to find stranded on the roadside, on the cellphone demanding that Chrysler replace their car because it ran out of gas. The people for whom the "do not submerge hair dryer" warnings were written.
Who WOULDN'T satirize the following true events:
- people who call because they're lonely?
- people who call and open up with a stream of profanities so you can't even get a word in edgewise? (We hung up on him after 30 seconds.)
- people who are clicking a dozen steps ahead of you while you're trying to walk them through something?
- people who INSIST that this Mac disk must work in their PC or vice versa, and fifty explanations later simply refuse to believe you?
- LAN administrators who don't know how to create new users? (this guy wasn't supposed to be calling us anyway, we didn't offer support for Windows NT at the time)
- people who spend half an hour ignoring all your subtle and unsubtle hints to get to the point, while they tell you the long and detailed story of WHY they bought the computer in the first place?
- people who are on free accounts (we used to donate accounts to the schools) and abuse the account somehow? like take a school account home, camp out on a modem, or call tech support constantly with obnoxious demands?
- people who refuse to admit a mistake? "that says winsock dot D I L L" "no, that's D L L" "no, it says D I L L, it says it right here!"
- people who just flat out LIE? "is your username entered correctly?" "of course it is! you think i'm stupid or something?"
- and then get mad when you can't solve their problem?
- and when complaining to your boss about your inability to figure out their lie, REVEAL that they lied?
- people with no memory?
- people who honestly believe "it doesn't work" is as much problem report as you deserve?
- people who, despite having teenagers, don't understand that they can't use the modem and the phone at the same time? I don't care if they know the WHY, I'd just be happy if they'd notice the *click* *click* *click* and GUESS the rest.
- people who GET ANGRY if you walk them through a control panel because they think you shouldn't make them do technical stuff? (for some reason we got a lot of Mac calls of the form "dammit, I bought this Mac so I wouldn't HAVE to mess around in thuh System Folder!" I'm a Mac owner too, which makes it that much worse to see someone making the right purchase for the wrong reasons.)
- people with Amigas calling, for any reason, period? (as soon as they say "Amiga" expect to be on the phone two hours minimum)
- people on their second or third Packard Bell?
- people who cannot comprehend that a cheap-brand PC makes a difference?
- people who refuse to believe there might be trouble with the phone lines? (which was a problem for us since Ameritech was the local carrier...)
- people who call you for tech support on things you don't support (general Windows support, other programs, hardware issues unrelated to Internet access) and REFUSE to take no for an answer?
- people who blame you for EVERYTHING that goes wrong after they install your product? ("why doesn't my MIDI sequencer work anymore since I installed Netscape?")
- people who throw rank at you? ("Do you know who you're talking to? I happen to be the executive adviser to the Mayor! Now FIX THIS!" Every case so far has been user error.)
- people who verbally abuse you? ("You stupid catraping sack of shit! Why the fuck can't you get your head outa your dickhole long enough to understand what the hell I'm trying to tell you, you heaping mound of semen?" solution: hang up. No job could pay me enough to take that.)
- people who wreck their system by sheer arrogance?
- people who aren't observant enough to realize an onscreen message is meant for THEM?
And I could go on and on.
Re:What ever happened to RTFM? (Score:4)
Problem #1: ENOMAN
Here's what happened, in a nutshell: more often than not, there no longer is a manual!
This is a grave problem. It widens the gap that separates the clueless user from the priesthood of gurus. It returns us to the bad old days when only the sacred priesthood held the keys to the arcane lore locked away in hidden tomes and passed on through oral tradition. The Unix philosophy of putting all reference manuals online in one definitive location (/usr/man), accessible with either a dedicated tool (man) or with generic ones (grep string /usr/man/man?/man.*) has been lost to us.
Instead of coherent, unified, and centrally located reference manuals, we are stuck with lame help buttons; make-shift, per-tool documentation in an infinite variety of different locations and formats; and, more often than not, no manual whatsoever.
You won't find one single scapegoat here: there's plenty of blame to go around. Here's a partial list of the guilty parties, in no particular order:
- The non-Unix systems that never embraced the notion of unified, online documentation.
- The tech support staff who assume that `the manual' has a well-known meaning to the listener, and that this suffices for explanation.
- The numerous new Unix users who, coming from a non-Unix (or even, non-computer) background, were never told that the complete programmers reference manual was sitting right there online, waiting for them.
- An emphasis by Unix types on programmers' reference material over users' tutorial material, which, of course, aren't the same thing at all.
- The authors of software systems who completely disdain the need to produce reference documentation. Think of how many libraries and programs you install these days whose functions are undocumented.
- The users who are expecting giant monolithic bloatware, and therefore think that all help information should be available from within a program.
- The programmers who seek to appease the previously named users, and thus cut everyone else off. They often invent a different layout design for each major subsystem.
- The authors of software systems who, unhappy with existing mechanisms, decide to `innovate' and so invent a completely idiosyncratic doc standard. That means that you can no longer use generic tools to access all docs. This doesn't scale, because for each new tools, you have to learn how to access its documentation.
- The authors of software systems who do not translate their program-specific documentation into a generic format to be integrated with the rest of the system. This means that you cannot use generic searching or printing tools anymore. All you have is a random patchwork system.
- The distribution providers (read: providers of Linux-based operating systems) who disavow any responsibility for creating a coherent system. They sell systems "as is", and claim that it's free software, so there's nothing they can do. They like to play responsibility-avoidance games, such as:
- The RPMs, tarfiles, make install rules, and distribution providers which allow you to install software that's been stripped of its documentation. So, in this case, the docs exist, but you don't get them.
- The makers of documentation tools who haven't upgraded them to understand how to follow SEE ALSO links. For example, how many man programs do you know that do this? Why not?
There. Is everyone here sufficiently ashamed or pissed off?- Sometimes these distributors try to shunt their responsibility to the authors by saying that they can't force authors of free software to write documentation. That's true, but they have no business installing undocumented software on their distributions.
- Sometimes they blame the authors for inventing their own doc mechanism. Yes, those people are at fault, but as the distributor, the buck stops there. It's their responsibility as a systems integrator to produce an integrated, coherent system.
- Sometimes they try to blame you the user. `Hey, it's free software. If you don't like it, fix it yourself.' This is so egregiously wrong that it leaves the listener speechless.
No matter how you cut it, the distributors are being negligent. They aren't selling a system. They're selling a random bag of trinkets.Anyway, it all boils down to the issue that when you tell the user to RTFM, they have no idea what that means. Even when they do know what the M is, said manual or may not exist--especially on Linux. If the manual does exist, it's highly unclear how to access it, especially with newer software, which hides its docs in idiosyncratic formats, locations, or websites. Another issue is that the user might not be a tool user: they might not have the skills to search the docset effectively in any other fashion than prohibitively tedious reading of every line.
This all contributes to why RTFM gets shouted more often today than before, yet is less effective than it used to be. The end result is that there are more unhappy people on both sides of that exchange.
Problem #2: Actual Learning Unwanted
I've only outlined here the problems of a proper manual not existing, or being difficult to access. There's at least one other important issue; possibly more important, in fact, than the manual's existence or accessibility. It's called willingness to learn. Often the problem resides in the fact that we're talking about users who don't want understanding.
They just want a quick fix, an immediate solution. They don't want to read, to learn. They do not see the computer and its software as a fascinating puzzle to work out, nor do they see the value in studying something. They certainly don't have a problem-solving mentality. They just want their answers, and they want them now.
The difference between inquisitive students in a classroom environment and petulant users who come to a help desk (whether real or virtual) is astounding. These helpdesk supplicants don't think of themselves as students, and they do not want to learn. Understanding is irrelevant to them. Only results count.
Plumbers and mocking people (Score:3)
Unfortunately, many of the problems that tech support people encounter are the computer equivalent of the user trying to flush a disposable diaper down the toilet -- i.e., sheer stupidity. And the sad part is that it's the same people over and over again, finding new ways to clog the plumbing.
I once disagreed with the concept that some people were too stupid to be allowed to breed. Then I worked tech support (grin).
-E
Anger at being told RTFM... (Score:3)
Many people did NOT appreciate that, but at the time I was in a position where I didn't have to care. (And I had written that manual myself, so I darned well knew what was answered and what was not answered there!).
The point, the point -- there's too many people out there who think that the concept of reading is something that applies to other people, not to them. This attitude starts early in their school days, when they learn that they don't have to read the assignment because they can demand that the teacher spoon-feed it to them verbally, and it continues through their adult life.
-E
Actually, some of them *are* idiots. (Score:3)
>> "But Scott, I work tech support and we constantly get calls from complete idiots." They're not idiots, they just don't understand how a computer works internally. <<
No, Scott, they are idiots. Adults who can't tell left from right, who can have a single phrase repeated to them five times and still forget it a minute later, who can't recognize patterns they've seen repeated a hundred times, who wonder (and I'm not making any of this up) why smoke pours out of their machines when they force plugs or connectors into incongruent sockets, are idiots. No one gets out of kindergarten without understanding that the circular peg can't fit in the square hole.
I recognize that the reason it's me answering the phone, and not them, is that I get excited about computers and technology, and I want to learn how it all works, and they don't. I understand that computers aren't for everyone, and that people who don't care as much as me shouldn't be expected to learn as much as I have. I'm more than happy to help out a polite user with a shred of intelligence who simply can't figure out how to work what is, I admit, a very confusing interface (no matter what OS you use). I get plenty of users like that every day, and I'm always glad when I do. I talk them through their problem, sometimes I shoot the breeze with them for a minute or two, I offer general advice in case their problem recurs, and when I'm done I always feel good about having, in some small way, made a contribution to society.
But, as anyone who works in customer support of any kind will tell you, there are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of rude people with unrealistic expectations. And if I'm less likely to get upset about those people because I can read a few comic strips that sympathize with my situation -- comic strips that the idiots in question will never read anyway, because they don't find them funny -- well, then that's a great thing. Tech support people put up with a hell of a lot, including the idiots -- do you think, Scott, that we laugh at them while they're still on the phone? that we'd be able to keep our jobs if we did? -- and if a couple of relatively harmless comic strips are what we get in exchange for having to deal with callers who (a) won't accord us the basic human respect & decency that everyone deserves, and (b) won't take a few seconds to step back and think of any possible alternate solutions to a problem before they rush to call us, well, I'm sorry, but I don't see what the big deal is. Their inability or unwillingness to exercise their own brains is their problem, not ours. There's help for it, but that's a different phone number. And, to be quite honest, I don't think that we, as a society, should tolerate or enable people who won't think for themselves. That's irresponsible behavior, and it only makes life harder for everyone else.
In any case, the analogy:
>> a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. <<
. . . is an inaccurate one. We're not there to teach; if we were, we'd have to have the appropriate certification before being hired. We're merely damage control, there to provide quick fixes for relatively small problems. I'm all for teaching people who are willing to learn -- I know full well that none of us were born knowing the slightest thing about how to use a computer, and I also realize that the better I educate a user, the less likely they are to need to call me back -- and I do what I can in that capacity, but unfortunately it's really not something I can spend a lot of time on if there are others waiting to be helped.
I do hate people who mock newbies, partly because, lord knows, I've been a newbie many, many times in my life, and I will be many, many times again before I die. But there's an important distinction to be made between those who haven't learned yet and those who refuse to learn. And believe you me, I'm definitely not getting paid enough to save the latter category from themselves.