Technology Rambles: Asking a techie for help

Tips about asking your nerdy friends for help:
Be specific. I don’t know how many times people have said ‘It’s not working’ or ‘My computer isn’t fast enough’ or ‘Why is the screen blank’ or ‘My internet isn’t working’ etc. That’s incredibly vague. I know how it could sound specific, yes, but it’s generally quite a bit more complicated and we’re going to be forced to ask you the same stupid questions you’d get from tech support. If you say, ‘It isn’t working’, I’m FORCED to ask if you plugged it in, because that’s the base case for not working. The more specific you are the less stupid questions we ask as followup. If you could list everything you tried, get it in writing [email] and, best of all, actually have your computer with you at the time of questioning, that would be the best!

Don’t get angry at us. Most likely, we didn’t create the software, getting angry at us is just going to make us not want to help you in the future. I know it sucks when something doesn’t work, but this is why I always try to be polite on the phone with people when something breaks, whoever you’re asking is just like you, may or may not be stressed out right now, and most importantlyis listening because they want to help you. So please, try not to aim the anger at us.

Know who you’re asking / sometimes we can’t help. I’m a Computer Scientist, I have no idea how most hardware works. I know what things do, and how I can use them to do other things, but if you’re about to ask me where to put in a new chip, I’m going to stare at you blankly and redirect you to one of my engineering friends / tell you to call tech support. It’s like going to a dentist and asking about your eczema. He might know some basics because it’s the same general area, but he’s not going to be able to tell you your exact problem and all the medicines you can use to fix it. Secondly, we can’t fix everything. There are some issues that flaws in the programming or hardware, and we can’t give you what you want. If you have overheated your machine too much and melted something important, like your video card or processor, you are not going to be able to fix that by restarting/resetting anything. If you delete a file, and then keep using your drive, we probably can’t salvage it. [if you delete something from a flash drive, and don’t do anything else to it and give it to someone, they can probably get it back.]

If you are a techie: don’t feel like people are patronizing you. Because computer do seem like works of absolute genius to people who can’t see all the flaws inside, when something doesn’t work exactly, people are going to get annoyed. If your waiter suddenly flips out at you, he’s doing his job badly, right? Well, this is the same type of job, and we can’t get angry just because someone doesn’t know what we went to college / did the research to learn. I like to ask people if they want to know how to fix the problem in the future. If they say yes, I show them, if they say no, I fix it quietly. I’ve received the same respect with a hardware problem, and I got to see the inside of my laptop! :D.

So yeah, this goes both ways, techies, be respectful and try to understand why people might be treating you like a ball of annoying-genius-poop […heh] and others, please try to just not treat them like annoying-genius-poop. Not even genius, if they aren’t.

Err, TL;DR, Learn as much as you can and respect your fellow man. [Or woman, in my case :D.]