It’s as if a person working in geriatric care claimed thet people are old. I rarely call or contact the support, the though of being treated as a dumb person make me solve the problem myself of abandon the service/product instead.
Well to be fair a lot of people contacting a front-line service center for a non-specialized product/service can't even articulate their problem accurately, if at all. I'm sure it'd be pretty easy to get jaded about people after hearing "I don't know if it's on or not, it just doesn't work...fix it" enough times.
That person calling in more than likely knows significantly more than you about some other topic, and that's the point.
Someone calling in that doesn't know the difference between the PC tower and the monitor and doesn't care to learn isn't "stupid" any more than you are stupid for not knowing an alternator from an AC compressor, and chances are you won't remember even if shown once or twice because you pay someone else to know and maintain/fix that stuff.
Yeh but what would the mechanic think if I didn't know the keys had to be in the ignition? Such are the level of questions you field at First level tech support.
Stuff like "where's my seat warmer?", "How do I turn off the windshield wipers" and "why does my window go up all the way when I just touch the button" are all questions I was asked when I worked as a mechanic.
And if they are coming to my shop to get those answers, then it's my job to help them. Hopefully come tax time when I need to talk to that accountant he wont laugh me out of the room because I didn't know I needed to keep my own tax when working as a contractor.
"why does my window go up all the way when I just touch the button"
hmmm, in many cars the window dongle has two states. Half pull moves the window only as long as it's pulled, full pull makes "the window go up all the way" even after releasing the dongle... and it might depend on whether the keys are inserted and whether the doors are open. Took me some time to figure it out in my car.
No, this just shows some folks aren't specialized in the same way you are. Everyone has their areas of non-specialty, and everyone has limited mental energy to devote to things. Everyone sometimes has a "stupid" moment. But I'm going to guess every one of these folks you talk to have things they know that, if you tried them, you'd seem pretty stupid as well.
There's a difference between being dumb and being ignorant. Most people aren't dumb, they could learn to handle their technical issues if they were motivated to spend the time. But time is valuable, and if you can have a specialist handle your problems for you, is it really worth the trouble of learning and keeping up to date on something that doesn't really interest you?
They are probably wasting more time being on hold and explaining the problems to someone else. Also problems repeat, so if you know how to solve it yourself you save time.
Having used things that require technical support, I have to disagree. I'm not an idiot, I just don't have time to learn the idiosyncrasies of the problem that I have.
Can you even determine the difference between a common law, and a civil law system of justice? Some non-trivial percentage of the population, including some very intelligent people cannot understand that - something so incredibly fundamental to the society they live in.
Ignore these haters mate, I'm greybeard sysadmin type who did his time in the helpdesk trenches, and it's a fact despite the many protestations of the others here. Prost!
ps. I would correct though and say some people are dumb. I've met others on the other end of the spectrum too. Also, something something, the difference between ignorance and stupidity, etc.
