Both my father and father-in-law are like this (both engineers, though I am not sure that has anything to do with it).
It is not just computer stuff, but it definitely happens there. I don't know what it is exactly, but it seems to have to do with expectations and assumptions about their ability to observe and predict. They expect the world to be in just this certain way, and if the world is not, then it is the world that is wrong--not them, by god.
I think it has gotten worse as they have aged, though I don't know that there is a correlation with age (e.g., like not necessarily cognitive decline or something) as much as just this deepening, crystallising certainty that has come by the mere fact of continuing to operate this way.
It is not necessarily age itself.
My father is approaching 80, computer literate since '86, and keeps adapting to whatever new thing comes out, even adapting to fluke versions of windows like 8 or 11...
Small note to all frontend people: he'd be happier if you stopped using low-contrast anything and small fonts, thank you very much.
I think my dad was like this also. When I was a kid, my dad was an engineering manager. A few times a week he would tell stories about how stupid all of the engineers that worked under him were and that they were always doing everything wrong. Now that I'm older, I think the issue was probably that my dad was not a good manager. :-)
I know of a highly experienced person who once opened an email attachment, edited it, and then claimed "I saved my copy in Yahoo!". No amount of asking would make him that he ignored the dialog box that asked him to save a copy.
Psyonix implemented the vehicles in original Halo game after which they made supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars followed by rocket league.
Many ages ago, at my first software engineering job, I was tasked with building a new replacement system for an aging platform. I decided to write this in the new-thing at the time, C# and .Net.
I managed to put together the overall framework, architect a SQL database for it, and after a bit of time had a working replacement for the most important parts of what it was replacing. While discussing the next steps, the owner of the company mentions he just sold one already to one of the largest clients using the old system. I found that rather surprising, as he made no mention of announcing it let alone starting to sell it, and it wasn't ready to be sold, but here we were.
We go to meet with this company to discuss specifics, and one of the questions they ask is "exactly how much bandwidth is utilized when we do X? We have Y employees and want to know exactly how much it uses if they were to be using it at the same time".
Now, I wrote this thing to be as performant as I could, but at no point up to now did I have time to run specific performance metrics on it such as how much bandwidth was being used by every specific piece of functionality. It wasn't even an announced product, as far as I knew.
My boss turns and just stares at me. So I answered honestly, said I didn't have the exact numbers, and I can get back to them, but I felt that their current setup should be more than sufficient.
Meeting ends, we get back to the car, and he is suddenly irate.
"Don't ever, ever tell a client you don't know something! How could you do that? That made us look like we don't even understand our own product! You know what you do in that situation? Make up a number that works! You never say you don't know! Unbelievable!"
I'm not in sales. I got dragged into this meeting out of nowhere only to get chewed out for not properly fielding a question, about a product that I didn't know we were selling, that I couldn't possibly have expected to answer at that point.
I used to work in technical sales and had the opposite interaction. The salesman told me "The customer knows I'm the sales guy. They automatically don't trust me. You're the technologist, make them trust you."
I was in a proposal team for a big project, responsible for the estimation of work. My estimate brought the cost at three times the partner anticipated. I told him there is no way we can execute with his budget unless if we take the cost as marketing expense. He turned around to tell me “we are doing sales mate”, to which I replied, “you are doing sales, I will be doing delivery”. Ended up getting the project at partner’s quote, two months later kicked out because the client felt there was not enough progress on the basis of budget proportion spent…
Wow. I’ve worked with a fair number of vendors, customers, and internal stakeholders in my time and “let me get back to you” is extremely common. The only time that wasn’t acceptable was when you didn’t get back to them in a reasonable amount of time.
I know a lot of sales engineers - the ones that make up numbers and bullshit customers don't last very long. Anecdotally, I know of sales engineer interviews which will push you to the point of saying "I don't know" -- not being willing to admit what you don't know means not getting the job.
This does not surprise me in the slightest. I got a whole diatribe and stream of insults when a user complained that we’d epoxied the USB holes in his desktop PC because he couldn’t bring his music in on a USB stick.
This was an airgapped network in a defence installation. They weren’t even allowed to bring in any personal possessions.
I had an employer who stuck with NT4 into the late 00's primarily because it didn't support USB for this security scenario. Our PCs had the ports but they were effectively useless.
When I was 11, i was the official tech support in the embassy of X in Y... (too embarrassing). The secretary had to redesign the template for official documents every day. No two documents ever looked the same. At least once a week the computer failed to boot and I had to reinstall win 95.
One evening I stayed in the office until the end of the day, teaching her formatting tricks in office 97. When we were done, she didn't save the file. Instead, she reached for the wall and yanked the power cable. She gathered her purse, handed me 5 (currency). She didn't understand the concept of saving files, or shutting down.
If she started on DOS, there was no concept of "shutting down." At the end of the day you just flipped the big red paddle switch on the side or front of the PC case.
Not saving? If she learned her secretarial duties using a typewriter, there was no saving. Once the document was scrolled out of the typewriter, that page was done. I could see someone like that using the computer the same way. Type the letter or document, print it, done.
I just want to say this post is amazing at giving plausible context to otherwise baffling behavior, thanks
A story I have is the time my father had set up a computer for my Grandma (Grandpa was very much a "no computers in the house" person until he passed) to give her something to do and people to take to. Naturally this means he had volunteered to become "tech support".
Early on there he was trying to help Grandma over the phone because for some reason no letters were showing up when typing on the keyboard. After an agonizing 45 minutes trying to figure out what was going on, he finally asks her to move the mouse to the box she wants to type in, click it, and then type. It worked! Turns out we took for granted the concept of input focus.
> If she started on DOS, there was no concept of "shutting down." At the end of the day you just flipped the big red paddle switch on the side or front of the PC case.
But... but... I diligently parked the disk every time !
I think my first HDD, a 130MB drive, had automatic parking.
It was a feature from so early on, that I never really though much about it except on university XTs, which were almost always just left on and walked away from, anyway
>no concept of "shutting down."
>using a typewriter, there was no saving
I find it interesting that shutting down and saving files is also a thing of the past, when you use e.g. an iPad, a MacBook, or another notebook and Google Docs.
There is auto-saving and hibernation or suspend mode.
It is 1989. I'm a newly minted ops whelp, granted the task of maintaining the thousands of miles of RS232 spread around the campus of this particular establishment, about 2000 terminals in all. Lots and lots of terminal boards, lots and lots of tone debugging in the wee hours.
My boss calls me in, tells me I'm getting upgraded to the PC team. PC's are these new-fangled terminals that we will, eventually, get everyone switched over to .. but first we start with the execs. Take their terminals, set up their new PC's, get them logged in for the first time.
I proceed to the nastiest exec first - even then, I knew one had to solve the gnarly problems first - as there'd be hell if some other underling got the upgrade first, of course. At least, I thought.
20 minutes of burned fingers amid measured cussing at the prior install teams lack of proper stripping methodology, and I get the PC booted up, the TERM.EXE started, and everything configured to take over the old Hazeltines job, which sits by the door ready to be carted away into an amber fugue ..
In comes Mr. Nasty Exec, who immediately recoils at the PC blob on his desk. "What's that? I'm not getting that yet. Do everyone else first!"
Oh, crap, I'd already sort of changed the connectors.
Under the desk I go, off he storms across the barren cubical wasteland, his hoffs and guffaws somehow visible in the khaki haze.
Alright, I get it all re-Hazeltined, PC sits on the cart. What to do...
In comes Mr Nasty, who has by now seen what the new PC can do. "I want both the old and the new, you can do that can't you Computer Genius Kid?"
Meh.
Always get your boss involved when the work order changes, kids.
Nice story. I feel, there are times for taking initiative, being a go-getter. Then there are times when work is work, and if anything l, you train your fine motor skills and be content with that.
I've got muscle-memory for DB9 and DB25, I can twist pairs for RJ45 in my dawn hours, I have scars with many more tales behind them, but I'm so happy to have put it all behind me now ... ;)
(Now I'm the grumpy guy who doesn't wanna change web frameworks every gronk season..)
If you were doing this during the Ethernet transition (to thinnet) you probably remember the AUIs also had DE connectors though I don't remember how many pins -- perhaps a dozen.
Yeah, I totally grok the fastidious corrective path upon which you sit, its just .. as a person .. I know absolutely nobody who used the proper terminology for these things, we'd also often just call them a "9'er" (DE9) or a "chunky" (DB25), which could be a cunt or a fuck, depending on sex.
Especially, rather late at night, deeply embedded in the A/C ducts and 'services tunnels' of the various hospitals, skyscrapers and other locations of this particular company, for whom I rashed my knuckles, bent my noggin', thrashed the chiclets and hacked mad code for long enough to know, that as long as someone else knows what you mean, it doesn't matter what word you use... as long as they fucking don't drop the thing into the abyss before you can embed burn tracks in your flesh and get it secured in place, to be left for the next damn junior fool who dons the overalls and climbs into the hell of it all, to upgrade things.
The whole point of the PC ugprade was so that we could stop draping wire everywhere we wanted a terminal to go, and just use 10Base-T, i.e. "one cable to rule them all" (lol, kthxbai...)
So yes, he did get both, but it did require me to pull one last strand of RS232 a week before we had to do it all again for the 10Base-T, and my manager was not amused at how I'd multiplied the work for myself; and especially wasn't stunned by my smart-ass quip that, "if only he'd demo'ed the PC thing to Mr. Nasty Exec in the first place, things would've gone smoo .. oh, okay, I'll be on my way to pull that last strand, then .."
Yeah, wasn't really a great idea, it was only a week later that I saw that old Hazeltine, forlorn once again, sitting on the cart to be carried away.. oh how I wish I'd kept a few of those, myself ..
Around the time glossy displays became fashionable a colleague of mine got a new laptop
from work. He opened it and there was a huge scratch across the display. So he went to his boss and asked if he could send the laptop back, because of the damaged display.
He sent it in, got it back after a while, but the scratch was still there, so he sent it in again.
A couple of days latter he was called into the bosses office to pick up the fixed laptop again. Boss gave it to him and casually remarked that he'd better check if the display was OK this the. Colleague opened it right there and - big surprise - the scratch was sure still there.
After he'd stopped cussing, while his boss was silently looking at him, boss - still without saying a word - tore away the protective film, which just happened to have a big crease across the screen, to reveal a flawless glossy surface.
I started a job as a software engineer, first day. The engineering team mostly use Macbooks, my manager asked if I preferred Mac or Windows. I said mac.
I got my Mac, but needed IT helpdesk to set it up (VPN, admin access etc...). I got told there was no ticketing system and for me to drop it off at the helpdesk instead. I did that, but was promptly told that 'Macbooks are hard to set up, so f off...' (yes, he swore at me).
I left stunned back to my manager, he followed up with head of IT and that guy was ordered to apologise to me and was reprimanded. Safe to say I had my Macbook set up within minutes by someone else. Not a great first day.
When I started my current job, they asked me Mac or PC laptop and I said Mac. A couple days later a PC arrives. When I'm on the call with the IT guy to get things set up I mentioned I requested a Mac but PC is fine too and he said he never heard about my choice. Later I find out someone else on the team had the exact same experience, and we found out the preference WAS communicated. We've long since gotten a new IT guy and I'll probably switch to Mac when my current machine gets to three years old.
I was a techie for 25 years and my response to this story would be predictable - combination of chuckle, sympathy, and outrage. And I still feel all of those.
But now I've been in the management/client-facing role for a while, and my burning question is: 1. WHAT did the person say over the phone to calm them down? 2. Could the author of the article have said it with same results? Because I'm learning that as much fun as it is to understand and hack computers, it's also fun to understand and 'hack' people (something all my mentors have been telling me for 20 years but I've only recently been able to hear).
For example (and the fun here is in guessing and hypothesizing:) -- rather than listening to tirade, could the author have said something like "Oh, we have found it is far less efficient for partner level people to go through obscure manuals themselves; my team and I have gone through them and I can give you a customized review of the key features relevant to you that will be far more respectful of your and companies' time" ?
(is it cheeky? Of course! Winning question is would it accomplish the same or similar result? Was there a winning game strategy for author other than escalating?)
An angry neighbor rings on our “apartment turned office” door - we were an early stage startup.
The guy is red faced, shouting profusely how someone had parked at his designated spot AGAIN. This goes on a while, until I understand what’s going on - I parked at his place, as I thought we were entitled to it from the apartment, apparently in error.
Well the guy was expecting to meet resistance I guess, he was all geared up for a confrontation.
I immediately apologized said that I didn’t know (which was true) and will not happen again.
The guy relaxed like magic, just calmed down immediately. And then started apologizing to me, and telling how “its alright from time to time” etc.
It was really bizarre transformation to witness. I attributed it to balkan culture generally being confrontational, so that when I just apologized, the situation the guy ended up at was not one he expected and he had to actually rethink his position. Or something like that.
And this is a pattern I’ve used in other almost violent confrontations to dissolve them. If you’re able to convince the other party that they are actually understood, then communication can happen.
An intersection in some real tight and twisty part of an old city backed up with cars in both directions.
Two cars had come in and neither was willing to move to the side to let the other pass. Plenty of shouting and honking was going nowhere fast.
After twenty minutes a fellow from way down the jam got out of his car and whispered to one of the drivers. "It looks like the other guy is being a jerk, and I feel for you. But, I need to get to my kid's birthday party, and it is really important to her. Could you do me a favor and move over to let us through."
A few minutes later and everyone was on their way.
So I thought about the pictures in his head. I thought about what he does every day. Finally it hit me how I could value him. "You know," I said conspiratorially, "between you and this other car, you are the only professional driver here."
That's not cultural. He was angry because he thought someone was deliberately stealing his parking spot. His anger went away when he found out that it was an accident and that he would now be able to access his parking as much as he wanted.
He apologized because it turned out that his anger was not actually warranted by anything.
In tech support circles there's a bunch of methodologies, but a common one is PAIR.
Probe, Analyze, Isolate, Resolve.
The first step is probing and gaining agreement - asking meaningful questions to get to the bottom line and then making sure the person understands you have understood and have the right problem in mind.
Many people spend a significant amount of their communication time failing to gain agreement on the actual problem, who was at fault, and how its going to be resolved - this is basic communication skills but many people are not given a framework to think about it and have to go through life getting screamed at, so they adopt a similar policy.
For programming, and other technicl troubleshooying, I think I'd add a step at the end of "Probe, Analyze, Isolate, Resolve"... Verify - verify that the actual problem was solved, or confirm the Resolve step if someone else is involved.
Mistakes and misunderstanding can happen throughout the process. A quick email or conversation regarding the resolution can work wonders.
> If you’re able to convince the other party that they are actually understood, then communication can happen.
This is spot on, I think. Usually people are angry because they feel that their routine has been disrupted/they're frustrated/etc, and are ready to fight. If you show that you understand them, sympathize, and will try to help them without a fight, they relax.
> But now I've been in the management/client-facing role for a while, and my burning question is: 1. WHAT did the person say over the phone to calm them down? 2. Could the author of the article have said it with same results?
Sometimes there is nothing the underling can do because people treat others differently depending on perceived social position. No matter what you say and how you say it, some people will treat you badly if they think you are below them on the totem pole. Think about people who berate service workers and ask to Speak To The Manager, then when the manager comes and says the same thing, they’re mollified.
I’ve had managers tell me “Bring me along when you go talk to Director ABC” because he knew Director ABC sees manager as a peer and will listen, and sees me as someone beneath him.
People have goals and perceptions going into the conversation. If they want a manager they have already decided sometimes before the conversation starts that the conversation with the underling will not serve those ends. They go into the conversation with the manager with the expectation that the superior has the tools and intelligence to do the job and ergo actually listen. This isn't necessarily a failing on your side and it may not be something you can correct.
Things that work
- You can speak to the manager but the manager is an expert in managing people I am the expert in <subject matter>. I can resolve your issue.
- You can speak to the manager but there will be a wait of up to 10 minutes and in that same time frame we could have already resolved your issue.
- I know you want to do <impossible/illegal/crazy thing> in order to achieve <end> but the <system/law/policy> wont allow us to do that that way but fortunately there is another way to achieve <end> and we can get started on that right now.
- I'm required to collect information about such issues before sending it up. I'll make it quick can I ask you a few questions about why you want to speak to the manager? <sympathetic sounds/interjections followed by a casual insertion of the obviously beneficial solution>
However there are plenty of cases where the thing desired is the perceived importance of having someone themselves important take the case as it were and you can't replicate that without at least the pretense of importance. For instance when I was a low level supervisor at a retail establishment I came to the service desk on a number of occasions to deal with customer issues knowing no more than them and not even being over their area thus having LESS authority. They just wanted to jabber at someone in a collared shirt.
The first thing I do when I get any equipment is record the serial number, purchase price and date in a spreadsheet. Second thing is to download the PDF manual, and in the rare cases one is not available online, scan then recycle the paper manual.
If I ever become world leader, one of the first things I’ll order is for every product to be engraved or printed with a QR code leading to the specs and manual.
The article is about the 90s, internet access was not a given scanners were expensive, QR codes as we know them didn't exist, and you may not have had a second computer to read the manual explaining why the first computer didn't work.
Also, manuals meant something. Nowadays paper manuals included with products are mostly legal stuff about all the things you can't do and limits on warranty. Maybe a quick start guide. But the actual manual is often not included.
Presumably their second act as King Of The World will be to mandate the use of perpetual third-party hosting services. (e.g., A simple HTTPS host for static files that's run by the government and never deletes or moves a file.) Use of these services is required for sale of QR-labeled hardware.
Or mandatory registration with conservation authorities and copyright depositories like the Library of Congress, British Library, Biblothèque Nationale de France, etc.
Usually a Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner after unstapling the manual and slitting the binding fold with a paper knife. Also scanner phone apps like Readdle Scanner Pro work very well for thick cardboard that won't feed through a scanner (I do have flatbeds but it's usually too much trouble to unpack them into my tiny home office).
One performance review I received was a 45 minute, one-sided rant from my boss directed at me. All completely out of left field. With no ability to get a word in. It left me utterly shell shocked.
Most performance reviews I’ve had are good “gives and takes”, leaving me with feedback to consider, but also offering my boss perspective too. They’re also usually not complete surprises. I’ve had to give hard feedback to subordinates myself, and I know the importance of being open and listening when giving feedback, as almost always I have an incomplete picture of their behavior and a lot to learn about what they’re going though.
Trusting, dumbass me, just sat there and took this. I assumed I was the problem, that I was fundamentally broken as an employee, and wanted to just find any way to please this boss to make it all better.
She used the time to tell me,
- all the ways I was screwing up, without letting me ask questions, clarify, or correct anything.
- that she, and only she, had the true objective perspective on and others wouldn’t tell me their thoughts about me (despite regularly giving / receiving feedback)
- Make me distrust my colleagues as my boss had me thinking they were holding something back / funneling all these complaints to my boss.
This pattern of communication persisted for months sadly, and it took me months to “deprogram” away from thinking she had the a true, objective view of my performance.
I slept poorly this whole time. My engagement suffered and my performance plummeted. I went from a top performer in my space to becoming disengaged and feeling I could do nothing right. I went from having regular open discussions with everyone on how I could improve to having convos with only her, and closed off from my colleagues.
It was as if it was intended to get me to leave, which I did given how unhealthy the environment was. Which is interesting as early on she had been so positive and supportive. I guess it all had little to do with my performance and more to do with not being seen as useful anymore, and thus discarded by her.
This reminds me of a friend who has a narcissistic spouse. The spouse's criticism, gaslighting, and projection has ruined his self-esteem. It took years and the help of therapists for him to see that he isn't the problem.
i too have this story from the dark ages of computing, when my colleague asked how to make a pdf from an excel file. i told them to choose the menu item "print", then choose the PDF-program as a printer and then click on "print". they walk away immediately, come back, grumble at the computer... i ask what's wrong "nothing, nothing, tell me again: print, PDF-program and then print, correct?", they walk away again and finally come back "i found nothing at the printer, where is my PDF !?"
lol I've had this exact same occur multiple times... basically every time we have staff turnover in our condo office no one knows how to print to pdf... so every year or two I have to show someone how to do it, including up to 2022.
My pet peeve is that even in 2023 I still receive scans of printouts from accountants. They print out their reports to add cover sheets and add pages, and then scan it back in to deliver as a financial statement.
Great example of terrible software UX that we just put up with. I want to save this file onto my filesystem as a PDF file. Why the hell do I need to choose “Print” to do this?? If you are a developer, you might know the reason, but as an end user, this is baffling and totally unexpected. Just put “PDF” as another option in File->Export, where it makes the most sense to an end user.
Or, even better, developers, just use the “Save” function, not “Export”. Why we have to separate “Export” from “Save” is another terrible UX that only makes sense to developers.
If you see something that you believe only makes sense to developers odds are it actually DOES make sense in terms of the underling model that the application is working with. For instance the way save works is that you save your file as foo.txt subsequent saves automatically write further changes to the chosen file in the chosen format. If you "save as" again you change what the active file and format is. So for instance you "save as" foo.docx. Subsequent saves go to foo.docx and foo.txt stays as it is before the "save as" and you could open either one an continue where you left off.
Now take PDF a piece of shit format able to submit remote forms, execute JavaScript, and render and manipulate 3D models. Its a garbage application formation masquerading as a bad document format.
It makes sense to produce a pdf as a snapshot of the document but it makes zero sense to treat it as txt or docx one doesn't simply "save as" pdf and then continue editing in that format. If you use save for this feature how do you express the fact that you don't want to make foo.pdf the new default save target especially if you can't subsequently open it? Do you just silently not do that? This violates good design where observable functionality reflects as much as possible the comprehensible part of the user model you are presenting to the user. Having save as silently work differently when targeting an output only format is a bad solution.
Save vs Export expresses the underlying reality. You see the same conceptual reality where you are creating multimedia and the output format is lossy.
This is part of what I'm complaining about: There often _is_ a technical reason (occasionally even a good technical reason) for why the software is made a certain way, but those reasons are things that should only be relevant to the developer, not to the end user. The end user should not care about the "underlying model" or the "active file format". The software should "just work", and the frontend developer's job is to make the right judgment calls and hide irrelevant underlying nuance and complexity from the user. Great software doesn't "ship the org chart" or "ship the class abstractions".
If there really is an important power user case, provide an Expert Mode for those who care about the underlying model. That way, users who care about the lack of editabilty of PDFs or who actually mentally distinguish between lossless source material and lossy outputs to lose nothing, but other casual users gain a lot when these things are done for them.
Providing export to PDF while allowing save to docx is what allows the user to completely ignore virtually everything about the underlying model at the expense of one additional menu. All the model they need is in knowing how to operate a standard menu.
99.99% of document editor don't open or edit PDFs for a reason and doing otherwise is incredibly impractical.
You are best case asking to literally treble the scope of the app to go from one menu to two and because PDF is a giant piece of shit the result will probably be substantially more buggy.
We either need to seamlessly handle the mismatched formats whilst handling complexity like embedded documents or the users mental model now must encompass what features work in different formats. In all likelihood we end up in the worst of all possible worlds where it's a little bit of both.
Then the experts who actually care about sharing working documents now have the functionality they need hidden in a special mode which by definition few will ever learn about while received wisdom will end up being not using PDF or printing and scanning.
If you special case save as *.PDF to produce a PDF but not change the active save target to avoid lovecraftian horror you avoid most of the above but now save as a feature most people understand works different in your app than everyone else's.
The people who have export menus aren't stupid, you aren't actually smarter than them, you should at least understand why the fence you want to bulldoze exists it exists for good reason.
How about this. Some formats are severely lossy. Users are used to "save" not being lossy. If they misunderstand the capabilities of a format then they can irretrievably lose data.
"Export" is an attempt to make that less likely.
Some misunderstandings are more serious than others.
There were reasons for it even developers didn't understand.
PDF is actually Adobe PDF and you had to use the Adobe PDF Creator to create PDFs. To be able to save to PDF by a 3rd party application would have meant licenses fees to Adobe. So some clever guys came up to "misuse" a printer library for PDF creation...
Today in Libre Office, of course you find a button to _save_ directly to PDF. Not sure about MS Office though.
>Why we have to separate “Export” from “Save” is another terrible UX that only makes sense to developers.
I'm actually torn on this one. I can see where you're coming from, but I can also see value in the conceptual separation between saving a file in a form which can reloaded with full editability, and exporting it in a foreign format which effectively freezes it in its current form. Commingling those two concepts does cause significant confusion in non-technical people.
Having said that, I still swear whenever muscle-memory from 20 years ago tricks me into trying to File->Save a .tif in GIMP, and instead of doing what I want, it lectures me about how I should use File->Export instead, like some bratty kid playing "Simon Says".
When I was a teenager, I added extra cables in my PC case everywhere they fit. My idea was that if/when I added something, I would already have the cable.
I probably spent $100 mail ordering the cables from sellers in Computer Shopper. I am not saying this made sense, but it probably made as much sense as RGB fans do today.
I had to take it in for some repair that I could not figure out, and the service tech "stole" all my spare cables.
I recall being unhappy, but I do not remember the details.
I do know the tech refused to give me back all my cables.
Although the user should have been polite, I totally understand being annoyed that the manual was intercepted and thrown out. Users who actually read manuals are like gold. They want to learn and they want to solve their own problems if they can.
Obviously the partner is the jerk in the story but "Oh, we threw most of them away" and "I could just say ‘fuck you’ and walk out” aren't hallmarks of great support and probably contributed to the escalation of what started as a simple request for a manual.
It took John (the protagonist's boss' boss) to calm the user and put them on track to express their real concern and having it resolved.
> ..."Oh, we threw most of them away" and "I could just say ‘fuck you’ and walk out” aren't hallmarks of great support...
Eh? Addressing your first point, the guy asked:
> I just got this monitor, where’s the manual?
Which was honestly and directly answered with "We threw most of them away. We have hundreds of monitors and no need of all the manuals.".
The next statement out of the guy's mouth should have been "I need a copy of the manual.", which the support fellow answers with "I'll run back and get one for you. I'll be back in a jiffy.". Instead, the guy flips the fuck out in the middle of the explanation.
One might even imagine that had the guy not flipped the fuck out, the words "I can go get a copy if you like." would have rapidly followed the completion of the "How Things Are and Why They Are That Way" explanation. [0]
Addressing your second point... from the fine article:
> "Part of me thought, “I am a contractor here. I could just say ‘fuck you’ and walk out”, but I stood and took it."
The fellow who just flipped the fuck out is absolutely not a mind-reader. Even if he was, he flipped the fuck out before this thought entered the support guy's head... so the guy would have to be a time-traveler for this thought to have triggered his tantrum.
[0] As someone who both does support, and has periodic need of support assistance, the "How Things Are, Why They Are That Way, and What I (as a support guy) Can Do About It" style of conversation is my absolute favorite. It's clear, to-the-point, and informative.
I worked tech support for a while. My favorite monitor-related story goes like this:
User calls, says his PC stopped turning on. I arrive, ask him to demonstrate the problem.
Screen is black. He presses the power button on the PC and the one on the monitor. Wait a minute. Screen is still black. Try both buttons again, just for good measure, screen is still black.
The distinction between the PC being off and the monitor being off is one that is still lost on people, and it’s understandable. End users should not have to separate these things in their minds. Why would you want one off but the other on, besides use cases that HN commenters will surely list that are only relevant to power users? Just have one fucking power switch.
Apple has largely solved this with their external displays, and the laptop industry has also solved this. Yet the PC world is still full of monitors with separate power switches that just confuse.
> Why would you want one off but the other on, besides use cases that HN commenters will surely list that are only relevant to power users?
I like having my monitor off because of this one weird quirk that OSX seems to have. Specifically, the machine unfailingly wakes itself up from sleep every ~60 minutes to do something, and then puts itself back to sleep shortly thereafter.
When I'm trying to put _myself_ to sleep (and keep myself asleep), I don't want a bright-ass monitor briefly blazing across my room for no good goddamn reason.
It's not uncommon to want to shut off the display independently while a machine works on stuff. It seems with Macs you can learn to invoke that easily in the OS but it's probably not "discoverable" at all.
Meanwhile, displays with indepdent power buttons have been around since decades ago and still tend to work that way with typical TV/media setups. Although that was always unergonomic and we now have semi-reliable HDMI fixes.
1) Turns off the display in 60 seconds or less. (I think it's more like 10 seconds or less, but I've stopped paying close attention to it, so I am no longer certain about the timing.)
2) Turns the display back on every single time I get a new notification, and turns it back off within a few seconds. Given that this machine is running the Work Messaging Client, that means that the display powers up and down very, very frequently.
So if this is the discoverable "turn off the display" feature that GP was talking about, it's not a fit replacement for the power button on the monitor.
Around 2010 I started my career in a barely functioning software dev company. For some reason, my boss thinks it was a good idea to welcome our newly hired intern to the company by setting him up with two CRT monitors side by side. So dual CRT monitors. Everyone was already using dual Samsung LCD monitors.
Until now, I still can’t believe how ridiculous that setup was.
I once got borderline threatened (the owner of the computer was a lawyer) for changing a PC's screen resolution from 800x600 to 1024x768 (the monitor was a 17" CRT) as part of something else I was sorting out (voluntarily/socially, not as a job).
Needless to say I didn't argue the point, I just got my ass over there and changed it back to 800x600. Luckily(?) I hadn't touched the stack of "toolbars" in the Internet Explorer window...
I've only seen this behaviour once. Someone very publicly shouted at and then privately apologised to.
Needless to say the shouter lost any respect I had for them - firstly for blaming without facts, secondly for being so pathetic they didn't make a public apology.
The victim in this case went up in my estimation and us now a very successful team leader.
I guess the thing that stands out to me is that this story shows the value of managers. John is obviously more experienced in dealing with emotional people (we are all that person sometimes).
Or maybe the angry partner only listened to John because he is also a partner. There was probably nothing the author could have said to placate him, being a lowly tech in the unfortunate position of having to tell a partner something they didn’t want to hear. But hearing the same explanation from someone he considered a peer was apparently enough to satisfy him.
In other words, this shows the importance of titles.
I don't have quiet this level of story but have had a number of experiences with Sales type people that are able to talk the talk and with confidence thus fooling me into assuming they knew what they were doing.
I was a SysEng back about 20 years ago and was getting a bit salty working there. It was a lot of Solaris, PG, Java and Perl. (I mention this just for personality context.) I worked closely with two specific dev teams and one day the manager of one of the dev teams mentioned a Sales Analyst type was unable to upload reports for a specific customer and would I mind looking at it. I had no idea what this person did, nor his business purpose but the guy had a cygwin terminal up and was remarkably tech coherent. I despised business types but clearly this guy had 'the right stuff' and thus I agreed to help. The issue was something like he couldn't upload files to the customer's FTPS server and I confirmed that was true. I then spent the next 2 full days learning the complicated FTPS protocols, checking firewall rules, checking PAM/LDAP perms on the prod host, on and on. I even nmap scanned the customer's server. He swore the customer used FTPS. It was Adobe so I didn't question this strange protocol choice. Finally I asked him to show me how he normally did it assuming he was a cli wiz. Nope. Cygwin had been installed by a dev trying to help, who had also told him FTPS stuff, and he'd just been parroting back everything. I was so annoyed and betrayed by this idiot I couldn't speak and it was clear he knew it: his face went red, he looked at the floor, and after a few moments he stood up and just walked away.
Solving the tech issue wasn't the way to a solution. This person's answers simply reflected my questions and how I phrased them, and everything was filtered through my assumptions. I'm sure my attitude made things so much worse. I didn't chill out overnight but it was the beginning and I became very aware of the people element when working an issue. And be nice to Tech Support.
I get the anger tbh. Just give me any documentation and accessories, cables that came with the device. There's no need to expend effort on getting rid of thousands of manuals when you can just give each manual to the end users along with the monitor, probably in the same box it shipped.
As someone who reads and keeps every instruction manual, I understand where the customer is coming from. I don't think the abuse is warranted but I understand.
Yes. If the PC support folks don't need the manual, just send it along with the monitor to the end user. Why did they need to throw the manuals away so fast?
At a previous company, a startup, we made and sold Firewall software which was installed on either Sun hardware (Solaris/SPARC) or Compaq (NT/x86). A sales guy returned from a customer meeting proud to have made a sale. His customer loved the Sun hardware, it was so well put together in those days compared to the “Pee Cee”, but he had only Windows sysadmins.
So our sales guy sold him a Firewall on SPARC hardware running NT, which the company then asked me to deliver. Thanks BillJ, wherever you are.
199x.. a friend is working as support technician of some highly-reliable-and prohibitely-expensive boxes. One day some lady from Big-corp-xyz rings, and says that her box would restart occasionaly. Whut? Taking all the machinery for diagnostics, he goes there. Takes box out, Opens it, plugs the cables, ... a hour+ later, nothing. The thing works as expected and no amount of fiddling around would make it restart by itself. He puts it back at its place under the desk.
- You sure this.. restarts?
- Of course, happened twice today
- Huh? Can you show how it happens?
She sits on the chair, start typing some document, crosses her legs and starts shaking the upper one. And, after a while, hits the reset button with nose of her shoe.
- You see? Just restared, i could not even finish the letter..
- Ahhhh. Okay. The.. location of the box is causing some.. intereference. Moving it.
He moves the box to the other side of desk, where no legs can reach.. and that's it.
I've seen deranged full-volume yelling for minutes on end, laptops being smashed into bits on desks, and a full on punch-up between middle aged men in nice suits in a fancy office.
I've not worked in tech support exactly, but dev on internal apps that we also run the ops for.
These types of users beyond the morals/niceness issue just seem plain stupid.
The most intelligent manipulative users I observed were the ones who do the exact opposite - chew out the boss regularly, but are absolute saints to the lower level "doers".
They engender good will with the people actually doing the ops work, often end up getting them to go the extra mile. Plus they shell shock the boss enough that the ops people are given the priority to work on their issues.
chew out the boss regularly, but are absolute saints to the lower level "doers".
i don't think that is manipulative, unless it is extreme. this is the behavior that you want. treat your subordinates with respect and move problems that you can't fix on your own up the chain.
the thing is, if every level works that way then you don't usually need to chew out your boss, nor need your subordinates chew out you.
I worked as an apprentice at the age of 15/16 in a store where they develop software but also provide hardware support for consumer devices (phones, computers, etc.), a customer asked me if it was possible for me to cut off his phone battery with a hacksaw because it wouldn't fit in the case
he was incredulous when I told him it couldn't be done and tried to explain that even trying is dangerous but he didn't want to give up, I hope he didn't try at home
I believe that providing technical support is a crucial skill for a developer.
If someone cannot assist a single user in resolving their issue, I question their ability to create effective documentation that reduces the occurrence of perplexing problems for inexperienced users. Furthermore, they are less likely to design a user experience (UX) that tries to avoid unnecessary complications and strange issues.
Tech support proud moment: in the 1990s, walking a non-technical user through editing and then saving a config file for the product I was supporting, with him using vi and not being familiar with how it works, over the phone. The vi editor is the one that you know is always installed on every Unix system.
about 2000, my father called me one day while i was somewhere in middle of mountain.. about something going wrong, entering the BIOS-setup of his machine... and in the next 15 minutes i had to recall and imagine all them 6-7 screens of BIOS of his computer, and lead-him-"by-hand", that is, key-by-key... Luckily i had same BIOS on my machine so it was been.. familiar. While even if he was seeing all the text there, it meant nothing to him...
You can be sure that partner, even if he had the monitor's user manual, wouldn't have read it. He would have immediately called support to send someone up to explain all the buttons and whatnot to him.
I can't imagine clearing somebody's browser history as part of support work. Yikes.
At an old job, back in the 90s, a Customer demanded we fire one of our young techs because he cleared the "Recycle Bin" on a PC he was working on. The PC's assigned user had been storing important documents there because "you can always get them back".
That incident set the bar in my mind. Touch nothing beyond what is necessary to get the job done at your peril. Don't touch monitor settings, chair settings, lighting-- anything.
Edit: I've always used the vernacular "the PC assigned to (person)" rather than "(person)'s PC" because the computer belongs to the company, not the individual. As the tech it's important to remember it doesn't belong to you either.
I rely on my browsing history all the time. I don’t always know to bookmark a page the first I visit, oftentimes realizing its importance or utility much later.
I think that’s something you should ask before doing. Cache and cookies aren’t as important, but history is useful.
Cache may not be that important (although I believe that nowadays clearing the cache also clears the local storage, so the same would apply) but there are sites that use long-lived cookies to deliver a personalized experience without needing to log in which you would irredeemably break by clearing the cookies.
Hmm yeah sorry without context it sounds like a bit of a dick move to be honest. You just assumed your way of working was somehow superior.
I have always relied on search and “last openend” for seeing what I was working on. Then some dude just deletes my winXP “last used” (or whatever it was) menu item stating: you should sort things in folders. Not amused I was.
even with sorting stuff in folders, "last opened" is a shortcut that saves several clicks and it helps me remember, which is important to get back into the zone.
same goes for browser history. it's not just where i have been, but also when. that gets lost with bookmarks. i probably won't miss really old history entries, but that's also an advantage. history eventually ages out. bookmarks never age out. i'd have to delete them manually. lastly at least originally visited links had a different color. bookmarked links don't do that.
I rely on open tabs. Firefox' search bar helpfully orders its results by priority: tab-search results first, browser history second, and search-engine results third. It makes a convenient workflow for re-discovering things I've already found before. I'm too lazy to close tabs, since new ones proliferate a lot faster than I can keep up. And if I dedicate time to clearing out old tabs, like a garbage-collection sweep, I waste far too much time because I get sidetracked by all the "read later" stuff I'd forgotten about.
When it goes up to several thousand open tabs, Firefox starts lagging, so I switch to a fresh browser profile.
Once, Hacker News IP-banned me because Firefox crashed, and the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.
when firefox started lagging because there were to many open tabs, i took advantage of that lazy loading feature and restarted the browser, causing all tabs except the active ones to remain unloaded.
now i installed an extension that suspends tabs that are not visited for a while. that keeps active tabs to a few dozen, so i never have to restart any more because of that.
apparently i have more than 3700 tabs (spread over a dozen windows, each window for a somewhat defined activity, which should make cleaning out a bit easier, since tabs are related, although i would still have to take some time off to clean through all off them).
> the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.
I wonder if this is the problem with Safari on Mac. There is some Critical Number of Tabs, beyond which it refuses to stop the beachball. I have to go into Safari on iOS to delete tabs from the Mac.
Yes I would be too, so I don't do that. But I think even more than the annoyance of everything lost I'd be mad at OP on principle for meddling? There's no context, but even if it was IT help desk my browser is too slow or something, seems like something I should be asked about first, given a chance to backup (or them do it for me and restore, and if that's not an option then it's just not an acceptable solution).
I assume everyone who has done "tech support" either professionally or as a hobby for family/friends has had the case where they "emptied the trash" only to find out that the person was storing important documents in it.
But it’s still weird to put something that you still need into the trash can on your desktop computer.
Like, if someone at an office physically put a printed document into the trash can next to their desk, and then they started screaming the next day because the cleaning staff had emptied the trash can of “important documents”. Most people would agree that that would be an insane reaction.
So why people decide to intentionally put important documents in the trash can on the computer I don’t understand.
IMO the purpose of the trash can on the computer is to give you a chance to undo throwing it away, just like in real life. Instead of putting it straight into the shredder irl. But to expect things to stay in the trash for more than a little bit, that’s bonkers.
Only because you (should) expect (through experience/onboarding etc.) that that will happen. IMO it's a bit more like leaving a pile on your desk that looks like scrap, then being annoyed that someone cleared it without telling you or when you asked them to help with something else, and it actually wasn't scrap, or at least you hadn't yet determined that it certainly was.
And browser history doesn't even look like scrap, it's just a useful thing that exists and many people never clear it. Myself included, no reason to.
I once got chewed out by a finance director because we in IT had scheduled updates (and their associated restarts) to run on weekends. This guy was in the habit of creating important financial spreadsheets and then never saving them, just leaving them open all the time. So he came in one Monday and found all his work gone.
There was a rumor that when he was let go, the police had to drag him from the building kicking and screaming. That rumor was not true, but it was plausible.
Reboots not under your own control are horrible, just super annoying. For me my desktop is my "state". I hate that Windows (admins) do(es) that. Never reboot my machine, ask me to reboot it, I'll do it, when it suits me. Sure, give me a timer, that's fine. In fact that's how my company used to do it.
I really prefer Linux because of this, my updates, my way, my time, my conditions.
I always try to avoid clearing peoples’ history if possible. E.g. use the Disable Cache option or delete individual cookies via Developer Tools instead.
In the rare case that I do try the nuclear option of clearing history, I always ask permission first.
I let Google keep track of mine and occasionally do a takeout so I can search back over a decade on all the devices I use.
One of the first browser extensions I wrote would archive the page you're looking at and create a navigable tree of your browsing history with a built in search. This was like 20 years ago. It's probably still somewhere, I don't even remember the name.
Bookmarks presume I'll know the future while history presumes I'll know the past. One of them is more knowable.
Clearing my history would be like wiping my home directory. If someone did it on my behalf I'd be shocked.
Hey now .. Its a perfectly cromulant way of going about tracking ones interests and information needs .. especially if you put the history directory in a git repo and practice good repo hygiene ..
Another good technique is to print-to-PDF, which is like boomarks on acid.
Of course, I'm implying intelligence where there is no evidence of any, in this case, just sayin' .. ;)
The point is, sometimes you need a manager to keep the authoritarians and the servile classes, suitably lubricated. This guy pissed off someone who should know better, and eventually - thanks to middle management - did.
There are class lessons in the narrative. Still relevant.
Partners are owners. In law and financial fields, they are often very knowledgable and experts in their fields and know little about things like computers.
When I started computerizing a law firm in the early 90s, the only technology attorneys knew how to use was the telephone and the dictation machine -- and their automobiles, of course, which some attorneys used as a comparison for how they wanted their PCs to work.
Especially for older attorneys, computers and such were frightening (many attorneys had never touched a typewriter), and I think this accounts for a lot of these kinds of reactions. Many people in power are used to having their whims catered to, to having others support them -- the junior attorneys, secretaries, paralegals, word processing operators, accounting staff, etc.
Most of the complaints I remember weren't about the inner workings of the computer, but about UI. The automobile argument wasn't that drivers needed to undertand the ICE, but to understand steering wheel, gearshift, brake and throttle pedals, etc. The complaints I heard were mostly pre-1995 as well, before Windows started seriously overtaking DOS and UIs had relatively little in common between programs.
The guy wanted the manual, because he felt he needed to read the manual - but when it was explained to him that the junior IT guy would help him with whatever he needed, it calmed him down.
Its a generational thing. You may not feel it these days but there were indeed periods of computer evolution where it was, kind of important to read the manual. And, also, help the older generation get used to the new things.
One day a petroleum engineer came with his monitor (from the company he was working) to fix it.
After 1 or 2 days it was fixed and they came to get it back.
After few hours the engineer called very angry.
-it is not my monitor!
-oh, it cannot be
-it is not!
-is this brand and model?
-yes
-read me the service tag at the back
-this
-it is your monitor sir.
-is not and I want my monitor back
-sir, it is your monitor
-no!
So he came back with his monitor. It was his monitor, the technicians tested it again.
-sir, this is your monitor.
-no, I had a completely different background, and different programs, it is not my monitor
-wait, what?
The technicians called the it department and told them the situation.
While the monitor was in service, IT used that free time to update his computer.
The engineer leave my dad's place not 100% convinced
If you are that engineer, the story is still alive 25 years later. Thank you.