Thank God for software developers and IT gurus. Without them, life and business would be more chaotic than it already is. You see, the rest of us need saving, well in advance of our indiscretions. Try as they may to keep us from downloading software, altering settings, or setting up websites ad nauseum we still find all new ways to make their lives miserable. Of course, their lives would be a lot less miserable if we’d learn how to read things like policies, user manuals, and self-help forums.
Sadly, the technical good guys bear the burdens of our sins. While we whine and bang our fists on the desks hoping our problem will be fixed exactly one picosecond after we discover it, they quietly push their actual thoughts aside long enough to patiently explain why it is or is not possible for us to instantly return to the state of nirvana we seek. If it is possible to get us back to The Point Before Everything Went Wrong, we should be elated, patient, and grateful but instead we tend to show our true colors the moment we utter, “So, how long will this take?”
Increasingly, I, for one, appreciate human help, especially as it is becoming a rare commodity. Increasingly, companies are trying to reduce customer and technical support costs through videos, webinars, podcasts, and self-help forums. The videos are great if they’re well made and address the specific issue you face; however, like webinars and podcasts they require an investment in time before their actual value can be assessed. Self-help forums may help but their quality is very inconsistent. Some are easy to navigate and well populated with good content. Others appear to have been designed by chaoticians.
Application-specific help also varies in its effectiveness. Most systems allow you to search for terms or step through an index. However, some systems don’t anticipate synonyms, meaning they may recognize “trash” but not “delete” or vice versa. If you know their limitations going in, you may have a better chance of finding what you seek.
Then there are the IT guys. They know the answers to our questions better than we know how to ask the question in the first place. Most self-help systems have no such capability. They generally anticipate a finite set of questions worded in a particular way.
So, when you have access to human help, be gracious. After all, the IT guys are people too.
