Here’s a good lesson to learn. If a geek is calmly trying to explain something to you, it’s generally a good idea to listen. Otherwise you run the risk of making a complete fool of yourself.
Jerry Taylor is the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma. Last week the company who hosts Tuttle’s web site had a problem which lead to the reinstallation of Apache and for a while the main page of the web site just served the server test page. Thinking they had been hacked, Mr Taylor contacted Centos (the people who supply the free operating system that the server runs and whose name was all over the new page) demanding that they removed their software that was blocking access to his web site.
Johnny Hughes replied on behalf of Centos and calmy and politely tried to get to the bottom of the problem. Oh, I shouldn’t try and explain it. Just go and read the emails that were exchanged.
This strikes a chord with me. Often when someone configures the nms formmail program badly and see our error message I’ll get angry emails demanding that we stop blocking their email. It’s a difficult situation to deal with. It’s not the user’s fault that they don’t understand the situation, but when you try to explain they think you’re just trying to confuse them with tech-speak and they don’t listen to you.
I’m just not cut out for end-user support.
It’s even better than that — the City Manager then wrote to The Register asking them to pull their coverage of this incident!
The view from the worm tank…
I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but wiggly worm has not ever been one of them. While looking through the TTLB thingy for other similarly labeled sites, I found a truly international hodgepodge of interesting sites. Let’s start our global worm