Time to rant
Alright. I was going to rant about something that happened at work yesterday, but someone else has already done a much better job and I’m going to have to quote him. First let me give you the cliff’s notes version of what happened yesterday to me.
One of the people that I support sends an email in asking how to configure something on their computer. I send them a link to a web page that we made with a simple 5 step procedure on how to do what he asked. About 10 minutes later he shows up in my office saying that it didn’t work. I ask if he read the instructions, he says "of course I did", so I ask him a few more questions and it becomes blatantly obvious that he didn’t read a single word of the directions I sent him. So I tell him to try the directions I sent him and come back if it doesn’t work. He sits down directly outside my office, boots his laptop up and tries it right there instead of going to his office to try it. About 5 minutes later he stands up and says "It worked" and walked away.
Here is the little rant I came across last week. I tossed around the idea of posting just the URL and sending you to read it from there, but the web page isn’t real work safe so I am going to quote it here. I try to keep my page fairly clean, I might drop a few f-bombs here and there, but that’s about it.
Quoted from Ernie’s House of Whoopass (click to visit the site, not safe for work!) Keep in mind, these are not my words, but there’s no way in hell I could have written it better.
…the instructions to install any USB device can be boiled down as follows: First load the software, then plug in the new device.
That’s it. It’s a very simple premise. So let me ask you something. Do you put your shoes on before you put your socks on? No, of course you don’t. Especially if each morning, sitting atop your footwear, was an enormous color coded postcard that read, "DO NOT PUT YOUR SHOES ON UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE PUT YOUR SOCKS ON FIRST." I mean even if you don’t know a single thing about computers (or getting dressed), you’d at least be able to follow simple instructions like that, right? Because that’s all there is to it. Nothing else. No DMA channels or interrupt conflicts. No DIP switches or setting of bus speeds. Just true, honest to goodness ‘plug-and-play’ that nerds of yesterday only dreamed about. And all a person has to do is, you guessed it, Follow The Fucking Instructions. Instructions which are presented in step-by-step fashion to where even the biggest fucking idiot could readily keep up:
1. Insert the CD into your computer.
2. Close the CD tray.
3. If the CD does not autorun, double click ‘autorun’.
4. Follow the prompts on the screen.
5. When told to do so, plug in the new USB device.
You’re looking at five idiot-proof steps — and I’m very serious when I say this — you have to actually work at fucking up a USB device install. It has to be a conscious effort. You have to wake up that morning and say to yourself, "My life is too easy. I’m going to make my life difficult, as well as the life of those around me." In order to fail with USB you have to come home from Best Buy, unwrap that new toy you bought, stare right at the five illustrated "QUICK INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS" and then you have to choose to fuck things up. You have to choose to transform a very simple task into a very difficult one. You have to choose to not Follow The Fucking Instructions. By performing something like this:
1. Skip ahead and perform step 5.
2. Go back to step 2.
3. Go even further back and perform step 1.
4. Perform step 5 again.
5. Frustrated, go back and perform step 3.
6. Perform step 4.
7. Repeat step 4.
8. Repeat step 4 again.
9. Perform step 5.
10. Perform step 1.
11. Perform step 3.
etc… until you end with…
27. Call Ernie.
And here’s a newsflash you you. The first thing I’m going to ask — and it’s a question I’ll already know the answer to but I’ll ask it anyway just to hear you lie to me — is, "Did you follow the instructions?" I know what you’re going to say. I know what you’re going to say will be anything but the truth. This is just a question I ask so I have a few seconds to silently curse under my breath. You’re going to say you did. And here’s what’s going to happen next. I’m going to tell you to take unplug the USB device, eject the CD, turn your computer off, turn your computer on, and this time… Follow The Fucking Instructions. Now I know, this is an easy five minute process. Think about that: five minutes. Three hundred seconds. That’s a long time. So when thirty seconds later you say, "Okay, I did that and it didn’t work." I’ll know you’re lying again. You were incapable of following five instructions when they were illustrated with color drawings, so I don’t know what made me think you could follow five verbal instructions but again, I had to go through the motions. Amazed at my fortune telling skills? Wait, because there’s more. Here comes the big finale. I’m going to ask you a very direct question, "You unplugged your new USB ethernet adapter, ejected the CD, rebooted your computer, and reinstalled the software… just now?" And here’s what you’re going to say — and you’re actually going to believe this is a valid answer to my question — you’re going to answer, "I think so."
And in the end, I know that it will take less time and be less frustrating to me to get in my car, drive an hour to your house, and Follow The Fucking Instructions for you, than it will for me to try to walk you through this over the phone. Why? Because for some reason I can not understand, you are incapable of Following The Fucking Instructions
There’s just no way I could say it better so I figured I’d quote him. If you want a good website to hit on a daily basis, I suggest EHOWA
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Meh. Don’t you just love end users?
It amazes me in my coursework when I see students losing large sums of points by not following the instructions. I’ve seen multi-page reports that fail to address the prompt in any way.
It’s far worse with users that have more ‘book knowledge’ – that is, more education. Experimentally, common sense seems to be modeled by:
common sense = k^-((years of post-secondary education-c)/4)
Where ‘k’ is a constant relating to how much of the real world the user has been exposed to and ‘c’ is how resistant the user is to academia. As you can see, with every passing year end of education, the individual gets better in their field at the expense of becoming exponentially dumber in preforming simple tasks.
You remind me of an XKCD comic. RTFM indeed.
http://xkcd.com/293/