Re: a perfectly understandable error
No, the cattle prod can be thought about for a few seconds but then what *needs* to happen is the IT guyzengalz need to figure out why the user cannot get their head around whatever is obvious-duh to IT.
Because elided thought processes are a common source of error in every damned facet of our business.
It is, for example, why in one shop I worked at with a frantic schedule I came up with the plan that if anyone had a code problem they had looked at for 15 minutes without seeing the problem they could and should grab the nearest colleague and make them sit through a line by line explanation of said code.
99 times out of 100 it went: "I do this, then this, then if that is true I do ... I see the problem".
(The other 1 was Fred not understanding that he had to test an error status after both the find *and* the get on Honeywell DML. "I find the record, get a good status returned, then the update errors!").
Sometimes it is simply a matter of a crib card with pictures. Say, you don't think the right switch could have been communicated to ghe librarian from the get-go do you?
Remember folks, "Users are too stoopid" never sold a single person on adopting Linux. Linux distros had to move toward the user. One to grow on.
My mother in law can't use a mouse because she hammers the buttons so hard the mouse moves an inch or more, performing an unwanted drag'n'drop instead of a click. We explained it, she still hammered the buttons and complained. So I bought her a trackball, which she loves because "it works".
I had to move toward her because she couldn't (for whatever reason) move toward me, and we both just wanted the problem to go away.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
