Re: The right attitude
@Potemkine! and @phuzz
I'd like to recollect two examples of problematic communication, the first was when I held a series of Windows 95 workshops for a large oil company. The prerequisite for the workshops were high-level computer skills.
At one of the workshops there were two people, a man and a woman, that sat at the same table, incidentally. Unfortunately, it seemed that their "high-level" skills did not include the art of double-clicking (and much, much more). At some point near the beginning of the workshop I had to show them how to double-click. The male participant did not have the fine-motor skills do it and gave up (I showed him how to single-click and then press Enter instead, which worked most of the time). His double-click consisted of a click, a slight pause, a jerk of the hand and then another click, and as you probably know, Windows does not register a double-click when you move the mouse between the two clicks.
The second actually happened before the "first" on my personal timeline. I was a student and a Teaching Assistant at an Engineering university. I helped with the practical experiments in weekly, all-afternoon classes. In this particular case experiments with an 8080 processor. The students (in teams of four) had to connect the processor box to the power supply box at the beginning of the class. The power supply had a mains lead and five coloured sockets for each of its four voltages and ground (Red socket = +12V, Orange socket = +5V, Green socket = -5V, Blue socket = -12V, and Black socket = Ground). The CPU box similarly had five sockets in the exact same colours and then there were five coloured leads in, guess what? Yup, the same five colours. About half an hour into class, one of the teams approached me and said their setup did not work. I looked at what they had done, which miraculously involved connecting the mains cable correctly to the mains power as well as connecting the five sockets on the power supply to the five sockets on the CPU with the five leads, only ... No two sockets of the same colour on the two boxes were connected to each other and no lead/socket combination used the same colour, instead something like Red power supply socket connected with Blue lead to Orange CPU socket, etc.
I asked the members of the team (nicely!) to observe the colours of the sockets and the leads, and asked them if they thought the leads and sockets were coloured for a specific reason. (A learning opportunity, eh?) They didn't take that very well and asked me (not entirely nicely ;-) to just f***ing tell them what to do.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Miraculously, the CPU had actually survived the misleading (sorry!) connections.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
