how to fix computer problems
Aug. 24th, 2009 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe xkcd webcomic is widely and rightfully praised, especially its computer jokes - this one got a huge chuckle out of me - but this recent one on "how to fix computer problems" does not fit my experience at all, although others have linked to it approvingly.
I don't think that people who understand computers - or anything else, for that matter - have any idea how all-encompassingly baffling they are to people who don't understand them. I find many aspects of computers baffling myself - I hate to break it to my friends in the industry, but when you tell me what you're doing on the job, I usually have very little idea what you're talking about - and perhaps that humility assists me when I'm helping my mother with a computer problem.
True enough that I've had problems of my own that a Google search on some terminology has shed some light on, but when I actually am able to solve my mother's difficulties for her, the algorithm goes nothing like the one depicted in the cartoon. It's usually one of two things:
1) I've had the same problem myself at some time in the past, so I can now cut through all the frustrations and useless trials I went through at the time, and give the benefit of the actual answer that I'd finally come up with.
2) The answer is buried in the verbiage, in places where it's impossible for the inexperienced user to tell what is blither that may be ignored and what is useful information that may be encoded in unexpected ways.
As an example of #1, my mother currently does not receive e-mail from me. (We only discovered this when she noted in a phone call that she'd not received an e-mail I'd promised to send, which I'd sent two days earlier. Tests subsequently confirmed the problem and proved that it was limited to my ISP.) It is only because I've had past experience with this that I was sure this was a block and not a server glitch, because a glitch generates a bounce message and blocks don't. And while a technician would look first for a block in her personal e-mail program (as indeed the poorly-informed technician who visited her did), it is because of past experience that I know that ISPs regularly block other ISPs because some spam came (or appeared to come) from it, without informing anybody of it - not their own staff, nor their customers, nor the supposedly transgressing ISP.
As an example of #2, at one time my mother reported that she could neither send nor receive e-mail. She would press the "send/receive" button and get an error message. She read this message to me over the phone. It contained lots of gobbledegook but it also contained the letters "SMTP", which is how I knew the initial problem, at least, was in outgoing not in incoming e-mail. Now, there is no way she could have been expected to know, or remember if told, that SMTP is the end-user sending mail protocol, or to have known to have chosen this bit of data from everything in the error message to search on, or to have understood the neepery explaining it if she had. I happen to know this. Why? Because I've had to sweat my way through problems setting up SMTP and POP user addresses in the primitive past.
So my first advice was to try hitting the "Receive only" command. Should she have known about its existence already? Well, yes, we'd used it before. But it's buried in a pull-down menu and not something she regularly used, so she'd forgotten about it. It worked, and the problem eventually turned out to be an indigestible attachment to a "Reply To" e-mail that the pop server had let in on the original incoming message - and I should have thought of looking in the outgoing mail queue, instead of just blaming a server problem, long before I did.
So it's not all that simple, and inexperienced end users are at sea in all kinds of ways the intelligentsia can't even imagine (there have been occasions when I've been asked, "Well, exactly what is it you don't understand?" and I have to answer, "I don't know: if I did, I would understand it much better than I do"), and the real question is this:
Why, with all the user-friendliness supposedly built into computer programs nowadays, can't Outlook Express give an error message reading, "Sorry, I'm having trouble processing a message that you're sending" instead of giving a load of technical neepery with the letters "SMTP" buried in it?
I don't think that people who understand computers - or anything else, for that matter - have any idea how all-encompassingly baffling they are to people who don't understand them. I find many aspects of computers baffling myself - I hate to break it to my friends in the industry, but when you tell me what you're doing on the job, I usually have very little idea what you're talking about - and perhaps that humility assists me when I'm helping my mother with a computer problem.
True enough that I've had problems of my own that a Google search on some terminology has shed some light on, but when I actually am able to solve my mother's difficulties for her, the algorithm goes nothing like the one depicted in the cartoon. It's usually one of two things:
1) I've had the same problem myself at some time in the past, so I can now cut through all the frustrations and useless trials I went through at the time, and give the benefit of the actual answer that I'd finally come up with.
2) The answer is buried in the verbiage, in places where it's impossible for the inexperienced user to tell what is blither that may be ignored and what is useful information that may be encoded in unexpected ways.
As an example of #1, my mother currently does not receive e-mail from me. (We only discovered this when she noted in a phone call that she'd not received an e-mail I'd promised to send, which I'd sent two days earlier. Tests subsequently confirmed the problem and proved that it was limited to my ISP.) It is only because I've had past experience with this that I was sure this was a block and not a server glitch, because a glitch generates a bounce message and blocks don't. And while a technician would look first for a block in her personal e-mail program (as indeed the poorly-informed technician who visited her did), it is because of past experience that I know that ISPs regularly block other ISPs because some spam came (or appeared to come) from it, without informing anybody of it - not their own staff, nor their customers, nor the supposedly transgressing ISP.
As an example of #2, at one time my mother reported that she could neither send nor receive e-mail. She would press the "send/receive" button and get an error message. She read this message to me over the phone. It contained lots of gobbledegook but it also contained the letters "SMTP", which is how I knew the initial problem, at least, was in outgoing not in incoming e-mail. Now, there is no way she could have been expected to know, or remember if told, that SMTP is the end-user sending mail protocol, or to have known to have chosen this bit of data from everything in the error message to search on, or to have understood the neepery explaining it if she had. I happen to know this. Why? Because I've had to sweat my way through problems setting up SMTP and POP user addresses in the primitive past.
So my first advice was to try hitting the "Receive only" command. Should she have known about its existence already? Well, yes, we'd used it before. But it's buried in a pull-down menu and not something she regularly used, so she'd forgotten about it. It worked, and the problem eventually turned out to be an indigestible attachment to a "Reply To" e-mail that the pop server had let in on the original incoming message - and I should have thought of looking in the outgoing mail queue, instead of just blaming a server problem, long before I did.
So it's not all that simple, and inexperienced end users are at sea in all kinds of ways the intelligentsia can't even imagine (there have been occasions when I've been asked, "Well, exactly what is it you don't understand?" and I have to answer, "I don't know: if I did, I would understand it much better than I do"), and the real question is this:
Why, with all the user-friendliness supposedly built into computer programs nowadays, can't Outlook Express give an error message reading, "Sorry, I'm having trouble processing a message that you're sending" instead of giving a load of technical neepery with the letters "SMTP" buried in it?
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 11:57 am (UTC)I don't think that people who understand computers - or anything else, for that matter - have any idea how all-encompassingly baffling they are to people who don't understand them.
I'm a good computer instructor because I do indeed understand this. My major skill remains being able to translate English to Geek, and Geek to English. My favorite way of teaching: "Ok, now you do it."
You did very well diagnosing and fixing your mother's problem. Should there be an option "Error messages for the English speaker"? Maybe, as long as you retain the neepery option.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 03:10 pm (UTC)I have complained to IBM and other major software vendors about this, but the problem is endemic to the industry and no one seems to want to correct it.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 03:41 pm (UTC)So why did they bother creating the codes in the first place?
The vendor attitude is usually that the computers came up with the error messages by themselves. But one of the few things I learned in my computer programming class is that computers don't write their own error messages.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 03:45 pm (UTC)I've had good experiences at the receiving end of this, to be sure, but I've also had bad experiences, of two kinds:
1) The instructor who shows you a complex procedure once and then expects you to execute it perfectly.
2) The instructor who has you perform the procedure, telling you step by step exactly what to do, but you have no idea why you're doing it, consequently it has no hold on your mind.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 03:58 pm (UTC)> why did nobody keep a list
It's not that simple.
It's often the case that multiple conditions exist that can result in a particular error. The code that actually throws errors is scattered throughout a huge code base, in the case of big programs, like anything MSFT produces.
Error messages are difficult to document and that documentation is tough to maintain unless you've got an automated system for producing the documentation. The Documentum server had something like three thousand potential error messages, and you bet Tech Pubs did not document them. We could not have kept up.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 04:08 pm (UTC)Your explanation for the failure boils down to: it's incompetence.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 04:26 pm (UTC)I've seen examples of this at work in my own profession. Sometimes, when the thing that I've been assured can't be done is at a level I can do something about, I've gone ahead and done it myself. I broke the back of the uncataloged book reserve queue at a public library that way.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 08:55 pm (UTC)A lot of the time, I have -no- idea how to solve a given problem, and while broken stuff is often solved (if at all) with google, specialized knowledge, etc, often the "how do I do X" is done via a random search that can't be done except experientially...now matter how much someone asks for help over the phone or on email.
I think the other chord struck is the wish (largely forlorn, for people who aren't technical, and have no desire to be) that people would do a bit of searching around before asking for help specifically so that they'd learn something in the process.
Re bitch on incomprehensible error messages: I agree that sometimes they're caused by personal incompetence. More frequently, they're caused by institutional incompetence (which isn't tied to the incompetence of anyone in specific -- or at least not anyone technical).
no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 08:24 pm (UTC)Perhaps it's because the former isn't any use to anybody trying to troubleshoot the problem, whereas the latter would be.
Cryptic numeric error codes are another matter, and in my experience they're put in by developers who are *certain* that they'll get that chunk of code completely debugged, and therefore the annoying error won't be seen by the end-user, no no not ever not ever.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 09:31 pm (UTC)The neepery could have been buried behind a "click here for more information" button, which many error messages offer anyway.