Marc Chamberlin said the following on 02/11/2011 02:09 PM:
Instead there are mostly only complaints when something does not work which does not really help the developers.
Oh YES, but complaints are extremely valuable, IF AND ONLY IF you take the time to LISTEN and understand where the problem really lies, and take the time to then correct it.
I suspect it was punishment for some grave and heinous sin I had committed in a previous life, but I once had a job on the phone support desk for a TLA company that - at that time - was a major name in the industry. My how the mighty TLA companies of old are fallen.
Most complaints are very likely to boil down to the fact that the user does not understand how to use a tool.
Dead to rights, Marc. Nineteen of of twenty calls were like that.
By correcting, I don't mean correct the user, but rather correct the tool.
And here's where you are wrong. The users really were losers. The joke about users taking the floppy out of its casing and sliding it in the gap between drives on the front fascia ... is not a joke. We used to whisper "I can hear him taking the shrink-wrap off the manuals". We had people who in the past used RSTS, the DOS-before-Microsoft or the IBM idea of a "dataset" and were confounded with the idea of a directory hierarchy or that they didn't have to create a file and preallocate its space before using it. We also had some people who had been using VAX/VMS where there are many different types of text file and you have to tell the editor to use the same kind that the compiler (or whatever) wants to see. The idea of a file as an array of bytes was was beyond them. (And I can imagine UNIX users having the converse problem when it comes to using VMS!) Were they wrong? Yes, they were wrong in the same sense that Brits visiting France and driving on the left are wrong. Or more. France and England have many more differences in road rules and etiquette.
Answers, such as what Anton gave me - RTFM - is so wrong on so many levels. Anton complained that I was beating my head against a wall because I was unwilling to change my approach to a problem I was trying to solve.
Where are you writing from, Marc? USA? Continental Europe? Visit England and try getting by if you are unwilling to drive on the left. Its more than your head that you'll be banging into. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org