Fnording fnordity fnorders

(I’m not an expert on the Illuminati, nor do I want to be. This is likely an oversimplification or just plain wrong.) In Illuminati conspiracy lore, as far as I can make out, there is talk of a word that we non-members of the conspiracy are pre-programmed to not be able to see. Illuminati members put it in plain sight all around us both to have a jolly joke at our expense, and to signal to other members that they are part of the grand conspiracy. On Usenet, that word is often represented as “fnord”, although of course that’s not the real word because if it was we couldn’t see it.

I have discovered a phrase that seems to have a similar effect. If you put it in an email or usenet post, or even a web site FAQ, people who aren’t part of the “in group” evidently are unable to read the phrase, nor anything that comes after it. The “in group” are the people who “get” computers. I’m not talking about the guy who thinks he’s “1337” (elite) because he managed to get the latest, most drool-proof version of Linux mostly installed on his computer, or the person who can find the on button and the “E” icon for Internet Explorer on his computer 3 times out of 4, I mean people who really “get” it. They don’t have to know everything, but they know how to find out what they don’t know and have the capacity to learn.

The phrase in question? “And if that doesn’t work, try”.

I answer a lot of technical questions from people who aren’t part of the “in group”. That includes family, pilots who use my free aviation database generators, people who use the news servers that I administer as a volunteer at the National Capital Freenet, people who use the various mailing lists that I run, or ask questions on Usenet newsgroups that I read. (You’ll note that in no case do I have any obligation other than my own moral compass to help these people. That will become important later.)

Usually when somebody has a problem, I’ll try and suggest a couple of things to try. If I’m feeling generous, I’ll even go so far as to fire up the appropriate operating system and try the things I’m suggesting so that I can describe the text and placement of the menu items and icons exactly right. I’ll try to simulate various error conditions so that I can describe exactly what they’ll see when things go right and what they’ll see when various things go wrong. I’ll try and explain things in layman’s terms so that they can learn what is going on. Then, after spending what is sometimes over an hour attempting to wrap up everything into one comprehensive message, I’ll send it along.

Then some hours or days later I’ll get a response. “It didn’t work”. Sometimes that’s all, sometimes it will including whiney petulance or demands that I fix it immediately, with an overtone of umbrage that I didn’t leap out of their computer and fix it in person without them having to do anything. (Remember when I said before I’m under no contractual or monetary obligation to fix their problems?) There is NEVER anything that might be remotely construed as useful, like information on what didn’t work, or what they saw at each stage.

So then starts the deeper debugging. Obviously since the stuff I suggested at first didn’t work, I have to elict more detailed information from them. Usually that takes a few back and forth emails, if I can get anything useful from them at all. Sometimes I’ll suggest a few more things for them to try.

But almost without fail, during this deeper debugging or the initial data collection phase, they’ll say “Oh never mind, Joe Bloggs said to try <blah>, and that fixed it.” Depending on how much of a dick they’re being, they may even ask why I didn’t suggest <blah> the first time. I’ll then point out that <blah> was the second thing I suggested in my very first email. That’s when they hit me with the zinger: They never read the second thing, or indeed even the whole of the first thing in my original email.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re telling them to try rebooting the router if releasing/renewing the IP doesn’t work, or giving them instructions on how to free their Windows box of viruses and spyware, or trying to talk them through what you have to do to make Internet Exploder stop thinking it knows better what a file is than what the web server say it is in the mime-type, they hit that second step, the one that starts with the magic phrase “And if that doesn’t work, try”, and their eyes glaze over and drool starts seeping out of their mouths, and you might as well have not bothered.

So it hit me. Rather than busting my ass trying to help these people, why don’t I just say “Fuck off and solve it yourself”? Not only will it save me time and aggravation, but it will probably save them time since they can then ask Joe Bloggs and maybe they’ll actually listen to him.

Ok, maybe that’s too harsh. Maybe instead I need some boilerplate to put at the beginning of any help message I send (I can’t put it at the end or they’ll miss it because they’ll have started drooling). Something along the lines of

If you try absolutely everything I’ve suggested in this message and it still doesn’t work, please tell me EXACTLY what you saw at each step – what results you got, what messages you saw. No detail is too trivial. Write them down while it’s happening, don’t try and remember it after the fact. If you respond without telling me this information, I will delete your message unread.