Have you ever spent hours, days, or months building processes, procedures, programs, facilities, information, web pages, wiki pages, and metadata for your team, so you’d have the proverbial 360 degree view of something, like account data?
You know that phrase, read the fucking manual? You know why that’s such a cliche? Because anyone who’s ever been in any sort of support situation, any maker, any developer, hell, almost anyone, knows that the vast majority of users, critics, and consumers will never actually read the thing. Even folks you might consider experts seem to spend most of their time in some sort of haze, forgetting all the info is already at their finger tips, and instead, default to filing a ticket or asking around, essentially asking the lazy webs for help, the poor, helpless children. There’s a reason we call them lusers.
Why even bother? Probably because laziness is rewarded, even accounted for in institutional design.
I just spent the last ten minutes replying to just such a question from a fellow so-called expert. It really pissed me off because this person, who really should know better (it’s their job, for deity’s sake), forgot the power of a simple search. They could have answered their own question in less than a minute by using the primary tool for their job. But somehow, they forgot everything they ever knew about that tool, even the fundamental thing that’s in just about every modern piece of software — you know, the search bar. You know, the thing that’s typically denoted by the magnifying glass?
How can anyone miss the search bar? Why is it easier to file a ticket than to run a simple search? Color me enraged the company I work for would rather pay me crap tons of money to do stupid shit for lazy people than hire people who try first and then ask for help, and only need to be told once or twice. Me, I’d get rid of people for such gross incompetence, and then figure out how they got hired in the first place, or trained, and go fix that so we stop sustaining a culture of useless, time-wasting drones without basic skills.
What next? Hire people to pump fellow employees’ lungs for them?
Coffee and Fury 