Secrets of Computer Geeks

Posted by Cyn

  • Remem­ber that com­put­ers are totally lit­eral — if you ask the PC to find the file jobs.doc, it won’t find the file jobs.txt. If you ask for jobs.*, it’ll find both of them. And if you’re using a Unix sys­tem, look­ing for jobs.txt won’t find the file if it’s really named Jobs.txt.
  • Nobody knows every­thing. Any­body who claims he does is lying. Some peo­ple know a lot about some par­tic­u­lar thing, but they’re going to need help with some­thing at some point. Don’t feel bad about need­ing help or addi­tional infor­ma­tion when your com­puter is act­ing weird or you can’t get it to do some­thing you need to do. Don’t feel embarassed, and don’t let any tech sup­port per­son get away with being con­de­scend­ing. Acknowl­edge your lim­its, work to sur­pass them when nec­es­sary by learn­ing new things, and ask for help when you need it.
  • Be will­ing to learn new things. To be hon­est, I have not found it use­ful to try to learn any­thing tech­ni­cal until I have a con­crete moti­va­tion rather than a vague “I’d like to know more about that some day.” That isn’t true of every­one, but I find it’s true of many peo­ple. Had I sim­ply sat down to learn HTML, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t know it to this day. Because I needed to do some­thing spe­cific at work that used HTML, I found it very easy to learn it quickly. If you want to learn about data­bases, find a use­ful pur­pose for know­ing about them — per­haps you could vol­un­teer to cre­ate a data­base to meet a need of an orga­ni­za­tion with which you’re involved?
  • Don’t mess with things you don’t under­stand. For exam­ple, if you don’t know how to get to the Win­dows Reg­istry, you prob­a­bly don’t have any busi­ness mess­ing with it. Yes, there’s a time to learn about it, but it’s best if you learn about such things after you’ve done a backup, when you don’t have any kind of time limit for get­ting the sys­tem work­ing again if things do go wrong, and when you have access to some­one who can fix it if things go totally toes up.
  • Plan for prob­lems. Just like you check the oil reg­u­larly in your car, do reg­u­lar back­ups of those files that would be most dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to replace if you had a prob­lem. DVD burn­ers are cheap, as are blank DVDs cost pen­nies. Get a DVD burner and blanks, and reg­u­larly burn a DVD with your doc­u­ments, web browser book­marks, con­tact files, email files, data files from your account­ing pro­gram, music, pho­tos, etc.
  • Win­dows machines crash. The oper­at­ing sys­tem gets cor­rupted. Just expect it. I rebuild the oper­at­ing sys­tem on our PCs at least every six months or so. No, you don’t need to rein­stall Win­dows every time you have any lit­tle prob­lem, but hav­ing return­ing to a clean slate peri­od­i­cally is nice.
  • When things go wrong, note the exact error mes­sage and what you were doing at the time. Be totally hon­est with any sup­port per­son with whom you speak. If it hap­pened once, say so. If it hap­pened that way three times, say that. If you got dif­fer­ent error mes­sages each time, give the per­son the exact error mes­sages (which you have, because you wrote them down, right?) It’ll help you get bet­ter support.
  • Google is your friend, but you need to know what to search for. That error mes­sage you wrote down is one thing to search for, to see if some­body else has had the same prob­lem in the past and fig­ured out how to fix it.
  • Peo­ple who are snarky when you ask intel­li­gent, appro­pri­ate ques­tions are prob­a­bly inse­cure in their own knowl­edge or posi­tion. When I worked in admin­is­tra­tion, I found that some MIS peo­ple were just plain nasty at times when asked per­fectly rea­son­able ques­tions, and some of them would just toss off a non-​​answer full of jar­gon rather than admit­ting that they didn’t know some­thing. Those peo­ple were a large part of the rea­son that I did learn about com­put­ers. I found that peo­ple who really do know their stuff sel­dom mind shar­ing infor­ma­tion with those who gen­uinely wanted to learn­ing about their areas of expertise.

Permalink | June 21st, 2012

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