Slashdot Mirror
Scott Kurtz Blasts Comic Strips on Tech Support
J. FoxGlov writes "Scott Kurtz, creator of the game-centric comic strip PvP, released his first rant with the new domain. It's his view on comic strips about tech support, and specifically names User Friendly and Absurd Notions as examples of strips that just aren't funny. 'Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. It's just plain wrong.' Read the rest of the rant here." I fit many people's definition of a clueless (Linux) user, but I still find User Friendly funny. Do you? Or do you think Kurtz is right that it's not nice to knock people who call tech support, even in fun?
I mean, laughing at people that are trying to learn how to use linux, or windows, or any other OS or computer related topic is wrong. we should help them so the group of people will grow. just my 2 cents on the topic.
Look, there's no point in ranting here because User Friendly isn't funny anyways. I could be "the" damn Iliad himself and I would not change my mind on this issue. I have yet to laugh at one single cell of this strip, despite having hundreds e-mailed to me over the years from coworkers and masochistic friends who like to see me in pain. For more on how you should feel about User Friendly, please consult OMM, the source for all your Thresh/Blue's News/Roberta Williams/User Friendly hating needs.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
But I find userfriendly hilarious. Sometimes the mocking can go a bit far but most of userfriendly isn't making fun of neophytes. I barely know linux and the only reason I understand most of the jokes is through a lot of time at my computer. Oh well... to each his own type of humor. If he says his strip is better because it's not offensive, who's to say otherwise? Chocobo219
...are idiots. I feel like an idiot when I have had to call tech support, because I am an idiot for having to call tech support. We're all idiots sooner or later in our lives. Deal with it, and laugh.
I agree that everyone starts somewhere and that they shouldnt be made fun of, but these strips (UF etc) are all in good fun and make light of an extremely frustrating and mosltly thankless job, I say if you dont like it dont read it.
Why is he so offended by them. School teachers are one thing, Tech support is another.
:).
Anybody who has any type of tech support/helpdesk job will LOVE his (Illiad) work. My friend thought UF sucked until he accually got a job at an ISP. He is addicted to it now
I Also question the Penny Arcade guy for going after User Friendly for this. I could understand a cartoonist mad at another cartoonist if he does something REALLY wrong and REALLY offensive, but this? It just seems petty to me.
Then again, as a sysadmin my I'm likely biased.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
I'm in Tech Support and I sorry but some people are just sooo stupid you have to make fun of them.
I think UFie is hilarious... and I am proud to have received his book for Christmas.
If you don't think UFie is funny you are either way over the political correctness edge _or_ you are in serious need of a sense of humor patch to bring you up to the current version.
A community or organism that can't laugh at itself is in serious trouble... and a comic strip that pokes fun without being all crude about it is even better.
Personally, I really like the running Quake storylines... mainly because I can identify (I suck at it too and constantly get fragged... and I enjoy seeing my own troubles needled in the strip).
-- Gary F.
First, many, many many, of Scott Adams strips are from Scott's work environment. When he was still working at something other than comic strips.
Second, User Friendly is often funny, not because of they making fun of the clueless people calling technical support, but because of the superiority of the people answering the calls.
I've done technical support.
Anybody who believes you can train just anybody to do proper/good top level technical support in 2 weeks is an idiot. I can show a 4 year old how to put a PC together from scratch. I can't show a 4 year old how to properly troubleshoot it. And having some guy on the phone follow a flow chart isn't the same thing.
Yes. Newbie user jokes are cruel. But then, some users are stupid too. I'm sorry, but the 'cup-holder' jokes, and the 'power outage' jokes are all too real.
And if you think teachers don't crack jokes about kids when the kids aren't around then I doubt you think they are human.
Well maybe it is, but it's more a knock on the tech support helpers themselves usually simply because they feel like they are in a dead in job where they have to tell people the same people over and over again with little gratification.
Anyone who thinks Illiad or anyone else is making fun of people who are specifically trying to learn how to use a computer is just pretending to think that or is genuinely stupid, espically since most of the tech support jokes in UF are really just puns about words or technical terms.
-[ World domination - rains.net ]-
Working at a tech support role myself, nothing is more frustrating than the clueless user. It is my job not to make fun of them and be supportive, but on my off hours it's nice to release some steam through a funny cartoon.
In the end, I doubt anyone will read a User Friendly strip, then go home in tears and decide never to try Linux again. Then again, who knows ;)
- FalconRed
UF is funny, and on so many levels.
Even if one of the "supposedly" clueless users happens to stumble upon the site they would never understand the humor that was a jibe against them, they would see the lower levels.
Well, thats what I think anyway!
Seems to me that we ALL have been clueless at one time or another. Contrary to what I tell everyone I meet, I was not born coding C and hacking kernels.
There are two things that you laugh about--things that are funny, and things that are true. I think that newbie-bashing by tech-support is hilarious because it trashes the tech-support more than it does the newbies. Have you ever called tech-support and were told that the widget you just payed $1500 for works, you just have to not be an idiot to make it work?
If you do not like a certain type of humor, you are not forced to participate in it. That's what the back button is for on your web browser.
I, for one, cannot stand Jay Leno, because I think he is a mean bastard. I just don't watch him. It's that simple. If you don't like User-Friendly, don't buy the book.
Just my opinion.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
Pure and simple, the guy is a whiner. If he truely didn't know anything about computers when he started tech support, then just was he doing on the hell desk? Simple, being an id10t. He didn't belong there.
Computers are substantially more complex than driving a car. Admittadly, they're also substantally less dangerous if you misuse them, but we don't require a license to operate a computer. Instead, anyone with a few hundred dollars can get a computer and then begin ranting that those of us who spent years learning how to operate them are idiots and can't make them functional.
Bullshit. They're perfectly functional if you know how to use them. I'm not talking about elitism or "read the 400 page manual," but simple "what the password is" or "the CDROM is *NOT* a coffee cup holder."
I've heard several (sometimes good) jokes about tech support being dumb or obstructionist, but the fact is most tech support folks *HAVE* to know what they're doing and even more often than not, they have to follow obstructionist policies passed down from above. It's a matter of truth and ability.
Users have the ability to learn. I'll go out on a limb and say they don't *WANT* to learn. They want computers to be as easy to use as a pen and paper. It *WON'T* happen. These people expect to just sit in front a computer and use it with no other studying/learning, yet they wouldn't assemble something without following instructions.
Give me a break.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
ever read readers digest? They have a whole column every month making fun of things that kids say and write. It isn't mean-spirited, but it certainly is funny to read what they say.
/. made my default password easier to remember I'd be logged in right now... =)
It's no different for tech support folks. It's funny... laugh!
If
It doesn't matter if comic strips like UserFriendly make fun of clueless newbies. Such individuals will never see the strips anyway. They're too busy talking with AOL's tech support trying to figure out how to 'get online.'
The cluelessness of new users is amusing, but if they're making a sincere effort to understand what they are learning, I won't laugh.
It's the ones that memory dump every evening they walk out the door that deserve unrelentless lampooning.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Ever notice how people get pissed when they see themselves as the butt of the joke? I wonder if that was the case here. Maybe he had to call tech support because he forgot to hook up his video cable or something.
Banned from moderation 01-27-2002. Fuck you too
So he blast userfriendly for portraying callers as stupid idiots, but the example cell we get is from a strip in which the caller outsmarts (essentailly) the tech.
Not to be picky, but adding a picture to your rant that is a counter-argument to the rant just doesn't make me want to agree with you.
Um, look, some folks find tech support humor funny. And seeing as how most folks around here seem to feel the Darwin awards are pretty funny, I'd say UF is pretty tame by comparison.
BTW, I really like UF and I read it pretty much everyday. Often from work. Where I do tech support. :)
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." -- John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987
I personally have been doing support of all kinds for years, specififcally with Windows products. I have been using first linux, then free, and now openbsd for a sum of 2 years. I look at UserFirendly and see the humour in both sides of the debacle, and find UF funny almost always. After all, isn't the funniest humor when we can laugh at ourselves?
NP
Mr. Kurtz completely missed the point of what comics like User Friendly and the like are trying to do. They aren't making fun of the people who are trying to figure out their computers and how to use them, but rather the lUser who has no interest in doing anything for themselves. I work in a Data Systems department, and all day long, I get calls from people who do stupid things, and never care to learn from their mistakes. They use the computer all day long, but don't learn anything about it. It's frustrating having to do the same thing for the same people over and over, despite telling them what they did wrong, and how to avoid the problem next time, but they don't care. Those are the people we laugh at.
Having worked in various levels of technical support for the past four years, I've seen a lot of support people mock the users who seek their assistance. I think that this is often done to help bolster the self-image of the support person. In the heirarchy of the tech industry, I think most support people recognize that they don't occupy the upper echelon and some try to make themselves feel better about what they're doing by belittling others.
So, I'd say I agree with Kurtz. The horror, the horror...
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
For me, the fact that he doesn't find User Friendly funny automatically disqualified his line of reasoning, IMO. The writer must have a telephone pole stuck up his nether regions. Humor is not meant to be politically correct, it's not about being "sensitive" or any of that BS. Humor often is a relief for pain and frustration (i.e., "when does it hurt? only when I laugh"). It can also be a form of aggression or hostility, open or concealed. Speaking as someone who works in a call center, it is simply too stupid for words to compare making fun of clueless tech support callers to a teacher making fun of a student. It's not comparable. For one thing, it is just a silly cartoon. No one is advocating that we actually make fun of or humiliate people on the phone, anymore than a teacher who laughs at a User Friendly cartoon is in favor of laughing at a slow student. For another, stupid tech calls are stupid because they are from people who refuse to think, not from people who are simply ignorant. Students are in school to learn; once they have learned something and then refuse to use their knowledge, then they are most certainly fair game for humorists. The entire argument the writer is making is asinine.
Yeah, it is kind of mean to laugh at people who are trying to learn, but you gotta understand, these people get bombarded with these questions every day, being asked about things that comes naturally to them. They aren't teachers and teaching is not what they are paid to do.
The whole affair can sometimes be trying on both ends when both sides can't communicate right.
I mean, when the caller is stubborn and gets rude(I've probably been that person once or twice). You generally don't see them as nice people who are just trying to learn.
That is the type of user you see being insulted most of the time on strips like UF. It may be somewhat unfair to the user who is just frustrated and wants something working, but tech support staff are people too, and its not really fair for them to be lashed out at.
I don't care if UF is funny or not, personally I think it's as funny as hell and it, and a couple of other comics that poke fun at the IT world, are the first URL's that I fire up when I get into work of a morning. IMHO It's harmless fun, designed to show a lighter side of computing, for the computing community. I work as an IT professional, mainly in Tech Support, but in a couple of other roles, and more often than not, Illiad comes out with genuinly funny content. Just because you don't like a style of humour doesn't mean you should bag it. Besides, I think it's funny to laugh at kids when they are trying to learn to read. Ha! There... that's my 2 cents.
Sure, the comics are funny, most humor has to do with someone else's misfortune. Maybe it's not Right(TM) to laugh at someone else's ignorance of a certain subject, but it doesn't hurt anyone either. It's not like they're naming specific people in their strips. Lighten up a bit.
Twinkies sure taste good for something that is 68% air.
I am sorry, but I do not share Kurtz's sympathy for clueless end users in this regard. I don't care how much they deserve to be made fun of; if it makes for a funny comic strip, go ahead and do it! Hell, I even support the mocking of racial and/or religious groups if it's all in the name of a funny comic strip! :)
But User Friendly has another deep rooted problem: corniness. The comics Kurtz has on the right side of his page are prime examples. Can someone help me out here? What the fuck is so funny about either of these? Are these just bad examples? If so, can someone please point me to a single User Friendly strip that is actually humorous to some extent?
There's an important distinction between making fun of people having trouble operating computers, and people who do colossally STUPID things with computers.
I work in a computer cluster here at Georgia Tech, and I'll give you an example I've seen. A fellow in his mid 40's or so was working with M$ Word in the cluster, and trying his damndest to get a printout of something he had brought in on disk. I watched him poke around for a good 20 minutes, and then come ask me for help. He explained that he wanted to get a copy of what he had on the screen, and had been selecting 'copy'. Later on, he asked my help again to enlarge the fonts, he had been zooming into the document and couldn't figure out why it was the same size.
Now, many people would be tempted to laugh at this guy, but honestly, I think he was making some pretty intuitive guesses for someone who probably had zero previous experience. I was pleasantly surprised, and glad to help him out.
The other noteworthy group, and those who warrant ridicule, are those who abandon all semblance of common sense when it comes to computers, or worse, they actively seek to avoid learning or trying to learn, because, in all honesty, it's considered fashionable by many to be clueless about computers. A customer of mine a few years ago brought his computer in for repair no less than 4 times, because he had tried to cram a CD-rom into his 1.2mb floppy drive. I asked him why he had gone to so much trouble to force it when it clearly didn't want to go in that slot, and he said he thought it was supposed to be hard for some reason. *sigh*
At any rate, there's a big difference between people who are clueless about computers, and people who are just stupid as bricks. Stupid people, since stupidity is usually a voluntary state, are always fair game for a little ribbing.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I'm getting really sick of people objecting to this or that humor because they find it offends some group of people. You don't like it, then for gnu's sake don't read it. But don't preach about it either, no one cares what you think -- trust me on this, humor is highly individual.
If we only pretend everyone is a genius then soon everyone will be -- right? If you really think that I have a nice bridge... This notion that it's unfunny to point out that people make stupid mistakes is just more of the idea that laughing at people or giving them bad grades makes them stupid or keeps them ignorant. [Note: Causality reversal warning - remove head from ass before proceeding. Failure to comply may lead to a humorless existence in a dark smelly place.]
It may not be *nice*, but *please* don't tell me it's not funny!
And I don't see much that this guy can talk about. I went through a bunch of his comics and I don't seem much in the way of content. He's ripping off "Peanuts" in a deathmatch scene. The he rips off South Park. Not to mention the "funny" penis joke with the Dr. Laura that ends up in a Dr. Laura/Judge Judy lesbian match. No, this guy has problems with anything more popular than he is. But what can I say? I loved the DFC when it was running and I think UF is funny (but sometimes it sucks). Humor is very idiosyncratic. What you think is funny isn't what someone else thinks is funny. And this isn't about mocking children learning to read. Adults are not children (or shouldn't be). An adult is EXPECTED to have a certain level of cognitive development. When individuals display behaviours that contradict this expected level of development, it is deemed FUNNY. Live with it. And stop trying to survive off of other people's work. The next thing you know, you'll see fantasy characters portrayed as living, intelligent entities (reference Hobbes, the tiger).
Yes, I used to work tech support and, yes, I'll admit that it is not a difficult job and most anyone could do it. I'll also say that I took enough ridiculous calls to write my own comic strip, if so moved. They were funny.
You're right that your plumber doesn't make fun of you... at least, not to your face. But I assure you there are Plumber calendars all over the place that make fun of all of us. You would be surprised at the industrial humor market. For just about every career in existence, there are cartoons and jokes that poke fun at their customers, coworkers, managers (Dilbert, for example). And they're funny.
In fact, I distinctly remember a teacher that I had in high school who was very proud his copy of the "Far Side" episode which featured a kid pushing as hard as he could on the door that was boldly labeled "PULL". It was funny.
Perhaps you're getting my theme now. It's funny. Perhaps you get it, perhaps you don't. You know what? I don't even like "User Friendly" that much. There are some good ones, but it doesn't do it for me the way Dilbert does (perhaps because most of my silly memories have to do with silly managers).
Anyway, we certainly have enough to do in this world without telling each other what we should or should not find amusing.
That's my take.
RP
What's the 3rd most stressful job (in terms of clinically depression, suicide, alchoholism or other chemical dependency, divorce rate, etc)?
The most stressful is air traffic controller.
The second most stressful is a doctor (specifically surgeon).
The third most stressful is running help desk.
I shit you not.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
I don't find UF all that funny either. And I think the point that he's trying to make isn't that experiences in tech support can't be funny. Strips like UF don't make fun of the tech support occupation. They make fun of the people that tech support is supposed to be helping. He mentions Scott Adams, and I think he maybe criticizes him too harshly, because Scott Adams finds the humor in the actual jobs he's representing without making too much fun of any one group of people.
The thing that most tech support employees don't recognize is that without people less knowledgeable than you, you'd be out of a job. When you insult the person who thinks their password is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk', you're insulting the people putting money in your pockets. At the company I work for, customers aren't referred to as 'users' because many don't understand that as anything but a negative term. We don't make fun of the customer who doesn't understand why he needs a new init string in his modem. We don't call them names behind their back because you never know when that information may be subpoenad and you get caught red-faced.
Tech support is about helping people. It's not about solving their problems, but getting them to solve their problems. Tech support employees are educators, because the more education they do, the better they serve their company.
So if you think User Friendly is funny, why don't you sit back and think how much you knew about computers when you first sat down at one, and then try to think of how that feels when you can see everyone else around you doing what you should be able to do. Guess what. Your poop stinks, too.
Everybody hates something. Even if only 0.001% of the computing population hates User Friendly, Dilbert or whatever it adds up. Do the math:
0.001% x really large number of people = not insignificant number of Haters
It's the cost of fame, realizing some people will hate you no matter what. Everything offends someone - including *the* Everything. Even being completely Politically Correct offends people.
Don't feel sorry for Illiad, I'm sure he likes what he does and realizes the Haters are in the minority. Feel sorry for the people that need to hate.
UF is hillarious to me. Do I care what Scott Kurtz of PvP thinks of UF? Hell no.
nothin here.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
In fact professionalism(if required by your job is the best thing you can do), or possibly humor with an answer. Will get you alot farther than abject mocking of the people that are comming to you for help.
Having said that...
"All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too"
Is a load of crap. You can answer the phone the first day you are on the job, after a week or two of training you can even do something usefull after you say hello. However this does not make you either technical or prticularly adept at being able to cope with the many and varried problems that you will encounter. That takes time skill and intelligence.
I am glad that I no longer work in phone support and that I now have a job that requires thinking and information to solve problems as opposed to opening up a trouble ticket and passing it on to someone higher up the chain than I am(although sometimes it is hard being the top of the chain).
I laugh at UserFriendly, dilbert, afterY2K, redmeat and others. Not because I think that it(making fun of people who think my job is still to trouble shoot PCs and who continue to ask me the same questions repetedly and after patient and well documented education) is right, but because I can still draw parallels from when I did that to what I do now.
Besides sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you from grabbing your LART and killing an office full of people.
...if you don't find User Friendly funny, I suspect you might not have worked tech support. Or if you did, it may have been for engineers, which is Not The Same Thing.
I did a year on the helpdesk at my small northeast liberal arts college. Dealing with dancers and English professors, I am happy to testify that people lose all common sense when placed in front of a computer. Stories like the "CD-ROM cupholder" are not, unfortunately, exaggerations. I have watched these things happen.
We do not have the patience of saints. I have dealt with people who could not find the little Apple logo on the front of their Apple monitor; I have argued with a woman, trying to convince her that yes, her mouse does have a second button, and she should click it now (yes, I was right). Things like UF are funny because they're *real*, and they allow venting of steam, so that we don't vent on the phone to the man whose printer "just won't work", when it's STILL SHRINK-WRAPPED IN THE BOX.
Without such outlets, we would (and I'm not kidding) have tech support people behaving like disgruntled postal employees.
Ignorance != stupidity. Just because someone made a funny mistake doesnt mean they are dumb. However, I disagree with his opinion of what is considered funny and what is not, but that should be expected since I do not find his comic strip funny.
Why dont i get him a tissue... All that crying and whining he's doing ...geez... I work in the retail market of computers and when I sit down and read User Friendly... i find it extremely amusing... due to the fact that its TRUE TO LIFE... Me and my co-workers ALWAYS rag on the hapless users who call our store trying to figure out why their printer needs to be plugged in to work... or why their monitor doesnt display a picture when they havent connected it yet...
;-) )
:)
Basically, he's making fun of the folks who have no common sense... dont compare them to a child learning to read... all it takes to use a computer without looking and sounding like a fool... is a bit of common sense... and the reading skills you aquired as a child(unless you were made fun of ofcourse
So he needs to get real... and get with it... if you dont like it... dont read it... free country
"...I've made my bed, so now it's in these flames that I lay my head..." - DMX remove the "nospam" to send email...
What makes this guy the leading expert on what's funny? What happened to this thing called personal opinion? He thinks its wrong to make fun of the people that call because they are not stupid, just ignorant of how a computer is operated. I worked a bit of tech support climbing the ladder at my current job, and Personally I find the situations that I was presented with hilarious. Like the woman who put her entire e-mail message in the subject of her e-mail(Notes) and was wondering why it would get truncated when she sent it via the SMTP MTA. I got frustrated when you had to tell someone for the 15th time that passwords are CASE SENSETIVE, after a 5 page dissertation on what case sensitivity is. Or the person who didn't know why his computer woulden't turn on, maybe it's because they only supplied power to the monitor? Sure they are ignorant of computers, but some of them experience utter stupidity when operating the magic information box. Do I find tech support satires funny? Yes, Probably will continue too until end users are eliminated, hopefully by some sort of computer operator licensing ;).
I've worked at a local community college helping people who are 50 + with there first exposer to the minefield of current computer interfaces. These people are not stupid, but because of their unfamiliarity and fear they occasionally ask obvious and stupid questions. Too be portrayed as fools is an injustice. My 80 year old stepfather commonly used to laugh and treat as if I was a fool because I didn't know some fact about farming being discussed. To him I should have initiatively known the farm lingo and life. I surely didn't like being put down for my ignorance. Further more, I had an interest in his wisdom. But this interest was soured by his attitude. We want to encourage people not humiliate them.
I can imagine someone feeling offended by some cartoons, but then again, why do they want to be part of an experience they don't need?
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
"You mean I need both gasoline *and* a battery to start my car? Well, that's not what the guy at the dealership told me!"
User friendly isn't just about blasting clueless users. It's about blasting utterly clueless users! I mean, come on! How many people do you know what can't even hit the freakin' POWER BUTTON!?
Also, UF is commonly absurd to the point of hilarity. A dust creature? A hacker that speaks with a fake Russian accent? A female hacker that gets dumped on by the male hackers? This is funny stuff!
But then again, it isn't everyone's cup of tea. No comic ever is. Just look at the widely divergent opinions of people regarding Snoopy and Peanuts. It's a broad spectrum.
---
rJames.org - illustration
There is a difference between the users being mocked. There are the ones who really have no clue as to what they are doing, but are willing to learn and co-operate with you. These people I love. These people are not the ones being mocked. It is the ones that are so incredibly thick, that you could make bullits out of them. The kind of person who is just barley listening, and asks which mouse button to click after telling them to click the left one, the kind of person who is rambling on and on after a drinking binge about how teddy bears in Northern Canada and the People there are not segregated. These people are the ones being mocked, not the ones who are TRYING to learn, the ones who put effort into what they are doing. There is a difference.
.-With Patience we Wait-.
I think one of the inherent problems is that it is very hard to help people through a computer ordeal when they do not understand any of the technical terms that you are sending their way.
... what's a click?
For instance, if I told someone to click on the start menu and then open the control panel, I may get a 2 minute pause and then
And yes, really, there are lots of people who are incredibly stubborn. They think they know what they are talking about; they even name drop when they can't explain while they are right. I once had some idiot tell me he was a doctor. I politely told him that his area of specialty did not give him sufficient skills to diagnose his problem -- but then he goes on to threaten and
"I want to talk to your superior" -- all the while his problem was due to him forgetting to plug his telephone cord into the right jack on the back of his modem.
And yes, there is humour in teaching 40 year olds how to plug chords into the wall.
Anyway, most of Userfriendly I've seen was not centered on the customers. It was centered on the pathetic lives of the employees going through their daily routing.
A lot of humor makes fun of a group of people. Like Jeff Foxworthy, I do a lot of redneck humor, and like Jeff Foxworthy, I usually do it from a "first-person" perspective to make it less offensive. But it still is offensive, it's just that white trash is still an acceptable group to make fun of. Or should that be "of which to make fun"?
Anyone who has done more than 10 minutes of sysadmin or hell desk work will inevitably run into a verifiable "cluebie", the clueless newbie. I don't get frustrated with the regular newbies if they're trying to learn. The frustration comes from people who don't try to solve problems themselves, don't learn from past mistakes, and generally see you as the crutch which they so desperately need to lean on to successfully perform even the simplest of tasks. Your job consists solely of helping them do their job.
That's the true essence of the BOFH, right? In the rare instance that Simon has the phone on hook, he knows what the problem is before he picks it up, based on caller id. The perpetual newbies are frustrating.
I don't think it's really possible to draw a parallel to school children and teachers. The point of being a professional, regardless of your profession, is that you are assumed to have a certain knowledge level for your job, and the ability to learn what is necessary to perform your job duties. If you can't use the computer without relying on tech support for the rest of your life, you probably don't have the ability, or more like you don't have the will, to sit down and learn what you need to learn.
And such people are fair game to those of us who would mock them.
Do you have ESP?
Making fun of a poor unemployed homeless individual should not be funny.
Watching two not very intelligent criminal musicians self destruct should not be funny.
Watching a sad middle aged servant become infatuated with his young rich employer should not be funny.
Watching a bad tempered repressed uptight indiviadual destroy his family an hotel business through sheer bad temper should not be funny.
But everybody laughs at Charlie Chaplin, thr Blues Brothers, Twelth Nigh and Fawlty Towers.
Political Correctness and humour and just plain incompatable. Nobody can love a person without a sense of humour. Love will save our planet. So lets just send all those humourless PC creeps to the gas chamber and save our planet. ;-)
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
"User Friendly" is simply not intended to be read by the targets of its humor. Every comic strip has its target audience, and UF is no different. Its target audience includes tech support weenies, who deal with the frustration that their end-users present on a daily basis. We all get to expierience the "idiot user" scenario from both sides depending on our experience in a given area. Denying tech support the ability to blow off steam and share "horror stories" through some medium such as UF might make them even grumpier than usual, and that is the *last* thing any of us want. Least of all for the sake of satisfying readers who aren't even the target audience for the strip to begin with!
O Lord, I am a help desk person at a Metro. hospital, and brothers it is rough. I am amazed at the average persons ignorance, lack of curiosity, and real lack of passion for anything. I am beginning to think we should just set the nukes off and let God sort us all out... o yeah. those comics suck for the same reason 99% of all comic strips suck....its not funny. Once in a while, you might see one that is clever, but rarely are they funny. Whoopie Goldberg makes people clap not laugh. She wants to funny, she tries to be clever, she achieves neither. If you are a comedian who gets more applause than laughter, then get a new f@$%kin career. If you write a comic strip, well, you are probably just one of the more pathetic individuals this decadent society has turned out. May God have mercy on us all...
The man in black walked into the desert and the gunslinger followed.
I work some tech support, and my biggest complaint isn't people not understanding. That's ok, that's why I'm a tech and they .. um.. work on drywall. It is when the first thing they say is "I don't know anything about computers, so I can't help you." People who don't know anything are not the problem, that's why I have a job. People who REFUSE to learn anything are. ("My kid was playing on the server, and now my software doesn't work.") ()
UF doesn't make fun of ignorance, it makes fun of stupid people.
-Teman
There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
I work at as a computer consultant and I find UserFriendly very funny. After reading this guy's article I think that he is completely missing the point. The purpose of this and other strips is not to ridicule new users, it is as an outlet for professionals in the field. As somebody who actually works as a tech support person it is nice after a hard day to read a strip like UF and laugh about what I go through. I can understand and laugh at the humorous situations in this strip. Does this mean that I am taking a sick satisfaction out of making fun of new users? No, it is meerly stepping back and laughing at my job. I would wager that just about all professions have inside jokes and do the same thing. The form that ours takes is these online strips because their target audience is usually online and able to read them while they work. Man, you are taking these strips and yourself too seriously. If you don't like them don't read them, but for god's sakes don't give me this holier than thou bullshit about how I should not read and enjoy them.
Part of Scott Adams point is that everyone is dumb at some point or another. He relates a story of the time he took his pager in to have it fixed, after he was SURE it was broken. All that was wrong with it was he put the battery in backwards. I just spent an hour looking at code that had a single typo, and it was holding me up. Point being, we're all stupid at some point or another. Don't be thin-skinned. I for one have never read UF and thought to myself, "Yeah, those (l)users are so clueless".
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I work in tech support. The number of staggeringly dumb questions we get is enough to make the most serene and placid human want to flail about with a large, blunt object.
One of the ways we manage our constant frustration is to make fun of the situation. It's either that, or go postal. What would Steve prefer?
However, it's important to mention that we never, *never* make fun of people to their faces, or behind their backs to their co-workers. It all stays well within the group.
I had one, but the wheel fell off.
Every UF strip is "humorous to some extent" unless you are ignorant of the subject matter in question. They may not all be laugh-out-loud funny, but they are all humorous in the broadest sense. Besides, sometimes we read strips regularly not to find humor but just to keep up with what the characters are saying and doing.
Obviously this guy has never worked tech support before. If he had, he'd know that these kinds of jokes are the single thing preventing support techs from hunting down and murdering their users.
These strips are meant for techs, not users. We laugh. What's wrong with that?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I'm in complete agreement.
As a previous poster noted - ``Humor is very individual.''
This brand of humor isn't Scott Kurtz's. Too bad. Boo hoo.
Like any form of humor - there is a target audience. Clearly, the target audience of User Friendly is NOT the people that are dumbfounded by computers.
I used to work in an ISP environment, and I still do work in Tech Support. User Friendly is funny, just like Dilbert, because it's true.
-Jeff
The first thing i saw that i thought sounded weird was "I read them every day"
Anyone not smart enough to stop reading the things that annoy them, well, lets just say that when i realized bad news was making me feel depressed, I stopped reading news of war and destruction. This guy is still reading tech support humor? WHY???
That aside, if I were him, I wouldn't have admitted to being barely able to turn a computer on at the start of a 4 year tech support career.
Heck, i wouldn't have admitted to having worked for that long in tech support.
But the fact that many of the people in the tech support industry are hired at that level of technical ability is disgraceful, and i wouldn't have admitted to being a part of the problem.
Indeed, the analogy between tech support and teachers is very close. Some are very good, some are acceptable, and many are woefully unqualified.
I didn't last two whole years in tech support, nearly went nuts. I clawed my way through freelance contracting to full time systems administration just to get away from the pinheads. And when i say pinheads, I don't just mean the callers, some of the cow-orkers were just as bad.
Some of them barely knew how to turn a computer on. They were essentially useless, and generally damaging to our customers, so we taught them how to build computers instead . . . .
I don't think I'm ultra inteligent, I'm not even a very good speller. But during my tech support days, Dilbert, et all, made it possible for me to vent steam and survive.
In retrospect, maybe that was a bad thing. I would have been better off getting out of that industry sooner.
I guess what I'm saying is, this guy sounds a little antagonized. Maybe we should stop picking on guys like him in our comics & stuff.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I have it on good authority that Tackhead says it's unfunny-and-sick for humorless prats to make fun of (geeks who make fun of clueless users (who can't articulate their problems to tech support)).
I was teach how to use the new software package to people who had never had a computer on the desks before. One woman COULDN'T get the hang of clicking (single or double) and had to hold the mouse steady with one hand while she pressed the buttons with the other. But she wasn't clueless. She just hadn't ever needed to develop that particular motor skill. I gave her solitare and she was doing perfectly well the next day.
PvP is never funny. Now Penny Arcade....that's funny.
It really Burns me When someone who isnt a tech on the phones anymore tries to tell me what i can and cannot enjoy. For the Record any company that tries to use a miracle 2 week training course that will make mr joe blow off the street a tech is not any company that i want to work for. Enough of that lets go to the heart of the issue. Illiad's User Friendly is good. Pure and simple. Makeing fun of people because they refuse to Learn is ok. I have been told countless time "i dont really care how it works i just want it to work!" Well maybe that will work for a while but sooner or later you'll have to use logic and realize that in order to make it through life you need to develop a backbone and start using the brain that you were born with. Sure i have forgotten passwords but damnit i was also smart enough to realize that i can forget these things and i wrote them down and stored them all in a safe place just in case i forgot. We are all human we make mistakes, but making them over and over kinda gets old. anyone who has worked as a tech can remember a customer who has done the same thing wrong and then wonders why the program doesnt work as advertised. I dont know about the rest of you but when i have a non-computer related problem i go to the library and find information on it. this way i am not dependent on other people to fix all of the problems that life dumps upon me. One last word here. Its always been if you have to bash another persons product to get a sale for yourself then you are slime.
At a music store. "I want this song but I don't know who did it or what the title is but it goes like this DAH DAH DAH AH DA HA HA DAH DAH DAH AH HA DH DAH." At a book store. "I just heard about this book on the radio. Do you have it? I don't know the name or the author or what program featured it." I could go on. But I won't.
Give me a stinking break.
Tech support is not here to educate the user. Tech support is here to solve the user's problems as quickly as they can. Rarely do you have time to explain to an end user exactly what went wrong with their machine, and even if you do, rarely do end users want to hear it. And most of the time, IMHO, the cause of the problem is usually an action of the user. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, everyone makes mistakes, so you try to explain what they did to cause the problem and what they might do in the future to avoid it, and they suddenly don't have the time, because they've got a meeting, or they suddenly HAVE to send an email RIGHT THAT SECOND, and listening to you gets renice'd down on the priority list.
Non-savvy users expect the explanations for how the computer works to be as quick and painless as the internet, or their email, or the icon they punch to print their document. When the explanation they want to hear moves beyond the realm of "short, simple, and easy to understand", most users say something equivalent to, "Well, I guess you have to be a computer geek to understand," and get on with their lives. Why? Because they have better things to do than sit there listening to the tech support guy explain stuff, and besides, if it doesn't work they can always call tech support.
Occasionally, you get lucky and a user actually wants to know, which is a cause for rejoicing. More generally, though, I think users take tech support for granted, and working tech support (especially front line support) can be mind-numbingly frustrating (as I'm sure you all know). Frustrating jobs tend to cause those working them to seek an outlet through which to vent their frustration and anger. Personally, I'd rather see all the techies laughing and smirking over strips like User Friendly than running around going postal.
Every other culture on the planet is allowed a certain degree of lassitude in it's exclusionary humour, why treat techies any different? If we didn't make fun of end users, we'd probably kill them, which I'm sure would hurt their feelings a lot more than witty comics like User Friendly and Absurd Notions. As my mother always told me, "Fu** them if they can't take a joke!"
(sitting here in complete disbelief that Scott Kurtz was taking himself seriously when he wrote that Rant)Eric Pogrelis
Like Scott Kurtz, I worked in technical support for a top 5 computer company. As a call center manager, I heard it all, over and over again. Most of the time I just shook my head and laughed. Sure, using a computer isn't an innate ability, but it's becoming a common one, and like any common practice, jokes abound. A comic strip is just an extension of those jokes.
User Friendly has an audience, just as Dilbert, B.C. and Garfield does. Is Iliad doing computer users a disservice by making fun of them in the help desk calls that his fictional company receives? I don't think so. Like much of our humor, there is some class of people who get made fun of. That's just the way it is.
I managed almost 200 people in a call center. In a Dilbertian world, I was the pointy-haired boss. I found Dilbert cartoons all over my cubicle. Was I offended? Nope. Even though some of the cartoons hit pretty close to home, I recognized that they were nothing more than humor.
And that's all that cartoons like User Friendly are: humor
Scott Kurtz may not think that User Friendly and its ilk are funny, but I'll bet that things that he thinks are funny would make me shake my head. That's the beauty of being an individuals.
Absurd argument. _I_ laugh at how ignorant _I_ used to be about computers. If we can't make light of these kinds of things we'll go mad. You seriously need to lighten up.
Nerds and Geeks, drawing cartoons of tech support situations is funny in my opinion. Most of use computer nerds have a great knowledge of operating systems, and know what it's like to deal with someone who knows little about what they're doing computer-wise.
When the average Joe/Joanne calls up tech support with problems that are so basically fix-able (Yeah, I suck at coming up with big intelligent words) and we know how to fix these things in 2 nanoseconds, that isn't really funny.
What makes in funny in the cartoon world is the repeating process of basic problems. We see this in Userfriendly constantly. The way that character handles the problems by telling the Joe/Joanne to reformat thir hard drive or claim the world has gone completely stupid IS funny. Sure it's malicious in the real world, but this is cartoons. If a real tech support person told someone to reformat their hard drive (without it be nessescary), they would get fired quickly. I don't even see what would make the tech support end up telling a Joe/Joanne to do such a thing.
Anyways, as long as it is cartoons, it is funny.
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
Yep, it only took this guy FOUR YEARS to go from completely clueless to being able to assemble a computer.
And he thinks this is some kind of accomplishment?
I can teach the same skills in less than a month.
I have no real comments to make about PvP or UserFriendly; I just obligated to point out that Goats is a hell of a funny strip.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Where I used to work, there was a gal who I really didn't mind helping, at all. She was smart, attentive when something was being explained, willing to learn, not obnoxious, and very considerate. Too bad she was married, because she was also quite attractive.
There was also someone there (also very attractive) whom I grew to despise. She refused to learn, demanded attention immediately no matter what her problem (or other problems: server down, she says "this is top priority"), was snotty, and (mostly) took on a "I'm better than thou" attitude. I used to like her, even. Ah well.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Okay, making fun of a person who is honestly trying to learn something is wrong. I find that for the most part that Userfriendly is not making fun of ppl who wish to learn, but just complete idiots who can't tell the difference from their head and their ass.... unless they are just plain butt ugly =P
If someone can't tell a potato chip from a microprocessor and lives in our moden society, like common, they deserve it.
If someone came from some sad ass nation and didn't know anything I could understand, but if my best friend down the street didn't know the difference, and whom I have known for years, I wouldn't hesitate to ridicule his ass.
Excuse me for not following that link, but the very idea that I should read something to let me know how I should feel about anything makes my head spin.
Nothing is funny or not funny. Things strike some people as funny while others find no humor there at all. The very idea that people should not find something funny is utterly preposterous, and anyone who thinks that they can rationally argue anyone out of laughing is even more so.
I think we're seeing some serious humor impairment here.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
You can only regurgitate one gag so many times before it loses any comedic appeal it once had. These strips, include Dilbert here, are terrible for anyone who doesn't demand monotonous humor.
I don't blame the creators for being clueless, at least they're trying and hopefully learning through their art. Its these self-styled geeks who have given conformists a new standard to look up to who are to blame and keep creators' ego flying. These strips are like little monotnous cultural "ME TOO!" badges that a significant number of technies use to identify one another. Its the electronic equivilant of,
"Hey you like Jewel too?"
Unsure what a good strip is? Goto www.e-sheep.com. Enjoy.
Now, if a teacher singles out a specific individual for scorn and makes the class laugh at that person, then yes - that's not education and that's no teacher. But if the teacher points to a mistake, to something people might do, and show how that isn't exactly bright, then that's their job. And if they can do it with humour, then the students are far more likely to remember what they just learnt.
Who was your favourite teacher? What was about their teaching style that made them so? Chances are, they made you laugh.
IMHO, that's what Illiad is doing for the not-so-clueful who read UF. You can bet those guys aren't going to make that mistake.
Noone is going to tell me what I should think about any comic, whether I like the comic or not. To me, Userfriendly, Dilbert, the Bastard Operator From Hell stories and the Computer Stupidities section of Rinkworks are sources of relief for those of us, who, from time to time, get severly frustrated by the apparent inability or unwillingness of users to understand even the most simple of instructions or concepts. I think they'd rather have that than us going postal. I did, back when I was a newbie, ages ago, though I fancy myself never having been a luser.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
There is a difference between an idiot and a neophyte.
....
The difference is not the volume of knowledge they have in the field, it is their applied intelligence when it comes to that field.
A friend of mine, who works for a government department here in Western Australia is no expert when it comes to computing, but if he ever approaches me with a question, it becomes immediately evident that he has read every help file he can find, looked for solutions on the web, in user manuals and in related applications.
Unable to uncover an answer in any of these places, he arms himself with every seemingly relevant piece of information he can find, and then comes to ask me how to solve his problem.
This person is not an expert in computing, but he's damn good at applying his intelligence to computing issues.
In contrast, he (let's call him Fizzle) recently sent me a story relating to his co-worker...
Last week, [co-worker]'s keyboard stopped working, which confused her no end.
I casually plugged it in and lied 'it could have happened to anyone'.
However, the conversation today went like this:
[Co-worker]: Fizzle, I think the thing that happened with my keyboard last week is happening with my computer.
Me: What do you mean?
[Co-worker]: I've turned on my computer and its making sounds, but my monitor isn't on!!
Me: (looking at the little light next to the power button which was significantly dark) I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, and you're going to figure it out by yourself. It isn't going to take you long.
[Co-worker]: But, but...
Me: I want you to pretend that your monitor is not part of a computer, but simply a normal piece of machinery, and you want to get it to work.
[Co-worker]: So I...turn it on...?
Me: Yes [i.e. EUREKA!, it thinks!]
[Co-worker]: How?
True story.
Here, I am presenting a story which seems to poke fun at a person's technical skill, in a somewhat similar manner to UF and various other 'techie' strips. What is actually being poked fun at is the obvious and complete stupidity of the person portrayed, irrespective of the fact that computers are involved.
I personally am very happy to help people who are willing to make a genuine effort to learn, and who demonstrate that they can apply at least a tiny bit of intelligence to the task before them, whether it be computer related or not.
I am not happy to help idiots who don't read help files or simple on-screen instructions. If you ask a question that can be answered by hitting a single key (like F1), then you deserve to be derided, and hopefully next time you will take some pains to hit that key before asking.
You will most likely find that school children are far better in learning computer-related areas that these 'idiots' I refer to, and what's more, they want to learn.
So no, don't deride school children, that is cruel.
But, do deride fully grown adults who don't think to try turning the monitor on.
(Perhaps if it weren't so socially acceptable to be stupid, less people would be?)
If you've read the manual nobody will knock you. If you just didn't read the manual and call the support, you're Just a Moron. Period.
Please, you think that cops, nurses and the rest don't make jokes about the stupid people they have to deal with?
Anyone in the world, can learn how to work in tech support. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required. All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
*Bzzzzzzt* Thanks for playing, Scott.
Tech support is significantly more than ``basic memorization''. In particular, quality technical support requires the following:
(1) A thorough understanding of the domain for which the support is being offered. Basic memorization does not necessarily correlate with actual understanding---a grasp of how parts of a system actually relate is necessary as well. Such a grasp requires some level of intelligence.
(2) Problem analysis skills. In order to solve a customer's problem effectively, i need to be able to understand and analyze a problem, often without having actual access to the software, hardware, or network that is experiencing or causing the problem. I have to be able to wrap my brain around the problem and come up with one or more possible diagnoses for the problem, think about their probable cause, and invent experiments (verbal or otherwise) to test whether the diagnoses are correct---all with the cooperation of the customer! That's damn close to a scientific method, is it not?
(3) Supreme communication skills. If i cannot communicate effectively---using the written word, the spoken word, or both---i will be utterly unable to provide quality technical support, chiefly because i won't be able to find out what the actual symptoms of the problem are. Being able to communicate effectively in a way that the customer understands is a skill which many equate with intelligence (consider job or scholarship interviews, for example). (4) Patience and a sense of humor. Without either of these, a technical support rep would go insane after a short amount of time on the job. Obviously, neither of these qualities depends much on intelligence, but they're requisite to do a good job. --jim
:: "I am non-refutable." --Enik the Altrusian ::
I remember the talk about dilbert. They said that people who read dilbert slowly start to ignore the fact that they are working in a company much like the dilbert one, and it makes workers think it's ok... And now, there's this UF case, except people are saying the opposite.
So, instead of UF making tech support think that stupid questions and such is everyday life and ok, it is said that it makes fun of them, and insults them? Either case must be wrong, because they are kind of similar cases, and you draw completely different conclusions.
-- (too bored to create account, ac posting is so much more fun) --
Having done a bit of tech support myself, I suspect 90% of users who call are clueless for the reason they don't read the documentation and then expect the thing to work.
Let's illustrate from an example from consumer electronics: setting the time on your VCR. Any half-competent geek will figure out it's under the menus somewhere (since you've probably been roped into setting the time for friends, family, and people who've flagged you down when driving past on the interstate). For everyone else, that's why they pay some poor people to write a manual in really simplified English and 6 other languages. Most of the manuals written since the 1980s actually make sense. Even my mother (no technical genious) can set the clock and set programs on several different brands of VCR... because she has the good sense to read the books in the first place.
I think Illiad is making fun of the mentality that you can just open the box and it will do everything on its own. Maybe the Internet makes people think they don't have to read the book... I dunno. I don't analyze most of it.
But I do know UF is funny. Besides which, many of the strips have nothing to do with users... they deal with the boneheadedness of the computer industry, or corporate culture in general. And then there are the dust puppy plots...
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
I don't see a problem with it. The Darwin Awards make fun of people who got themselves killed, so I don't see how people who merely can't operate a computer have more of a reason to complain.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Cluesless tech support humor touches on all three. Stupidity (of course), absurdity (I'm picturing Dilber's boss "rebooting" his etch-a-sketch computer by shaking it right now), and even pain (this one is left as an exercise for the reader). For those of us in the industry that haven't gone on to the greener pastuers of writing editorials lambasting one's former collegues, this shit can be funny. Really funny. Spitting milk out of your nose funny. Sure, not all of it, and sure, it's elitist geek humor. But it's funny.
Now Kurz is incensed that a profession held in such high regard would stoop so low as to make fun of stupidity. But consider for a minute what else is considered funny. Listen to Comedy Central for a while, or read some other comics - I'd say most of your low-calorie humor is based on stupidity.
Jeff Foxworthy has built a career around one joke about how stupid rednecks are. Look at Jim Carey's earlier (non-dramatic) work - that guy was funny because he was a walking imbecile with a non-rigid skeletal structure. Blond jokes, racial jokes, aggie jokes, the Movie Dumb and Dumber, the list goes on an on. For whatever reason, this makes people laugh.
Think about the old tech-support humor gem where the guy keeps jamming floppies into the floppy drive (without removing the old ones). Clearly, anyone with a basic understanding of matter, space, and the world around them would recognize this guy as an idiot. What if someone tried to park their car in the same space as another car, are we allowed to Laugh at that Mr. Kurz? If you examine what is presented as funny for a moment, you will see that a great deal is at the expense of one person or group of people. If you think lawyers don't make fun of their clients, or doctors don't make fun of their patients, or bosses don't make fun of their employees, you're probably on crack. Of course, comparing making fun on one's client to a teacher making fun or his students is absurd. Sure, it makes for good editorial handwaiving, but's it's still a poor analogy. If you can't understand why, get back to me and I'll explain it to you.
If you're a geek, the Kurz editorial is abusrd and stupid. If you're in tech support, it's probably painful as well.
XML causes global warming.
No one is advocating being rude to computer newbies. We object to the idea that _humor_ in a comic strip is somehow objectionable for making light of user _stupidity_ which is not the same thing as user ignorance. There is far too much of this PC crap going around.
"The thing that most tech support employees don't recognize is that without people less knowledgeable than you, you'd be out of a job."
Having worked (not anymore, however) at an ISP in tech support for a few years I would have to say this is exactly the reason UF is so much fun for us ex-(or current)ISP workers.
You see, often I wished I could just quit or the job would go away. People really are THAT dumb and annoying at times.
"When you insult the person who thinks their password is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk', you're insulting the people putting money in your pockets."
Personally, I find this funny because there was a time when I was just as confused about passwords and things that I fell for it once--long ago.
I think you're getting a little too hostle about all this. Things like this usually are given a funny look or a slap on the forehead by the tech helping the customer. Nothing more. What the characters in UF actually say is often what a real-life tech would *want* to say--but can't. Tech support people don't just consantly bash "idiot" users to their face (or ears). Techs help and then laugh about it later when the phone is hung up and the customer is happily connecting to the net again.
"So if you think User Friendly is funny, why don't you sit back and think how much you knew about computers when you first sat down at one, and then try to think of how that feels when you can see everyone else around you doing what you should be able to do. Guess what. Your poop stinks, too."
Yes I'm well aware that everyone had to be a newbie at some point. But there's a difference between being a newbie interested in learning and a newbie who is positive he/she is the smartest user on the block even though the UPS guy just dropped off the Gateway box last week and it took 4 days to get it hooked up right. You see, the people UF makes fun of are the people tech support folks hate most. They are also the people most likely to NEVER read UF simply because they have no clue and don't want one.
I may seem a bit harsh and uncaring to you. But let me remind you that all humor cannot and should not fit all people. Should all comedians stop telling political jokes? Should we all just forget the fact that Mr. Clinton had a rather funny episode with an intern and a cigar? Or is humor only "right" and "proper" when those who are the targets are in politics (and therefore considered "enemies" to almost everyone in the country)? I think most political people have gotten used to the comedy directed their way--in fact some have even gone out of their way to poke fun at themselves (witness Bob Dole's various Saturday Night Live shows after he lost the election).
So, I guess I just don't see where it's such a big deal. People do stupid things. Other people will laugh about it. Get used to it. I was laughed at, made fun of, and in general tortured all through school because there were some things that everyone else seemed to know but me. Now, according to your way of thinking, when I get into a position to finally know more than the average person about some particular topic (computers), I'm suddenly not allowed to take advantage of the situation even though jokes and humor are pretty much harmless anyway? Give me a break.
You need to lighten up! If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? And if you can't laugh, then how can you possibly be healthy?
-SH
By the time you've gotten enough familiarity with the source material to understand/enjoy items like "User Friendly", you've either spent a lot of time studying for a little effort, or you've achieved some competency with computers. Either way, being able to enjoy the strip is a reward for your efforts to learn-- like those Honour Society doodads they give at schools, but much funnier.
Furthermore, not all the strips focus on making fun of users, and some of those that do are providing a basic lesson in computer sensibilities (don't ask stupid questions) in a funny way.
Brent noted that he worked 4 years in Tech support. I hope he gave out better advice than this selection, from this web page:
And you cannot get a virus from opening an email.
I know he's just trying to be helpful. But Brent gets things wrong sometimes. (Note the above, from a veteran of tech support.) I think the concern over tech support humor shows sensitivity, but misunderstands the point of User Friendly. The "tech support" strips use pointless, unfulfilling jobs (e.g., entry tech support) as a foil for humor. We don't laugh at the customers; what's funny is the ironic juxtaposition of bright gen-X-ers whose talents are wasted on simple computer problems. Customers asking stupid questions is not very funny; the frustration of bright, capable people who face these questions is funny.
Oh yea, just so this thoughtful comment doesn't get moderated up: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock-sucker, mother-fucker and tits.
I had to call up tech support once. Why? Because a game wasn't working for me in Win95. And why did that happened? It's all because of some stupid check to make sure that all the drives are not using some old DOS-way of FAT-way of managing files. So I forgot exactly what the error was. Sue me. Anyways, I realized that it was a stupid program bug that does too much checks. Yet the solution was so simple I couldn't believe it.
At some point, some people will call up tech support for help. Sure some are good questions and some are bad. But it is expected. It is inevitable. We all had to live with it.
As for User Friendly, for those tech support strips, it's the truth. I'm sure lots of tech support folks laugh at it too because it's true. And often the truth is funnier than a mere joke. Look at me, a Win9x user and a Linux user, a gamer, an average tech/geek person who knows enough to get by, I laugh at some people who ask stupid things. Yet when my friends asks me something that may sound stupid, I don't laugh at them, that easily anyways. It's all because we know the people we speak with.
I read User Friendly just about every day. I love the strips. Why? Because in many cases, it's true! And I just chuckle, laugh, or fall off my chair laughing. It's entertainment. It's the way I see it. And it's the same reason why I watch WWF Smackdown! every thursday. I need some laughs. And in my opinion, laughing is a good thing... no matter what mood you're in. If you don't find UF to be amusing, that's just you. So whatever sort of entertainment makes you laugh, go for it. In this day and age of this crazy world, we're gonna need those laughters. :) And that's... my two cents... "Strider Hiryu" of irc.fanfic.com on channel #db, signing off... Hello, Zagato. :P
you insult the person who thinks their password is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk',
Actually that strip didn't really have the user stupid, but rather clever.
When I make dumb mistakes, I laugh at myself. It's good to do so. I almost became a Darwin Award, by changing the Power Supply without unplugging the power cord (I was in a hurry). I look back and laugh. Noone got hurt, but it took a notch out of my pliers.
Funny too, is that when I call tech support, I usually find out that the person I'm talking to doesn't know any more than me. And thus tells me to do the things that I have already done, and does not believe me when I tell them "I did that already". I usually have to repeat the steps and give my diagnostics about the problem to get them to pass me on to someone who really knows what they are talking about. At work, I almost refuse to call tech support, because they usually frustrate me. And at the end, I have to figure every thing out myself.
I recently had my cable modem go down, and when I called tech support, I had to go through all the steps with the support guy, checking for conflicts with interrupts and such (which I did in the first place) before he would believe me that the modem was bad. Finally I got someone that knew what they were doing to bring me a new cable modem, and everything worked fine.
So relax, and if you don't think it's funny, then go off and read Family Circus!
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
I really don't feel like going back through the UF archives and counting every single strip that's made fun of tech support callers, but I imagine such strips make up a pretty small minority. There really aren't that many of them. And, to my knowledge, every one of these strips is based at least in part on an actual real-life call. It's not like Illiad is making this stuff up.
So what's the big deal? Illiad pokes fun at real-life morons who didn't bother to read the manual or use common sense. I've never worked in tech support but I've had to help people over the phone with computer problems (friends, family, etc.) and it's a frustrating job even when the person on the other line knows what he/she is doing. All Illiad has done is given tech support workers a way to vent their frustrations, and if he's stepped on a couple toes here and there, so what?
I think instead of whining about potentially offensive content in other strips (makes me wonder if he's seen Jerkcity) Mr. Kurtz should focus his energies on making his own strip a little funnier. After browsing through the archives a bit, I didn't even crack a smile.
Humor is hurtful. Always has been, always will be. Humor is about denigrating. Even very benign humor like puns are still denigrating language (and why they are called "groaners"). That's why we laugh, we are masking our shock. Larry Niven's Puppeteers had it right when they said "laughter is an interupted defense mechanism".
But this does not make humor wrong. It's like a vaccine of mini-hurt to cure the big hurts of life. Humor is healing. When we laugh at our stupid mistakes of previous years, we are healing ourselves of those stupid mistakes.
Of course, there is humor that hurts too much to be tolerated. Racist jokes and cruel pranks are just examples. But if we eliminate all humor that hurts people, we are left only with puns and wordplay. We don't need to be political correctness police. User Friendly is a great strip, and genuinely funny.
If we're not allowed to pick on people, all we will have left are our noses. Ouch! That hurt!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Scott seems to miss the point entirely on his way to his politically correct rant. We're not laughing at the "dumb" user. We're laughing at the comedy of the situation itself. The sheer outrageousness of the moment.
I'm sure he's offended, on behalf of women and minorities, by "All in the Family" because of the Archie Bunker character's overt racism and sexism.
I'm sure he's offended, on behalf of people with low motor skills, by Chevy Chase's "Saturday Night Live" pratfalls.
I'm sorry, but I'm offended by hyper-sensitive people who over-moralize everything.
We're not laughing a new users. We've all been "new" at one time or another (unless someone has discovered a way to imprint complete educations on a fetus prior to birth). Everyone who's worked tech support has gotten at least ONE really wierd situation (though I doubt anyone's used a permanent marker on a CRT screen in a good long while).
We're not picturing that other person. We're picturing OURSELVES in this situation. Like a guy who's assmebled computers for a living for years having absoloutely no luck getting a computer to boot up, only to find out, after severe, agonizing troubleshooting, that he's forgotten to plug the power supply into the motherboard.
One one level, people are going:
"Yeah, I've been in that techsupport position."
But, on a deeper level, they're usually thinking:
"God! If I were that user, I'd just DIE!
Again, not lauging at the person, or even the stereotype. They're laughing at THEMSELVES. Now if you cannot laugh at yourself, can you laugh at anything else without being a hypocrite?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
For all intents and purposes, User Friendly is by far my favorite net comic...i guess i could be called a religious reader.
/.'ers, but for the most part, those people are some of the most ignorant people i have ever had to talk to...
Although a good point is being made that it can be mean (who cares tho), to crack on those pathetic users who claim to be comp-illiterate even after two years of owning a computer, he needs to lighten up just a bit....
i'm unlucky enough to work for a large southern isp and no offense meant to any fellow
it's these types of people that user friendly tries to crack on, not those who are actually trying their hardest to actually learn 'the craft'...
i would have to agree that it's wrong to put down people who actually want to learn and get somewhere on these damn'd machines, but the truly ignorant people who have no desire to learn anything and better themselves deserve to get the smack down....
i would have to assume that the author of that rant has has little or no experience trying to teach people how to double click or even turn their magic boxes on.....and until he/she/it has some of that experience, they have little or no right to rant on about how unfair these cartoons are.....
403: Forbidden - you do not have permission to access
True Computer Tales (that will make you feel brilliant)
:>
A woman called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer. The tech asked her if she was "running it under Windows." The woman responded, "No, my desk is next to the door. But that's a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his is working fine."
A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's tech support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't find the printer." On the phone, the man said he even held the printer up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn't find it.
Tech Support: "OK Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now type the letter 'P' to bring up the Program Manager." Customer: "I don't have a 'P'." Tech Support: "On your keyboard, Bob." Customer: "What do you mean?" Tech Support: "'P' on your keyboard, Bob." Customer: "I'm not going to do that!"
Overheard in a computer shop: Customer: "I'd like a mouse mat, please." Salesperson: "Certainly sir, we've got a large variety." Customer: "But will they be compatible with my computer?"
Customer in computer shop: "Can you copy the Internet onto this disk for me?"
Tech Support: "All right...now double-click on the File Manager icon." Customer: "That's why I hate this Windows - because of the icons - I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons." Tech Support: "Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't believe it was meant to-" Customer: "I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'. I don't believe in icons." Tech Support: "Well...why don't you click on the 'little picture' of a filing cabinet...is 'little picture' OK?" Customer: [click]
Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having problems: the bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I walked her through the basics, then went over and printed out a test sheet. It printed fine. I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the printer. As the paper started coming out, she yanked it out and showed it to me.
And another user was all confused about why the cursor always moved in the opposite direction from the movement of the mouse. She also complained that the buttons were difficult to depress. She was very embarrassed when we asked her to rotate the mouse so the tail pointed away from her.
A friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations with her arms crossed across her chest, staring at the screen. After about 15 minutes he noticed that she was still in the same position, only now she was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help and she replied "It's about time! I pressed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!"
I hope someone finds something here funny
BOFH now here's some demented humor
http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~cvenour/bastard/
http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/index35.html
Forget User Friendly, POKEY is the ultimate in
tech support
HOORAY FOR POKEY THE PENGUIN!!!!
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
This is one of the funniest I've read, definitely. Reminds me of a war I had with my whole family, during the holidays :)
I think we've all got the message that you think it's all a geek-conformist movement or something. Give it a rest.
XML causes global warming.
The user wants the computer to have an interface that is intuitively obvious upon first use. This is unrealistic. The programmer / developer / marketer / tech support person wants the user to have the same worldview that they do, such that things intuitive to the person who designed the system are intuitive in the same way to the audience. This is unrealistic. The middle ground is that the tech support people remember that without users, their job would go away; and, that the user remember that they need to take responsibility to learn a complex system in a way analogous to driving a car. Most users would agree that driving tests are necessary. Many users spend more time "driving" the computer interface than they do behind the wheel, yet few of them make the effort to learn in a structured way. There is a danger here that the finger pointing will go on endlessly, with the tech support pointing at the clueless user and the user pointing at the esoteric system designer. The finger pointing stops when it becomes a cooperative effort where people help each other learn and feedback is built into the system. And I'm not just talking about MicroSoft's Wish List.
A) User Friendly is funny.
B) People who claim it's not funny don't get it.
The same could be said for many other jokes, of course.
I suspect that those who don't find User Friendy to be funny either don't have the necessary referrents or suffer from an excess of political correctness.
Regarding the former: Some User Firendly strips aren't stand-alone. You have to have seen quite a bit of the strip's history to get the running gag.
Regarding the latter: Of COURSE "children learning to read" are funny. It behoves a teacher not to ridicule them to their faces. But that doesn't mean the teacher has to ignore the humor. And one of the things about Tech Support is that an endless supply of users making the same ignorant and/or dumb mistakes can be frustrating. So a support person will from time to time WISH they could do what the characters in User Friendly do, when they come up with a snappy comeback, sabotage the luser, or otherwise blow off steam.
If you think the humor of User Friendly is occasionally black, try listening to medical workers or policemen some time.
Some things HAVE to be funny, because otherwise they'd be too painful.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
GOD DAMN, this is some funny shit he links to! Didn't know about Absurd Notions!! AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHH!!!!!
Scott has made good points in that humor 'shouldn't' be mean to people. Personally I get offened at racial jokes, for two reasons : 1. Even in jest they indicate that a particular race is inferior to your own. 2. Racial jokes are simplely changed depending on who your racist against. i.e. How do you stop a [insert disliked racial group here] from drowning? Take your foot off his head. When I first heard this I thought it was funny. Why? not because I'm racist (at least I hope not), but becuase the punch line is unexpected. I think this is one of the reasons I find tech support jokes funny, becuase I don't expected how stupid the users are. Whether or not they are just ignorant or jsut plain unable or unwilling to learn dosen't matter, I laugh becuase I don't expect the answer. but when I've heard the same joke recycyled 50 times then it isn't funny. UF also has another type of humor, a sympathetic humor, The joke is on the tech support, how does he deal with the user, he can't outright tell him/her they're stupid, he's got to lead them through it, and the humor is in how stuck the tech support is, not how dumb the user is. I can't find the strip, but there is one that illstrates what I'm saying. It's were Greg gets an email from a guy saying he can't use his email, what does he do? I think my point got a bit distorted in there, but I hope you all see what I mean, and don't go through this with a fine tooth comb picking out all the pendatic errors. Ben ben@e-caf.com
Unfortunately, I found Scott's two examples on the rant page quite funny.
Every joke has something, or someone to laugh at, even the day's PvP strip is making fun of some big alien guy with the IQ of a doorknob, but he is not clearly human and so, i guess, fair game for a joke. So, will we have a tide of comics that make fun of aliens?
I can understand Scott's concern, but the sad truth is, most of our humor is at the expense of someone else, and that is what makes it funny... and it is a narrow line 'tween making fun of a computer users' stupidity and (e.g.) the percieved silliness of blondes.
Fact is, we get upset when we feel we are the object of a joke, so the Irish don't like Irish jokes etc. And I guess Scott don't like jokes about clueless newbies cause, er, well...
.sig available on 'Need To Know' basis only!
That is the most intelligent thing I have ever seen on /.
Hell, I like UF and Dilbert because they give me fond memories of when I was:
:)
:)
a) First using computers (or, in the case of Dilbert, first learning to be a PHB
b) Doing tech support for friends & family (1-900-GrantFix
c) Setting up & running ISP's
d) Setting up & running a tech company
These days, I also use them as a sanity check - eg - "Hell, I almost did that the other day - better check my hair in the mirror for pointy bits!"
:)
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
umm I use AOL alot..I mean like all the time but this slashdot thing is weird like how do I submit a message and stuff you know? So, like I got this really nerdy hacker friend of mine to help me and he's really cool but very weird and says I should try out Lee Nukes but I don't want to nuke my computer! Like that is so strange... Why would I want to do that???? Anyway before I go I have to say that AOL is really really cool and you guys shouldn't knock it off that much! You should really try it!! But this slashdot thing is also kinda cool too
Most humer is tragic thats what makes it funny
I don't know why but it is.
Look at all these home video shows. They are full of people getting hit in the nuts and falling; they are kind of funny.
Please excuse my spelling
-evol
Of the cartoons he mentioned I only follow UF (but now that he gave a pointer somwhere else I have to check that one out too...)
.com economy, programming geeks/nerds and (lately) relationships and dating!
I think he needs to lighten up. It's only humour after all. UF doesn't exist solely to mock the clueless lusers, it also mocks management, techs, funny accents, linux, Microsoft, Quake, internetworking, the
In other words, the UF author is fairly well plugged in to this sub-culture we call whatever it is we call it, and he seems to be able to see and illustrate the humour in it. UF is not mean spirited humour by any stretch.
I have to take issue with the following statement:
Anyone in the world, can learn how to work in tech support. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required. All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
I think he really has no idea what real tech support is all about. It sounds like the only "tech support" he's ever dealt with is the type I call "Customer Service Agents" whose job is to answer the phone pleasantly, follow the script, regurgitate the answers from the FAQ list, enter the trouble ticket, and then hurry up and answer the next call. Little more than tele-marketting
really...
Real tech support is remote troubleshooting. It is fixing technical problems with some sort of device.
Before one can fix a technical problem, one has to find the cause of the problem. Ever notice that the actual fix to the problem at hand is usually really short/easy/quick? The most time consuming part of tech support is trying to figure out what the cause of the problem actually is in the first place. Once we know that, fixing it is (usually) the easy part.
Before one can find the cause of the problem, one has to have an accurate statement and understanding of what the problem actually is. Here's where the user comes in. The tech support person has to know all the right questions to ask to get the information out of the user that will tell them what the problem actually is. All the user knows is "it doesn't work, and I'm pissed off becuase of it!"
The tech has to know what the device is supposed to do if it is working right. This usually means knowing steps a user would follow and what the expected response is to each step. Alterately, the tech needs to know what the possible error responses the device would produce at each step, and what does each error point to as being the problem. Often there is not a one-to-one relationship between problem and error response - usually one problem can produce any of many different errors, or one error response could point to several different problems depending on what other errors are observed, in what order, and in what combination.
The tech then needs to be able to piece all that into a step by step sequence of questions to ask the user, and based on the user's answer, go here or go there and check this other thing, and so on.
Sure, a lot of this stuff can be written up in scripts and flowcharts, but if all somebody knows how to do is follow the flowchart, what happens when they are presented with a set of conditions the flowchart writer never thought to write up? Tech support is not ALWAYS fixing the same problems over and over. Granted there may be a certain amount of repetitiveness, but the true test of a real tech is not in handling the easy stuff, it's handling the stuff "nobody's ever seen before".
Genuine troubleshooting skills are not picked up in 2 weeks of training, there are college courses that teach this type of thing. Sure a lot of it is simple deductive reasoning and basic problem solving skills, but the application of those skills takes on new dimensions in a technical setting.
I have worked with a fair amount of the type of person that get the 2 weeks training and then get on the phones, and they are usually the worst type, worse than the customers. They are unable to think beyond what's in the script, and panic and come running for the help of the ones in the know seemingly on every call. They seem to be unable to assimilate and connect information learned on calls. They can't seem to figure things out for themsleves.
<rant>Don't ask me "Is the email server down?" First, there are about 6 dozen email servers here. All of them have a name. Find out what email server the luser is on. Secondly, once you know what email server it is, then don't come to me asking "Is the email server mail.foo.com email down?"
How many times do I have to how to find out for yourself? How many times do I have to tell you to ping the thing? How many times do I have to show you how to log in and check processes? How many times to I have to show you how to test the server with a known good client? How many times have I shown you how to do all that and you still can't seem to get how this is basic troubleshooting?
I can see having to walk you through it two or three times, it is new to you, and it is a lot of steps for you to remember. But after a while you should be able to at least get started by yourself, and if you need help in one of the later steps because you forgot what's next, I'll be happy to help. The main thing is that you are making progess, you are learning, and maybe down the road you won't need my help anymore, and you can be the one who helps the others.
What I can't stand is how you never seem to even learn what the start of this procedure is, and when it might be useful to try. Instead all you ever ask me is "Is the email server down?"
Techs like you are worse than the users. The users don't get paid for knowing how to do this technical stuff. You do get paid for knowing, now do your job and learn!</rant>
Explain to me how someone can post the exact same thing twice (minor spacing differences) and have both of them moderated up? Does this seem absurd to anyone else?
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
How do I use that spell checker again?
When I got my first PC after years of owning a C64 (1200 baud modems ruled!) I had no idea what to do first.... What did I do? First I read the PC-DOS (yep, version 5 no less) manual, then the users manual, and pretty soon I was cd'ing all over the place and dir'ing like no tomorrow.
Now I use Linux as my main OS, have been for a couple years, everyone asks me for help, and it's really annoying.
Why, you ask?
Because I read the manuals, documentation, I learned how it worked, I spent the time to figure it out, and I feel these people are just getting a "free ride" by asking me instead of going and doing it on their own like I did. I didn't know anyone locally with a PC, I had no one to ask until some months later.
Sure, now and then there is no sufficient documentation and I'm forced to ask, but I make concious efforts to learn on my own, these people don't, they don't care, they want it working and they want it working now. Reading documentation is like severing a limb. "Why should I read it when I can just ask you?" is a question often posed to me.
Welcome to the society of instant gratification.
Now if you ask me, this is a Bad Thing(tm), and poking fun at them may be a subtle way to get them to see that its not all that "cool" to just ask people instead of going to even make an effort of SOME kind to find it themselves, especially about something like computers which touches everyones lives now.
Not to mention, I find UF funny usually, and this political correctness rant buddy posts is just crap as the strip isn't usually about tech support calls at all! Only a small minority of them are.
-- iCEBaLM
well, you seem to have read my mind (and the post i had been composing for the past 20 minutes :P), so let me add a few thoughts...
(1) thorough understanding of the [problem] domain
i find this quote from Mr. Kurtz rather interesting:
"I worked tech support for 4 years. When I started, I barely knew how to turn a computer on..."
if i were going to run a serious technical company, i would be looking to hire people familiar with either mine or similar products to provide customer support for my product. why should i waste my time and money training someone on the basic workings of pc hardware and windows 9x so that i can then train them in the intricacies of My56kVoiceFaxModem when there are plenty of people already suffieciently knowledgable in the first two areas.
(2) problem analysis skills
anyone can go through some huge flow chart of symptoms and possible solutions, but thats not real tech support. thats someone a company hires so that they can have a real live person on the line rather than a phone menu system to which angry customers are less likely to listen (would this be tier 0?).
as im sure we all know, not every set of symptoms has a cut and dry set of possible solutions. what if there is more than one underlying problem to be discovered, but one is masked by the others? anyone who has worked with PC hardware should have encountered that at least once...and without being able to thoroughly analize whats going on its hard to get anywhere.
(3) communication skills
my experience is that a lot technical people (like myself) have a hard time explaining technical things to non-technical people. its basically a language barrier of sorts. there are some technical people however who are quite good (either naturally or through schooling) at bridging the barrier, and they are the ones who make the best tech support reps.
(4) patience and a sense of humor
requirements for any position that requires interaction with customers, not to mention life in general
off on a tangent slightly, i thought this line interesting:
"Ultimately, as we continue to move forward, the general public is going to reach the level of computer knowledge that the typical tech currently has."
to which i say that may be true, but by then there will be all new systems that a large percentage of people will need but only a small percentage of people will be able to provide support for.
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
I love UserFriendly, but "grew" up on BOFH (http://bofh.ntk.net/), back when I was a newbie sysadmin. Both of these make fun of users. (err, BOFH far more than UF. I don't think UF ever killed a user for the fun of it... :) I think my main point is that unless you have been in the situation that the comic/story describes, and can laugh at your situation, it will not be funny to you.
I feel that it is my duty to make this world a better place in which to live. But before I continue, allow me to explain that I oppose Scott Kurtz's scribblings because they are superficial. I oppose them because they are dotty. And I oppose them because they will utilize questionable and illegal fund-raising techniques by the end of the decade. What I mean to say is that his statements such as "Everything is happy and fine and good" indicate that we're not all looking at the same set of facts. Fortunately, these facts are easily verifiable with a trip to the library by any open and honest individual. It will be objected, to be sure, that Scott doesn't honestly want to turn once-flourishing neighborhoods into zones of violence, decay, and moral disregard. At first glance, this may seem to be true, but when you think about it further, you'll really conclude that outrage pounded in my temples when I first realized that he wants to produce a large number of totally diabolic extravagancies, most piteous indecencies, and, above all, the most superstitious blasphemies against everything that I hold most sacred and most dear. In a larger context, his cocky chauvinistic memoranda remind us that acts of cannibalism continue in our midst.
Just to add a little more perspective, Scott's fixation on revisionism is nothing more than camouflage for a lack of original ideas. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of effete gin-swilling spivs, and that's one reason why I'm writing this letter. Please don't ask me to paint pictures of pugnacious worlds inhabited by putrid perverts. I simply can't do that.
The truth hurts, doesn't it, Scott? How did he get so hostile? I have my theories, but they're only speculation. At any rate, his cronies encourage naive bigamists to see themselves as victims and, therefore, live by alibis rather than by honest effort, as though it were a disgrace to resolve a number of lingering problems. It may seem obvious, but I cannot, in good conscience, step aside and let manipulative slobs address what is, in the end, a nonexistent problem. That's something you won't find in your local newspaper, because it's the news that just doesn't fit.
Simply put, eventually, Scott's remonstrations will provide cover for a shameless agenda. The world today seems to be going crazy. Let me explain. The first response to this from Scott's lackeys is perhaps that disruptive hackers are inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive. Wrong. Just glance at the facts: Scott's perorations mean delays in getting things processed, errors in handling requests, inefficiency, and many more years of error from keeping an old system alive.
Following this line of logic, it would appear that by refusing to act, by refusing to reach the broadest possible audience with the message that Scott's petulant protests arose out of an unjust system only to spread more injustice in their wake, proving that there is no end to randy unilateralism, we are giving Scott the power to reduce human beings to the status of domestic animals. Now, more than ever, we must see through the haze of expansionism. Why is it that his blind faith in voyeurism leads him only to corruption? It's because in the genesis of his magic-bullet explanations, illogical begat unrealistic, which begat sappy, which begat rash. Oh, and one more thing. Scott's comments manifest themselves in two phases. Phase one: make us the helpless puppets of our demographic labels. Phase two: make all of us pay for his boondoggles.
Maybe it's not fair to call Scott's henchmen "mindless" just because they cause (or at least contribute to) a variety of social ills, but remember that Scott's refrains have a distinctly beer-guzzling tone. All this aside, Scott draws his outrageous conclusions from arbitrary statistics. Individually, his editorials seek temporary tactical alliances with slovenly gutter-dwellers in order to quote me out of context. But linked together, his hastily-mounted campaigns could descend to character assassination and name calling. At the very least, I've heard of sullen things like stoicism and isolationism. But I've also heard of things like nonviolence, higher moralities, and treating all beings as ends in and of themselves -- ideas which his ignorant, unthinking, mudslinging brain is too small to understand. Everybody knows that Scott's threats are a hotbed of negativism, but you should consider that Scott has completely stepped off the deep end.
Let's look at the facts. First, his assistants have cooperated closely with dictatorial beggars on several projects. Second, his promise of equality is a false one. And finally, it's time for him to stop his systematic assault on religious freedom. Scott has taken it upon himself to jawbone aimlessly.
Things that you or I might regard as mendacious or mad might be considered by his helpers as an article of faith, a philosophical conviction, a political opinion, or even an innocuous form of entertainment. The same might be said of the worst types of perfidious quasi-unprincipled slumlords there are. His modes of thought are a blatantly obvious and cleverly orchestrated script, carefully concocted to demand that Earth submit to the dominion of vulgar yahoos. As I understand it, Scott's rise to power was not accomplished without a fair amount of backstabbing, skulduggery, and unanticipated and unpredictable reversals of fortune. Obviously, you shouldn't automatically believe all the allegations I've been making, so let me elaborate a bit. I, for one, frequently wish to tell Scott that that which is built inextricably into the laws of the universe cannot be thoroughly pigheaded. But being a generally genteel person, however, I always bite my tongue.
The problem is, it's not fair for him to create a regime of ignominious gangsterism. Scott spews out so many falsehoods, distortions, and half-truths, that rebuttal requires some lengthy documentation. Doesn't it strike you as odd that I don't care to share the same planet as the most slaphappy dorks you'll ever see? We have to start talking with one another honestly, in honest language. I am reminded of the quote, "He rarely tells his toadies that he plans to curry favor with contentious fanatics using a barrage of flattery, especially recognition of their "value," their "importance," their "educational mission," and other lascivious nonsense." This comment is not as hate-filled as it seems, because the time has come to bring fresh leadership and even-handed tolerance to the present controversy.
I pause to note that if Scott's supporters had even an ounce of integrity, they would fight to the end for our ideas and ideals. Scott's ramblings do not hold under close moral scrutiny. For the most part, we have to consider all of our options. Still, neither Scott nor his slaves have dealt squarely or clearly with the fact that factionalism has never been successful in the long run. I will renew my resolve to provide some balance to his one-sided hatchet jobs. I'm inclined to think that we must continue to monitor Scott's minions and expose them as the wild sordid bureaucrats they are. Anyway, I hope I've made my point, which is that Scott Kurtz's subhuman tracts are not something that endears him to me.
Or worse: ignorance is power.
There sometimes is an attitude of "If I'm good enough at my *real* work, I don't need to know about computers". Sometimes this can be justified (I'm good at what I do and you are good at what you do). All too often, though, it is a manifestation of an "I'm a hot shot, cause I can get someone else to do the dirty work" attitude.
But now we're closer to Dilbertland than user friendly.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Listen to yourself dood, it's like an entire contradiction of itself. Figure out what you are trying to say before you type with your hands.
He (Kurtz) has a constitutional right to complain about things. I have a constitutional right to complain about Kurtz's strip. My rantz:
I've never read PvP, but I already have an extreme dislike for the opinions of the author. He is too close minded. If he were to think about supply and demand, he would see the DEMAND and realize that people out there are LOOKING for this kind of humour, and Illiad is supplying it.
Settle down, already. It's a comic strip. It makes some people laugh. Have you considered the fact that UF might be popular not because it's a "hip" thing to like, but because they identify with it and find it absolutely hilarious at times? I'll agree, sometimes it gets repetitive, but it's still funny, in my own opinion. You're welcome to think what you like about UF, but to suggest that I avoid it based on the fact that only "conformist" geeks (whatever that means) read it is absurd.
I think User Friendly is funny, but the culture wars between "techies" and "non-techies" frustrate and depress me.
... spends fighting his/her computer is a minute they're not caring for someone, keeping an eye out, or curing a disease. That's why tech support people are necessary.
When I worked at tech support (in a hospital), I understood that the people I was supporting were hired to care for sick people, keep track of expenses and reimbursement, etc., not to fix computers. Fixing computers was my job.
Not to explain to them how they could fix it themselves, not even to make the exact changes they knew how to ask for, but to understand what they needed the computers to do and make sure the computers could.
Often this took me all day. Every minute a nurse, security guard, surgeon,
I'm aware I was in the cushier and more idealistic end of the job category. I'll bet sitting in one place answering call after call from some angry joe who wants his porn fix but can't get his screen name to work and takes it all out on you can be real frustrating. But for those of you who spend most of the day browsing or playing Ultima Online, then go out with your buddies and crack about those idiots who pay your salary, you should take a look at your bank account and find less insulting stuff to circulate.
See also: Computer Stupidities
As for humor in general, almost all jokes are at someone's expense, and we all tell them, so we shouldn't be complaining...just laughing.
User Friendly isn't funny. But I don't think this is because it makes fun of clueless users: I mean, the BOFH is piss funny and it also makes fun of the clueless.
No, unlike Dilbert or the BOFH, User Friendly is simply predictable. The jokes aren't funny because of clever wit, but instead rely on you thinking "yeah I've been there".
Predictability is what destroys good humour, and is one of the reasons why Far Side and Dilbert are getting pretty dull these days, and why South Park started to suck after the first season.
There's an easy litmus test. Normal non-geeks laugh heartily at Dilbert. Go find a single User Friendly strip that anybody except a full-time-I-live-for-Linux geek would laugh at.
Teachers need to vent sometimes. If you have ever known a teacher it can be quite shocking. They can be cruel - talking about their kids in the most degrading terms. It is unprofessional but necassary for some to get through the bad days.
The point of all this is that comedy is subjective. When I hear my teacher friends talk this way I don't really find it funny so I politely laugh and change the subject as quickly as I can. They are still my friends though and most have leaned to not go there.
If you don't find UF funny then feel free not read it. But don't presume to tell me that I'm some sort of bastard for finding it funny.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
If we ignored or, worse, banned every piece of humour that offended someone there would be no humour left!
:-) And the moments of sheer hell, well we look to UserFriendly to cheer us up!
[insert standard wibble about being a tech support professional for ages and not being offended by cartoons about it, no sir].
It's really important to laugh at yourselves - comics like UF don't just make fun of the user, they make fun of all aspects of the job we do. Technical Support is bloody funny at times believe me
...or do you judge intelligence strictly by whether you agree with something or not?
...is nothing more nor less than the ground for Scott Kurtz's pissing and moaning. That's how it always has been, and probably how it always will be. Anyone expecting anything more from a comic (like, say, entertainment) would do best to look elsewhere.
I consider my self quite knowledgeable in electronics and software. However, I still find myself stumped by [presumably] trivial errors on occasion. For instance, I've been trying to make a program work on a small microcontroller board for about three days now (on and off). The program is only five instructions! Fifteen bytes! How many mistakes could there possibly be in fifteen bytes? I bet the Motorola engineers are laughing:
:)
"The idiot didn't clear the DWOM bit, what a fool."
or
"Hello! OC output, stupid!"
###
For those who care
ff ; sync
86 01 ; ldaa 1
b7 10 01 ; staa DDRA
loop:
7f 10 00 ; clr PORTA
b7 10 00 ; staa PORTA
7e 00 05 ; jmp loop
Processor is a 68hc11f1cfn3 in special bootstrap mode. 2MHz e-clock. Please help me
Ryan
I work at a help desk (I'm there now) and there is a large contingent of people who claim "we're not the helpdesk, we're the systems group" (or whatever name they pick). Tech support people have a big problem with their rank in things and eagerly tell you how good they are and how they should be doing something else. And I'm like "just do your fucking job and shut up".
Yes it is funny. And anyone calling a helpdesk is free for all game to redicule. The breakdown in the analogy comes where the child has problems learning on their own, while the depicted morons in support related comics have the perfectly reasonable alternative of using the skills they (hopefully) picked up as a child and Reading The Fine Manual.
Personally, I've laughed at jokes about whites, blacks, blonds, women, men, preachers, sex, death, baldness, and just about everything else under the sun. Almost every bit of humor out there can be offensive to someone, so deal with it.
As for this Scott guy, I'm more offended at him slamming his competition directly like this. Do you hear professional comic strip artists going around talking about how their competitors suck? No, you don't. Sometimes they lampoon each other's strips, but they don't trash talk. Since Scott is 'in the biz' so to speak, I think people are perfectly justified in ignoring his rant as nothing more than an attempt to get cheap publicity for himself and knock the competition. His conflict of interest here makes everything he says about other people's comic strips suspect in the extreme.
Another thing - I've never heard of this guy before, so I checked out his site from the link /. provided. Scott's strip was about as funny to me as Family Circus, which is to say it was boring as hell. Gee, a guy gets his eye hurt with a Nerf dart and so calls in someone else, who is a big furry monster of some kind, to play his game. What a snoozer. That's about as flat a joke as I can imagine. Kind of like Al Gore trying to make a joke. The kind of safe and sanitized humor I expect from someone who is making sure they don't offend anyone. I also checked out Absurd Notions, which I had also not heard of. Absurd Notions at least raised a chuckle or two out of me. Pvp was just painful. Also, the page for the current strip on Pvp was poorly designed. I had to search for the navigation buttons. Once I went to the previous strip, suddenly there were clearly labeled icons for navigation at the top. He also buries links in the midst of text that you have to read to figure it out. I've seen people who literally barely know how to turn on the computer turn out better designed web sites than that.
Humor lets us deal with taboo and dangerous subjects in a socially acceptable way. Comedians take the absurd, frightening, and frustrating and lampoon, satirize, or turn it into parody. Cartoons like UF and Absurd Notions just do that for a more specific target audience than most. As for Scott and his Pvp strip, all I can say I'm surprised that given the Quaalude effect his comic strip had on me, that he is popular enough that anyone even knows he exists, let alone being worthy of a /. article.
I've been involved in the tech support side of things for a few years now, & it is the most frustrating and depressing job ive ever had - especially when dealing with "end users" - the ppl who treat tech support as a miniature classroom to learn all they can about their computer & when you cant solve their problems are all too ready to abuse youre lack of knowledge or the legitimacy of your birth. I'm of the opinion that computer purchasers/users should require a licence before they can be let near the keyboard or at the very least live with the jokes made at their expence
Regarding the last paragraph about users being unwilling to learn...
The learning curve from being illiterate to being able to write quickly with pencil and paper takes several years, and is taught at schools. Using a computer (except perhaps for Unix boxen) is significantly easier to learn. Once you know how to use a computer, computers seem easy to use.
Of course, I may be missing your point here.
This is what is wrong with the whole moderation concept. A user can create an account, post for a while to boost his karma, and then "splurge" by posting all kinds of inflammatory bilge until his karma is destroyed. Then he can create a new account (or several) and start the whole process over again. I've never liked the idea of moderation; it simply encourages trolls to look for loopholes.
UF also is making fun of the tech community itself, just think about the discussions about which Linux/BSD distribution is best, the M$ bashing, the Quake obsession, etc. I think this is probably the best part of UF: it shows the absurdities in the tech world today.
Sure UF does poke some fun at some of their clueless users, who can blame them. I work in field service and have travelled over 100 miles to load paper in a printer before, its hard not to chuckle at something like that.
But the techs in UF do a lot more than just sit around making fun of clueless users. There is a lot fun being poked at techs and geeks themselves, these people have plenty of quirks the,selves and Illiad does not hesitate to take a shot at them. Its a shame more people can't take themselves a little less seriously and not always be on the lookout for a new reason to be offended.
I always thought that UF was funny, however after reading all the posts here that tell me it isn't I realize I must be wrong. Thank god for all you saving me from the pitfall of free thought.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to buy Microsoft.
I armost though you were serious! I'm grad I figure you out you funny guy. You no want anybody but Americans to learn secret tech support skirls from the genius Illiad! We know you try and trick us! Shame on you, now we go study User Friendly and learn many secrets and get even more tech support contracts! Thanks you MicroSoft for making us many oppurtunities to to support!
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I think that we would all agree laughing at a student *honestly* trying to learn to his face is just mean.
However, there is a big difference between laughing at a specific individual and general stupidity. For instance most people find jokes about stupid people/blondes funny even though people that stupid really do exist.
Secondly there is no way these people are honestly trying to learn. The people who call in with these problems might be doctors or lawyers so the issue is certainly not one of ability. The difficulty is rather caused by an unwillingess to try and learn...something which SHOULD be ridiculed.
Thirdly even if tech support humor isn't funny, or is even offensive much more harm is done pointing this out then the strips do themselves. What reaction is such a comment supposed to provide? Are people who were previously enjoying UF supposed to stop reading it because they feel guilty. The human condition is such that much of our pleasure takes place at the expense of another. To insist on only bland inoffensive humor is a far worse harm then any ridicule could bring about
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
Maybe you've been lucky with VCRs. A friend of mine was recently asked to retune his parents' VCR when they moved somewhere with different frequencies. They'd lost the manual. He eventually gave up, and was forced to contact the manufacturers and order a manual.
It turned out that to get the tuning menu, you hold down PLAY and FFWD together.
... eeeew.
--
Anyone who has s/u/f/f/e/r/e/d/ worked tech support will get a good laugh out of UF. Anyone who has worked retail will probably find it funny, and any SysAdmin should find it funny, or hand in their BOFH membership!
ttyl
Farrell
SysAdmin &
Tech-Support Survivor
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Do you buy a car and expect to ring the car-yard every day because you didn't take the time to take driving lessons? No. Do people buy computers and instantly expect to be experts? Do they expect to be able to ring their computer dealer 20 times/day to ask how to right click? Worse, ring their ISP to ask why their CD-ROM won't eject? Yes, they do. Working for an ISP, it never ceases to amaze me just how many users expect to use the internet, and yet can't grasp a right-click, what a browser is, or even how to shut down their computer properly.
"Anyone in the world, can learn how to work in tech support. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required. All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too."
/. and a six-pack of Dr. Pepper...
When I was "trained" for my tech support job, the training consisted of pretty much just "These are our policies, this is how our system works, now go kill the queue." I was expected to be able to troubleshoot problems and come up with solutions for them. While I admit, much of the problems I encounter can be remedied by a solution I have memorized, computer problems don't always follow the rules. Without some troubleshooting abilities (i.e., intelligence), my job would be impossible.
"They're not idiots, they just don't understand how a computer works internally."
That's true, to an extent. I hold nothing against people who don't understand how their computer works. I'm perfectly happy to explain everything in terms the customer can understand. However, It seems to me that a number of people lose all traces of common sense when they call tech support. Don't call me and tell me its my fault that your modem doesn't work after you dropped your computer down a flight of stairs.
"I use a toilet everyday but never has a plumber openly mocked me for not knowing how to fix a pipe."
But, I guarantee your plumber would mock you, though perhaps not openly, if you tried to flush, say, a side of beef down your toilet. Besides, plumbers aren't magically produced from "a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training" like us techs are.
"Then people are going to find jokes about cup holders and foot pedals about as funny as I do."
Oddly enough, most non-techies I know find these jokes much more humorous than the techs I know do. Why? Because the techs I know laugh at things like User Friendly because we can look at it and think that its funny because it's true! While virtually every tech support situation in User Friendly has happened to me at some point, not once have I heard of a real person encountering the old "cup holder" problem. Yet other people laugh at these jokes because they find people who are dumber/more ignorant than they are to be funny. Its the same reason there are television shows like "The World's Dumbest Criminals." I could probably entertain my non-tech friends for hours with Tales from the Queue(tm) , yet my co-workers would generally not be impressed.
Anyway, all I know is that User Friendly is one of the few things that keeps me from losing my mind when I'm at work. That,
I really hate lamers that don't have a clue. And I also think that User Friendly is the best. There, my rant (just like scott's) for the day!
I would like to rant a little on a few points.
...
1. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required.
So who came up with the solutions to memorize in the first place?
Someone with 2 or 3 weeks training (I call these people pseudo-tech operators)?
Problem solving takes a lot of "intelligence skills". I was in tech support for three years and spent most of that time as a trainer and resource (a tech's tech). Pseudo-techs regurgitated answers on the phones while a few real techs solved the problems. We wrote new driver INFs, dissected the windows registry (registry == HELL), and wrote procedures for the pseudo-techs to follow.
So, anyone in the world, can learn how to be a pseudo-tech operator. It's basic memorization and regurgitation, there is no real math or intelligence skills required. All you need is a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can repeat answers on the phones too. But if you want to be a real tech and create solutions you need intelligence and skill.
2. Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer
Learning how to operate a computer is one thing, waiting four hours on hold to ask what a power cord is for is different. I just have to laugh at that.
Everyone has read an email full of funny things kids do. Like a kid learning how to talk and mispronounces some words and thus creates a sentence that isn't quite right. Is it wrong to laugh at that? Is it mocking the child? No! Its just funny like a lot of the situations in tech support we laugh at.
3. "But Scott, I work tech support and we constantly get calls from complete idiots." They're not idiots, they just don't understand how a computer works internally.
Two words; power cord.
4. "Almost every caller I ever helped was an intelligent person..."
So there were some people worth mocking?
So are all tech support callers idiots? No!
Can intelligent people ask stupid questions and do stupid things? Hell yes! And a lot of those really stupid questions and things are damn funny.
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison
Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbess,
1) Teacher says something,
2)kid interperates with different meaning,
3)antics ensue
4)kid appears infront of the principals office.
Old formulae but sometimes funny,
so if it's funny about kids, it can be funny about mindless grown ups.
It's turtles all the way down.
What a snob Scott Kurtz is to say strips like User Friendly and Dilbert are in bad taste because those poor end users don't deserve ridicule. Fact is, most end users DON'T deserve it and can laugh with us about the rest. The ones that are the topic of these strips usually fall into two categories:
Maybe I am too close to this to be objective, but it really cheezes me when someone like this looks down their nose and leaps to the defense of people who are not worthy of defending. I have answered thousands of technical questions and I never make fun of even the "dumbest" question when the person asking has 0.5 of a clue, made an honest effort to figure it out, and is just stuck. How many of us have designed eloquent systems and then wasted a whole hour because you forgot a ';' at the end of one freaking line and just couldn't "see" it?
By the way, PvP is not funny. I read the strip linked in the /. article and even looked at the home page. When a cartoonist goes out of their way to be Politically Correct, the whole point of humor/satire is missed.
from the jihad!-jihad! dept.
DustPuppy83 reports: "Scott Kurtz, creator of the game-centric comic strip PvP, said something bad about User Friendly on his web site. Let us know when you spot him."
o/~ Join us now and share the software
And even worse is a cartoonist depicting a dumb school child. That Charles Shultz is so cruel making fun of Peppermint Patty getting a D-
I never laugh at clueless users. I laugh at dumb users. A clueless user is a person who doesn't know anything - yet. They may well learn. A dumb user is the guy who assumes he will just be able to operate every aspect of his machine, doesn't read the manual, clicks in places where you haven't told him to, and expects everything to be fed to him with a spoon. For this person, there is no hope. This is the kind of person who when you are walking through something step by step, makes assumptions about what you want him to do next. These assumptions are normally wrong and they waste more of your time trying to get him back to where he started.
Teachers laugh at this kind of student too. Mechanics laugh at this kind of driver. Doctors laugh at this kind of patient. And geeks laugh at this type of luser. If you call a helpdesk, and you co-operate with them and make their lives easier, they won't laugh at you. If you act like a pratt, they will.
And hey, a large portion of the world laughs at the geeks permanently. So what's wrong with us getting a laugh off of their stupidity ?
BUT humour is subjective so try not to get too worried about it.
TWW
It isn't that I hate UF, it just isn't funny. And not for the reasons in this lame article.
If your comic hinges upon the second panel being just a guy sitting there (a pause for comedic timing) you know your comic is in trouble.
Illiad just doesn't know even the basic formula for a comic. Dilbert knows it... the first two panels are for the set up, but those are funny too. The third panel gives you the punch line *and* an added commentary, giving you three jokes.
UF just gives you one joke, at most. One UF strip was just a robotic arm moving up saying "Oh, yeah." That was it, just that. The whole strip. So what if it mentions Linux, it just ain't funny.
One UF was for two panels a guy clicking a mouse. "What are you doing?" "Trying to get a first post on slashdot." --- That's funny? It's a joke, but Illiad just doesn't know how to show it. Instead, I'd put that joke in the first two panels and in the third panel put in the *real* joke: "But we lost our connection a couple days ago, that's just a cached copy." "I thought news was rather slow."
Now *that's* funny. Really, all UF needs is to be cleaned up like that. Take what buds of jokes you can and turn them into real kickers. That, and get a real artist, like http://www.penny-arcade.com/. Read a couple of those, and you'll wonder what a no talent hack like Illiad is doing in the first place. PA is funny also because they rail on Illiad better than I ever could.
PS. For dramatic timing you'd use "..." in the strip, not waste a whole panel.
I suspect that if Tech Support folk couldn't laugh at their job, the suicide rate would skyrocket. Dealing with some people, you either laugh, or you go insane. I work in the university computer labs between lectures. When someone ignores all the handouts they've been given by lecturers, and uses 'rm' to rename their files, what else can you do?
Just not for newbies :)
Now, it's a-holes that don't -care- to learn how to use their computers, yet still rely on them..well, they're fair game.
As a "Help Desk Operative", one deals with users of all levels of competance.
It is always a pain when a user tackles you with a problem that can be solved easily by referring to the documentation, but often this is due to ignorance about the existance or clarity of such documentation.
UserFriendly, I feel, doesn't really attack this (rather innocent) group of User.
However, the group that UserFriendly does attack, and quite rightly in my opinion, is the arrogent AND ignorant group of users. These are the users that don't only not know the solutions to simple problems, they feel its the HDO's responsibility to correct them despite the fact they have often made _NO_ attempt to enlighten themselves first, or they fall completely outside of the juradstriction of the operative.
Now before you all move to flame me off of /. for being "Anti-user", please remember that I too work on a helpdesk, and I have no qualms with Users who make an honest effort to learn something that they have to regularly deal with. [Please note that I provide more unix support for non-regular unix users - so I'm probably biased]. And Userfriendly makes no effort to slander or parody the users in this category.
The thing to remember is, that above all, not only are the users human, but so are the help desk operatives.
I guess thats my 5 cents worth.
Actually, a lot of times I don't find User Friendly funny because it can be too PC. I cannot count the number of times I have gotten calls from users who had never cracked open the how-to book in the manual. The question they ask is right there, in the opening of the book! I have never understood how you can spend $2500 on a computer and never read the book. I read the manual on my car. I read it on a $99 microwave from K-Mart. What is so difficult about taking 15 minutes, or, even better, keepin it open and following the step-by-step instructions? Some manuals are horrible, so sometimes this is not possible for a new user, but some don't try. I once had someone call in because the computer would not come on. It wasn't plugged in. Another guy bought a modem and called when he could not get on the Internet, but the problem was that he didn't even have a computer . He thought all you needed for the Internet was a fast modem. I'm sorry, but that is funny to me. I understand that if you have no exposure to the technology at all, and all you have heard are rumors, how this can happen, but please, ask the guy in the store.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
If comics are prevented from mocking ignorance and stupidity, what will be left?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You got it, right there! Tech support -is- meaningless! Teaching morons how to use crap that's going to be obsolete in 6 months. Then teaching them again. Makes you feel oh so useful. I suppose if you've got a superiority thing going on it's great, but I like to feel a little bit more productive than that. Thank god I got out of that hellish position.
There have been occasions, RARE occasions when UF has been very funny. There are also regular occasions where UF is completely unfunny. Sometimes embarassingly bad, "I can't believe I've actually gone to this site to read this drivel" bad. It would probably help matters if Illiad could draw, or at least develop a style not associable with children.
On the other hand, I've never failed to laugh at Dilbert, because they have always had a continuous flow of good ideas.
Well, I'm not a geek and I don't use linux and I think UF is funny. The problem is that you and Scott are taking your personal tastes and objectifying them as absolute truths. You don't think it's funny; that's fine. But please don't tell the rest of us what we should or should not find humorous.
No, it's not wrong at all, what bullshit, what a munchkin.
Some points I'd like to make:
Tech support is *not* just memorisation. If it was, then any spud would be able to be paid £50,000($80,000)/year to do it.
The first and foremost skill require is problem solving, that requires analytical, logical thought. In addition to a problem solving mind, you need a detailed *understanding* of the how and why of the systems you are tech support for. Basically you just need to be smart.
Sure, any spud can be a first line human dictaphone for the call logging system and it sounds like that's approximately what Mr Kurtz did during his time working "tech support for 4 years". But that's not really "tech support".
Tech support people don't laugh at the genuine calls; The call where there *is* some problem or there is some difficult technical challenge that might cost the business.
The people we laugh at are the stupid and the time wasters; The people who raise calls about their monitor being broken when all they needed to do was turn the brightness back up to normal... They go on "The plank" - a plank of wood with the names of those who have raised the dumbest calls.
These people need to be laughed at, and they need to know that we laugh at them, and their bosses need to know that we laugh at them. That way they might well think a little and try the brightness control before calling the support line and tying up a very busy, very highly paid technical support person over inane crap!
Deleted
Everybody gets made fun of every once in a while. Very few people actually mind. This isn't about political-correctness, it's about a hack who can't think of a decent story that would get publicity on it's own merits, so he decides to slag off a few popular comic strips.
It's much easier to do this than actually go to the trouble of writing a real story after all, right?
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
A co-worker thinks it's a laugh-riot and reads it every day since I turned him on to it.
I really like Pokey the Penguin, but he thinks it's too stupid and badly drawn (which is kind of the point). Pokey is ironic, and I like irony.
"Peanuts," by means of comparison, is universally understood and appreciated. It speaks to the human condition-- everyone can relate to Charlie Brown feeling like "the goat" or Snoopy daydreaming about being a World War I fighter ace.
IMHO, the Bastard Operator From Hell series is much funnier than User Friendly because you laugh a little about the luser on the phone and then laugh a lot at how mean a bastard the BOFH is. In other words, it is about the life of an abominable human being rather than the gullibility of his victims.
As a cartoon, the drawings in UF add very little to the story since the characters are mostly expressionless.
The Five Premises of UF
- Regular people are lusers (ho hum)
- Phone techs are misunderstood
- Managers are unnecessary idiots (Dilbert)
- Microsoft sucks
- Quake rules
If you don't agree with most of these premises, User Friendly doesn't have much to say to you.If we can't laugh at ourselves then we are in a lot of trouble.
I find User Friendly absolutely a stitch. I am so new to Linux that I can barely get an installation to work, but I've been working on Windows for 7 years. I can APPRECIATE the humor that is being made with regard to new users, operating systems, and the crud in the bottom of my PC's.
I never considered this to be a serious slam on newbies - after all, if there were no newbies then there would be no technical support. Then again, there really wouldn't be any need for developers as everyone would just develop whatever they needed and leave us alone. That would suck because then we would have to work on social skills, dress codes, and office politics.
Personally, I think this is getting blown all out of proportion in the feeble name of 'political correctness'. Therefore, he's an idiot.
Kurt said: Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read.
Absolutely not. 99% of tech support laughs are caused by people not reading the damn words in front of them.
How many times have you solved a colleague's tech problem by simply reading the on-screen message out aloud to them? This happens to me on a weekly basis. Some people just won't bother reading what the computer is telling them in plain English. Often all a tech support guy has to do is read the message aloud, verbatim, without changing a single word or explaining a single concept; and somehow, by the magic of human voice, the user understands.
If a genuinely illiterate person were to have trouble using a computer, this would not be funny.
But a perfectly literate intelligent person ringing up tech support because they are simply too lazy to read the on-screen instructions RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR DAMN EYES is hillarious.
Sure, us techies are guilty of not producing good manuals and we sometimes write ambigious on-screen messages. But the number and triviality of most tech support calls outweighs this a hundredfold.
See my User's Complete Guide to Computers - the first manual designed specifically not to be read.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
...On this one, I can't agree with him. Come on, good humor is an art form, and just like you wouldn't hear one artist (publicly) criticizing another's work, if he was a professional, you shouldn't hear this sort of crap.
I have worked two sales jobs, tech support, and systems administration at a small ISP that I set up from scratch, and currently, at a medium-sized ISP that hired me back (used to do tech support there). This has led me to deal with people on many levels, and it isn't really the cluelessness of the people that is funny. It is the NATURE of people that is funny, and that is what the real root of the joke is in User Friendly, or any other site that pokes fun of the tech's situation. Help Desk Funnies come to mind.
I'd also like to point out that the strip "Help Desk" linked to by Kurtz as an example of what's really funny is not above exploiting this type of humor as well. See this link for an example.
I was really disappointed to see an artist so publicly berating another, arguably more successful (Kurtz has a comic book deal, but Illiad has a book published by O'Reilly!) artist like this. Perhaps Scott should send e-mail to all the nice people in the biz who seem to disagree with him.
As someone else pointed out: If you don't find it funny, stop reading it.
Sometimes I can't read UF because its so darn funny, I can't stop laughing. I think the whole issue is about open mindedness. If I poke fun at someone about learning about computers, it's not vindictive, it's good clean fun. Utlimately, I will usually bend over backwards to help anyone I can... And I openly invite anyone to poke fun at things I find tough to do. Hell, I can't swim very good. (And I'm 24). Once, at a pool party at a friend of my wife's place, I was swimming in the pool with many other people. My wife's friend's daughter (she was probably all but 7 or 8) asked me why I was doing the doggie paddle, and I smiled and replied "Because I can't swim. I'm just faking it." ;)
FLR
Anyway, in case anyone was going form an opinion of the guy based solely on this somewhat objectionable rant, take a look at this as well.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I found this other rant he wrote also interesting:
http://www.mpog.com/pvp/rants_dd.html
Its about dungeons and dragons and in light of the current viloence debate i find it interesting.
Oh, I suppose this means the Darwin Awards aren't funny either?
Everything is funny, if you look at it from the right perspective, and new users to the funniest things.
Many users who call tech support have been using computers for years, and aren't new at all, but either made a dumbass move or don't intend to learn HOW to use a computer.
I've done Tech Support, for longer than i'd care to admit, and let me tell you, even the customers who call in get a laugh out of what's going on. It's funny. Laugh.
I think Colonel Kurtz has gone up the river without his PT Boat, with an oar inserted somewhere very personal.
... Techsupport people tend to dig strips like UF and like to make fun of the people that call is simple: It keeps them sane. Don't get me wrong tech support isn't hard by anymeans, the information your providing to people is very easy to understand for someone who is computer literate but when your getting calls with people going "Wuts a dubal clack?!" or "i clicked with my right hand and it didn't do anything differnt" etc it slowly drives you crazy after about the 50th one in a row. you've gotta laugh about it or you will go nuts... i'm so glad i'm past my techsupport days... even with the laughs i was loosing it slowly. Spending four hours on a phone with someone who can't grasp the concept of right click, left click, double click, 'press space' ("You can't write a space how can you type one idiot! [yes he said that to me]"), and 'press enter' ("I don't have one" --> "how about a key labled 'return'?" --> "nope, sorry and quit talking in those computer terms like enter and return" *shudder*) doesn't do anything good for your mental health... and its an exercise in flusteration. I don't miss it at all. The strips and jokes are good for the techs. If they started naming exact people it wouldn't be good. Shads ex-techsupport personel Now System Admin
Shadus
Many VLSI designers could mock software engineers for their 'stupidity' about how computers really work. But that wouldn't be nice either, huh?
# amo, ergo sum
Y'know, I used to have a hearty laugh at User Friendly every day. I even subscribed to the Ufies debate list. I was livin' la vida loca.
But thank the Lord, along came good old Scott Kurtz. He made me see that, in fact, User Friendly isn't funny at all! It's so obvious to me now! It's just not funny!
Let's all pause now and give thanks to Scott Kurtz for enlightening us on what is funny and what isn't.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think it's perfectly fine to make fun of clueless computer users who make no effort to actually learn something about computers. Win-tards who complain about not being able to understand computers and at the same time refuse to learn basic concepts deserve it.
:)
Imagine, if you will, that you're a teacher and a student can't read but at the same time tells you "fuck learnin' 'bout letters" -- shouldn't you make fun of him?
When a person physically puts the mouse on the monitor to move the cursor, I believe that is the moment to call them stupid.
There's a world of difference between someone laughing at something requiring professional skills (fixing a plugged toilet) and something a total moron should know how to do (calling for help on operating a standard flush toilet). If you experience the latter dose of stupidity on tech support (like my freind does daily) you deserve a good laugh.
It's humor, and also not necessarily funny to all who read it.
FWIW, I don't think PvP is funny, but I'm not about to waste my time developing a website that preaches what I don't like about PvP. I have much more important things to do with my time.
Come to think of it, this ain't one of them either, so I'm outta here.
I have done two years of phone tech support for a hard drive manufacturer. I have done 3 years of e-mail tech support for a small linux distribution. I've done tech support.
I find User Friendly hillarious.
Now, I read his article, and I can see what he is trying to say. We should be nice to clueless people. And to some extent, we should. But there are people out there... it's amazing that they can even turn the damn things on! And what is worse, they are trying to do something that is way beyond their skill level (like installing a hard drive - not hard by any means, but for those that are scared to look in the recycle bin...) which is usually the direct result of a sales person at BigComputerStore (who is equally clueless, or he still works on commission...) telling them it's easier than baking a pie.
Now, should we laugh at people who really have no clue? Why not? Why is tech support any different from plumbers talking about stupid homeowners who tried to do something like replace a floater ball in their toilet and destroyed the entire mechanisim? You can't tell me that plumbers don't talk about that kind of thing. They just don't happen to have large numbers or comic strips. It still happens when they eat lunch together.
The reason we enjoy jokes reagarding tech support, is that as a whole, we techies & geeks are fairly computer literate, know about much of this stuff, and are good at getting around the web. Which means it's subject matter that we understand, and as many have noticed in various parts of the Internet, many of our `cliques` are at some times zealtous in their knoledge and beliefs. (Pick a flame war, any flame war...)
So what happens when we have a comic strip that we (Don't know anyone [even my wife!] who doesn't enjoy User Friendly) all find funny, timely, and uses it's comedic license very well with current events - someone is bound to hate it. Apparently there is now one person who hates User Friendly. First one I ever heard of. (And I don't pretend to know Scott.) Now, this person is also a techie, and has a web site. Bingo! That's what the net is all about.
Another thing about the Internet that goes with stating your opinion - others will have the same opinion as you. Multitudes more will not. And they are the ones to speak up. Welcome to the Internet Scott. I hope you don't have too much E-mail to read.
One other quick thing I would like to leave you with. Scott says he thinks comic strips more like Help Desk are funny because they don't poke fun at the customers calling. Well, he should read just a few more strips past his own example: http://www.ubersoft.net/helpdesk/015.html
To me, it seems that this strip is poking fun at the customer for being stupid. Didn't Scott say that was bad? Now, there is a word that comes to mind, but I'll just let it lie.
Try: `/usr/games/fortune -s`
..not just people who has trouble with computers. UF is a strip by techies for techies, and therefor has lots of techie-humor, which at some point relegates into mocking stupid people, like every other kind of humour. There are sitcoms making fun of everything from nerds to christians. And not being able to tolerate them, is not being able to laugh at yourself. You are in other words taking yourself too seriously. People who try to cram 5 1/4" disks into 3.5" slots, by folding them, have to realize that someone finds this behaviour funny. Just as I have to realize that some people think I'm funny by acting really dorky when it comes to women (just like AJ). Besides, lots of the UF-strips makes fun of ourselves (techies). We laugh about that as well.
I work at a computer lab in a library, an I for sure find it a little piece of hell when certain id10t users cross my way. A healthy number of users download the latest of what they use for their chat stuff even though it's against campus policy to do so. Another chunk of these (lusers) just save their stuff to the computers (not to disk), not paying attention to the "Save As" dialog with the file location. Most of these folks just rip the disk out of the computer (all running Windoze 95 - ECCH!) when the applications (M$ Office stuff, etc.) are still reading the disk, giving me the "Oh my God, is that a blue-screen!?" fit (and possible disk errors). This kind of stuff doesn't happen much to the older computer lab across the campus, but it happens with the "newer" library computer lab where I worked. Why is my workplace the "roach motel" for the ignorant masses?
Someday, this kind of ignorance and stupidity will bite these users in the ass. We'll be there to see this happening.
--
Having worked in tech support at the beginning of my illustrious career, as many here have, I sometimes shook my head at how people that stupid could afford a computer. I mean "Oh, it has to be plugged in?" If I had a dollar for every time I heard that one... I would not be working now.
If you have never worked TS, then perhaps you don't see how any of those could be true, but I have personally seen most of them, and MUCH worse.
And Before you start, about just about everything else in the world, I feel like an idiot, and the first thing I say when I ask for help on something is.. This is going to sound stupid
Get off the PC bandwagon, its dead.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
Jeez. This guy is bitching about UF being offensive? ;)
He's obviously never seen Space Moose...
--Kevin
=-=-=-=-=-=
"HELLO SMALL CHILD! WHO IS BACK! I HAVE THE RENEGADE MASTER WITH ME!"
Wow, he's right. *Please* forgive me!
I'll never tell another blonde joke, lawyer joke or, better yet, ANY joke ever again! Someone might not think it is funny and feel sorry for those who the joke was about!
We should all live in a society where we are *told* what is funny and what isn't. That way, we wouldn't have people like Scott Kurtz telling us that things *we* may think are funny, really aren't!
Yeah, right.
Perlguy
P.S.:
Q) How many Scott Kutrz' does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A) None, because he has no sense of humor!
-- Windows security? Sure, which ONE would you like? -me
It takes all kinds. I find some of the humor to be good, because it reminds me of what some of these (I'm in charge) people have forced upon others to happen and then blame the secretary for the problem.
... (I like to laugh, at even myself of course, after I get over my screw-up and head-shaking).
Also, sometimes hard-headed techs that don't listen to the customer's problem description can be very funny (and time consuming) in their troubleshooting and attempts at problem resolution.
I think we all have some thing to share from experience from every perspective that is "vary" funny to some or all; So, lets keep the comics and humor and request coverage of management/bosses, techs, and customers/folks screw-ups, mistakes, stupidity,
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
He says that learning how to do tech support is mostly all memorization. Oh I see. It wouldn't require any kind of problem solving skills or anything... or the ability to adapt to any situation that isn't in your little book of solutions.
The comparisson to the teacher making fun of the student is wrong as well. The tech is paid to listen to the user tell him (he/she) is the idiot. They sit through a call where every other minute a death threat is pouring out. Sometimes the people call in and just defy what you consider common sense. At that point to relieve some stress why not joke about them with your fellow friends. And why not wake up and read a cartoon as funny as userfriendly each morning. Isn't it our right to decide? Techs are not teaching the user like a teacher teaches a child. We are telling someone who doesn't really want to learn how to get out of a problem they created only to have them call back in a week with the same problem not having learned a thing from their mistakes.
*sigh*
If I were a manager, I don't think I'd find Dilbert's portrail of the PHB to be funny at all. The pressures of management and the lack of support for middle managers are breath takingly horrendous. Your underlings hate you. Your boss hates you. It can be a really soul crushing experience.
Which is why it makes for GREAT comedy. When people fail to laugh at thier own situation, life is a long series of miseries. For people learning computers (and we were ALL here at one time), there is a lot of humor in one's first attempts to chain the bit beast. "Where's the 'any' key?"
"Should I hit the 'Ok' button?"
Do teachers make fun of students? Well, not to the student's face, but I've had the confidence of my teachers. You want to talk about vicious? Are you looking for Komedy?
The real issue is that the line between humor and cruelty is periliously thin. I feel that we are all brave enough to explore humor even though we may become casualities ourselves.
D'oh!
All the dedicated help-desk people out there who read user friendly everyday, have the one strip that has "evolution of man" with telco exec at the bottom, helpdesk / tech support almost at the top, and sysadmin at the top (rootus rootus), that love to laugh at how stupid their callers are... don't ever realize that they're not that much smarter than the people who call them. All they have is 2 weeks of training (if that much), arrogance and a deluded self-opinion. (Face it: when you can be replaced off the street by someone who's never operated a computer before, you can't be THAT special)
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
The first thing I'd like to point out is that tech support is NOT a learning line. Yes, when you call up the "Ass" on the other end of reality, you are expected to have a basic grasp of mecanical operations. This includes but is not limited to;
Now, is this really too much to ask for? No. I think not. If I were to invoke the tired but often accurate Cars to Computers analogy, does one buy a Pickup Truck, or even a Tractor Trailer, and IMMEDIATELY take it out on the highway? Once again, no of course not. As a matter of fact, such a suggestion would be considered extremely dangerous. So dangerous in fact, that our own government has enacted laws requiring testing and licensing before you can even pull out of your driveway.
"Yes, but a computer can't kill you the way a ten ton mass of metal can!" Oh really? Reminds me of the time a client of the Company I teched for told me of the disquieting messages he had been recieving. These messages were aparently generated by the US Secret Service in response to a series of death threats they had been recieving from his account. What he failed to mention was that he had been writing a script based on the assasination of JFK, and then Saving the files into his AOL mailbox under the address of president@whitehouse.gov!! (Yes, this did really happen)
"But that was just a fluke! You can't judge an entire group based on one experience!"
And yer absolutely right. I never judge anyone based on ANY one experience. Not even two or three experiences. Yet when story after horrible story begins to pile up, (As any tech will tell you they do.) it becomes increasingly hard to assume treat those people and one's job with respect. This is why things like UserFriendly and alt.tech-support.recovery exist. They are the pressure valves of a very stressful enviroment. And if you don't find them funny, then perhaps it's because you don't NEED that kind of humor in your life. Gosh, had I known that a strip such as UF existed I probably would still be working tech support to this day.
Now I don't speak for every tech out there. Naturally there are some who find UF and AS the most asinine comics on the planet, and they are more than welcome to their opinion. Furthermore, there are points where I'm none too pleased with these comics myself. (Did sluggy seem to be choking on the Cannibals Anonymous story, or was that just me?) But anything that involves customer support on a technical level always seems to get a chuckle or at least a good-natured groan out of me. Perhaps I am just enjoying the sensation of a pain shared by others.For those of you who don't appreciate the humor,
Don't read the comic.
===
===
This is my sig. There are others like it, but this is mine.
...and why should I give a damn what the whiner thinks?
OK - first of all UF and AN ARE funny as hell. I don't care what this yutz says. We all have our "special" users who we would love to club over the head, take away thier machine and remand them to doing work on a etch-a-sketch, with a poloriod camera to print with.
/. readers, but I hate phone droning, just slightly more than I hate desktop support.
Sorry buddy boy - I don't know what you're talking about but it takes a bit more than memorization to make it in the IT industry. Despite what you said, you DO have to have intelligence if you ever want to make it past phone drone level. I don't know about the rest of the
May this guy should come out of his house and be in the real world again. Yutz.
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
i do tech support for a major cable isp for your 'home' 99.999999999999999999999999% of our callers are morons. complete morons. theres no way around it, theyre just idiots. they dont listen, dont know what theyre doing, and very rarely actually want help. all they want is someone to vent on. im not trying to be a troll here, im just telling it like it is. most of them are pissed off drunken wifebeating rednecks who are upset because they cant download porn. i say that anyone who makes fun of these people is a godsend, and keeps us techsupporters sane by forcing us to laugh at our own situations. point: it does way more good than harm. some people just cant take a joke
*This* got a score: 2?
;)
He/she/it has a relatively good point, just not very eloquent at all...
I'd give him/her/it a score: 1 flamebait personally...
But of course this is at the nth level where no one bothers to look...
(Notice how I didn't use gender specific words -- I wouldn't want to offend someone!
--Kevin
=-=-=-=-=-=
"HELLO SMALL CHILD! WHO IS BACK! I HAVE THE RENEGADE MASTER WITH ME!"
There's a big diference when you're plain stupid and when you are in a "lack of knowledge" situation. I can't pilot a space shuttle, but I know I don't want to press something called "selfdestruction", "explosive escape doors" or "fuel dump valvle". People do stupid things and call tech support with stupid questions. Techies ALSO do stupid things. I know a team of two, they had a task: get a single-HD PC and install a slave HD. The cable was single-drive only. They disconected it from the motherboard, and conected each end of the cable to a drive. The first proof of intelligence is when one can laugh at himself. I did a lot of stupid things, and even screamed at a poor lady at the phone when she asked me politely to shut down my crashed DTV decoder, and turn it on again. "Listen, young lady! I work with computers for 20 years. I KNOW it's a program glitch, and I NEED to speak to a tech support engineer, a simple shutdown will NOT solve anything..." Of course I forgot a shutdown is a cure for 99% of everything in computer problems, and after I did it (just to make her shutup and see how smart I was) everything worked fine... EVERY newbie I talked to have a lot of stories, they love to tell how stupid they were, the silly things they did. It's a learning, life is a learning. You can't shield people from doing stupid things, so let's at least laugh about it.
[]'s Carlos Cardoso - Becoming a brazilian ProBlogger, typo by typo
I have been in 'tech support' for a few years... and User Friendly was funny to me when I only know of winblowz. Now that i can actually use linux in a productive manner and not crash with a BSOD. User Friendly is even funnier. Major pain to the lusers B.O.F.H. FOREVER
So nobody should joke about the amusing antics of small children since they're only learning about life and can't be expected to do any better yet.
Yeah, right.
Just as kids grow up and later find such jokes amusing, themselves, those new computer users who are serious about learning will eventually reach a stage of technical competence where they can enjoy the humor of the "dumb user" stories.
Note that the audience that the computer humor is directed at is not the new user, as Kurtz implies, but rather the seasoned user, who is unlikely to be hurt by it. So to assert that such humor is cruel would be silly.
Finally, if you are going to eliminate any jokes that someone might possibly find offensive, there won't be any humor left when you're done. As long as you're not going out of your way to offend people, I say #$^@ 'em if they can't take a joke.
Besides, User Friendly is very funny.
--- Brian
All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
So maybe with a few more years' exposure to the horrible people you get out there on the 'Net (ick), he'll have mastered grammar as well as being able to answer the phone.
Otherwise, what an anal-retentive arsehole...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Here's the letter I sent to 'samwise'. And by the way, I'm sure the real Samwise had a good laugh about his master Frodo's stupidity when he got back to the Loyal Minions Union (Shire Local #2) after LoTR... oh, and I don't find UF that funny most days. About the only good UF strips *are* the tech support call ones...
"when I write PvP I try to remember one important fact: jokes about
computer games aren't funny. However, jokes about the people that play
computer games are"
Isn't that cruel? Isn't that like a schoolteacher making fun of kids?
No?
No. Users who call tech support lines aren't kids. They're adults.
They've just spent a thousand dollars or more on the most expensive
manufactured device they own after their car, and they don't think they
should have to learn anything about it.
You don't get in your car and drive it without spending weeks learning
how to drive, how to use traffic lights and so on. You don't expect to
be able to fly an hot air balloon or sail a racing catamaran or even
ride a horse without training.
But you expect to be able to use the most complicated machines ever
unleashed on an unsuspecting user... one that's had less time spent on
making it easy and safe to use than a car, or a hot air balloon, or a
sailboat... without ever learning anything about it.
This isn't a teacher making fun of kids. This is a garage mechanic
making fun of the rich yokel who buys a new car every week when a part
breaks or it runs out of gas, the old lady who takes a nap when driving
because her horse always knew the way home, and who refuses to listen
when you tell them that the reason they're finding cards so frustrating
is because they're doing something wrong.
As you say, you only need a couple of weeks of training to get up to
speed on this stuff, but you *do* need it. There are people out there
who not only haven't had any training, but they refuse to even remember
their password from one call to the next.
This isn't ignorance, it's not naivete, it's deliberate and wilful
refusal to face reality. And I think laughing at it is a much better
response than running screaming through a Best Buy with a machete
hacking down customers before they have a chance to join the ranks of
idiot callers.
I think someone's just a little bit hypersensitive here...
User Friendly and other tech comic strips are not things that "normal" people would read but geeks and others that realy know the computer industry would. Normal people don't find strips like User Friendly funny as they don't catch the jokes that a geek/nerd/computer expert would. I've been working with computers for almost 8 years being a geek and I find nothing wrong with laughing at ppl that don't know anything as they aren't likely to A. ready it, B. but 2 and 2 together.
UF is funny. It allows people to vent offline, instead of online. If he thinks it's not funny, he's been out of tech support too long to remember. The fact that so many enjoy it is the proof that someone finds it funny. Yes, I do find it funny that you can't replace a pipe, or cut the brake lines off because you couldn't get them loose, or won't pay to have me install your new hdd, but call in and expect me to walk you through it over the phone.
But, it does appear that his main point is, I'm funny and enlightened, and you're not unless I say so. So read my comic, and hit my page.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
Technical people have been ridiculed for being
nerds that nobody wants to be close to; it's
nice to see a strip or two that is the opposite -
to balance things out.
Anyone who can't laugh when they make a mistake
deserves to be ridiculed, anyway... I know I've
made plenty of dumb ones too but I can laugh about
it.
Mark
Thats the entire magazine. Making fun of people. Why? Its funny. I send the UserFriendly links to people who barely understand how to check there mail and click on the darn things and they tell me they spent hours reading it and they thought it was funny even tho they missed a lot of the humor. That says something there. I dunno what.. back to work.
JA
Wrong: *no* topic is out of bounds for a properly done satire, and should never be.
Yes, there are a lot of techs like that. I personally try to learn things, find ways around problems other than the obvious, and work to make sure that if I have to support something, I can support it damn near every which way I can. And then, when the weird question comes, I know the answer. I also, when working for an ISP, used to mail things to the other techs so they would have that information too. Because, dammit, we were supposedly a 'team' and working together.
A large number of the problems tend to come from the new people on the phones. I've seen a lot of companies just slaughter their training budgets, then toss people who don't know better on the phones to sink or swim. (They usually sink.) I had the luck to have two good jobs in support early on which gave me good solid training that I could use to get a new job.
Clueless Support tends to be the result of either support people who don't want to learn, or of people above them who don't want them to learn enough to get a better job elsewhere. It just makes people evil and bitter.
And then we become sysadmins.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Perosnally I think it looks like he's pulling a "blow out your candle to make mine glow brighter" move. He may not. For all we know, he _is_ one of those clueless people on tech support (or, at least, for all _i_ know). Maybe he has called in a problem like something they feature in UF or the other comic (not familliar with it) and wants to make his sore ego bigger by lambasting comics that do that sort of thing, in essence, make fun of him. There's a reason UF has a book and he doesn't (for all I saw on the site at least). UF is great, the other looks like one I'm gonna start reading, Kurtz's comic looks like one I'll veer away from (today's witty installment had a amorphous blob who had been poked in the eye with a pencil while playing Nintendo and couldn't play so it called in a replacement to play for it. The replacement was a bigger amorphous blob. hahahaha NO. Sorry for this little sub-rant). Anyhow, don't worry about what other people are doing, do your own thing and stop bitching about everyone else or many more people will bitch about you. Seeing as that last statement would make me a hipocrit I think I'll stop now.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
I think Mr. Kurtz is being way too uptight. User friendly is hilarious. I'm an NT tech support person , and I'm pretty new to Linux and the other *nixes. Yet I think it is very funny. If you can't laugh at yourself, the world is a boring place.
I choose to laugh.
I know this because my mom is a teacher and well I have heard a lot of her jokes about her kids. Well, she don't tell her kids about or laughs at them while they can see but the fact is teachers do laugh at the kids they are teaching.
Click Here. It's about a web admin who can't figure out how not to make broken links.
I understand the sentiment, and if you can keep it up, more power to you. I believe in respect for every person, no matter how inept. People can't always be good at everything, and people can be at their best every day of the week.
However the users don't always have that attitude.
Users treat tech support people like an inanimate component of the computer system -- actually worse because most users know better than to damage a valuable piece of hardware; however they think nothing of repeatedly abusing a valuable person who is trying to help them. In the end it is very hard to keep a person who is facing dailiy emotional abuse productive.
When I got my first job as an MIS director, I reoriented our budget from development to training and support. I hired the best people I could find for tech support, with real skills, both technical and personal. And you know what? They burned out.
Finally I hired a woman to run my training and support who, while nice enough personally, was a total bitch-on-wheels when it came to people who weren't learning what they were supposed to. I got complaints, but as far as I was concerned the people who were complaining had used up their credit (the people who got along with the new trainer were the people who got along with the old ones -- the complainers were just getting a taste of their own medicine). When I hired people who were unfailingly nice these users emotionally abused them and didn't take advantage of all that training they said they wanted. After I hired a strong woman they may have fought with her, but they learned the things their supervisors said they needed to know and they got better at their jobs.
Now that I am older and, hopefully, wiser, I realize that I probably should have made it my job to come down extra hard on abusive users. Back the when I was young and idealistic, I thought that people should be trusted to come to a reasonable accomodation on their own. I didn't realize back then that when sweet reason fails, you have to kick the shit out of someone -- and that's the boss's job.
Unfortunately, people doing tech support at a place like an ISP don't have this option, and the users know it.
We laugh, so we don't cry. And, some of the things that the more naive users do are funny! Like the time one of my buddies diagnosed a balky mini by figuring out that it was plugged into a dimmer switch that was turned up half way. Respect is how you handle the customer. Finding what the customer says or does to be funny is not fundamentally disrespectful, so long as you handle their problems professionally.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I find tech stories fun, it is not the users that I laugh out. It is the incident that I laugh at. In some rare cases, I laugh at the users when they are really dumb, but that is quite rare. I know a guy who printed a.out to get output of his program. It was pretty funny, the event. I laughed but proceeded to help him, I didn't belittle him. How about another guy who wacked /dev/ cuz he was out of space and /dev/ with all those files must be taking up all the space? I laughed at the incident again, but proceeded to help him. I think the important thing here is not if we laugh or not, it is what we do to help the "clueless." If we laugh and ignore them, then that is bad. But as far as we teach them, that is good. ...and if we laugh, then we teach them and they never learn, it stops becoming funny, it becomes annoying.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
One of the great things about being human is recognizing our shortcomings and learning to laugh at them. Let's not take ourselves to seriously. The comics help us relate to these situations we have all been in which at the time are extremly frustrating and not funny. Learning to lighten up is always good and besides we will always laugh at other peoples shortcomings your own take at least ten minuets before they are funny.
He ruins an otherwise good point about how UF et al are unfunny by trying to stick an ethical mandate on it. "just plain wrong"? Please. It is not a matter of right and wrong. It is a matter of Iliad often making unintelligently conceived jokes. The difference between the two frames posted, one from UF and one from Help Desk, is that the Help Desk one is simply a smarter joke. It has insight. The UF joke is just stating the obvious, which isn't very funny. But there is nothing unethical about it.
There's a big difference between a comic strip and laughing at a person. If someone in tech support laughs at a new user that's pretty shameful. But a comic strip? Come on!!! If that's the case then we should have burnt Comedy Central to the ground because I'm more than sure that South Park has offended everyone on the planet in some way or another. The guy is just trying to get publicity for his strip. What, did he somehow become the oracle of comic strips?? Uh-huh.
After working for many years in tech support, I have come to the conclusion that their are two different types of people. Those who are ignorant (don't know, but can learn) and those who are dumb (don't know and will not learn). It's the dumb ones we find so humorous. User Friendly pokes fun at the personalities that surround the "support" group and the "repeat" customers. Prime example, user spends 3 minutes looking on his own physical desktop (not the one on his monitor) for the "My Computer" icon - only to respond "I can't find it".....
As for User Friendly, I do read the strip. I will say that I don't find it the most humorous comic, but once in a while my geek side will get a chuckle. <flamebait=on>I think User Friendly is simply a comic strip written by someone who loves Bloom County / Outland and wanted to apply it to computers somehow, but unfortunately isn't as funny as Berke Breathed.<flamebait=off>. Not saying I could do better, but that is the face value which I give it.
My two cents; no refunds.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Although I don't agree with what Scott said, i think he was misrepresented in the above writeup. He didn't say the comics weren't funny. He just said the ones about the lusers weren't funny. To him. He didn't say anything really drastic like "We should boycott UF." He didn't say "My comic is better." I think all he was trying to say was "We should be nice to even stupid people." Which isn't a horrible idea. But, like many others have posted, most of the (l)users aren't stupid, they just aren't using common sense, or aren't reading the instruction manuals before calling tech support. And that's really what's funny.
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ib
As tech people we should never make fun of someone we are trying to help. PERIOD.
As a cartoonist anyone should be free game. From god to the lowest form of life on earth(bill gates). If a cartoonist wants to make fun of newbies let him. Don't you think that an exteacher writing a comic strip might make fun of students?
fuck pc(big brother wants you to conform) I'll say what I want to say.
BTW for those of you with no taste those comic strips are funny.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Hi Scott, you dont know me but I have read your rant and while I agree with the freedom of speech I feel some counter points must be made. You state Techsupport jokes are cruel. I agree, but Scott TechSupport is cruel. You may live in Theory, where everything works, but techsupport only work with the broken, the abused and the mistreated. You use a teacher never joking about a student analogy. But my RL world experience withe a teacher flatmate taught me, teachers do joke about their students, their students family and their coworkers. As do most professions. humour needs a common ground, and TechSupport ppl have their profession in common. Your 4 years of job experience based on 2-3 weeks of basic memorisation, must have been in a very narrow field, as I spent just 20 months over a dozen overlapping phonelines and I was still learning something new everyday. You use the phrase "Almost every caller I ever helped was an intelligent person" and I agree, but it only takes one idiot call a day to maintain a daily cartoon, and one genius call to keep the support person motivated. And while I agree that mocking people asking for help is a stupid thing. I wonder what your viewpoint is about people who threaten, demand, whine, etc? You are welcome to put any veiwpoint you like into your cartoons, that is your right and that is the right shared but the people you dont like. I coined the phrase ages ago called "Information Inflation" i.e that everybodies level of knowledge increases over time, and people who dont learn, and just stay mentally still, will be left behind. However while the general public will someday reach the level of knowledge that support staff currently have right now. I am willing to bet money that support staff will be at a even higher level in the future than they are now. --HAND
To a certain degree he has a point (barely) but, like other rants I've seen about User Friendly being all about Open Source jokes, they either haven't read most of it or hasn't recalled anything except [pet peeve of the day]. Any comic that can get away with the punchline "Men are from Mac, women are from VMS" gets my vote.
Claiming UF doesn't poke fun at itself is a bit disingenuous. Stef's Y2K question, from Evil Geniuses for Dummies, is a beautiful example.
Basically, IMHO, it comes down to the person having a pet peeve, finding stuff to support it, and missing, oh, say, 50% of the other stuff. No real shock there.
There's a big difference between the two: a tech support person is trying to help an ADULT who is presumably literate. Anyways, after four years you should be able to build a box from scratch. If you were working for me and couldn't build a box from scratch after four weeks I'd fire your ass.
...is that he's never heard a good joke about a kid learning to read.
I've spent the last few months trying to teach my daughter this and it's hysterical!
Last time I checked, UF found humor in ALL the characters in the strip. The web master, the marketing guy, the techies...
I think he busts on computer users the least.
Get a grip! A parody on techies at work is funny to many of us who live it every day.
Have you ever picked up a BlahBlah for Dummies book? Not only are they informative for the newbie trying to learn, there is a comic for each chapter that portrays the typical computer user as a total loser.
They sell millions of copies and I bet no one has ever complained about the comics.
Get Real.
I might be ignorant, but I've never even heard of PvP. So the ranting might just be a clever plot to get hits to his site (using the /. effect).
I read some of his other stuff... his 13 things people with e-mail should know is making fun of people who don't know better. From that page...Number 9
9. If you still absolutely MUST forward that 10th-generation message from a friend, at least have the decency to trim the eight miles of headers showing everyone else who's received it over the last 6 months. It sure wouldn't hurt to get rid of all the that begin each line. For the love of God, LEARN HOW TO COPY AND PASTE!!!!!
and number 6...
6. There is no "Good Times" virus. In fact, you should never, ever, ever, forward any email containing any virus warning unless you first confirm it at an actual site of an actual company that actually deals with viruses. Try: www.norton.com. And even then, don't forward it. We don't care! And you cannot get a virus from opening an email. you have to download...ya know, like, a FILE!
Not only is he incorrect about not being able to get a virus via e-mail (as users of Win95/8/nt and outlook have found out lately). But he (in number 9) doesn't explain how to copy and paste...or what headers are...he just makes fun of people who don't get rid of them by calling them morons.
What a whining stump.
Obligatory story: I've worked my share of tech support in the past. In this particular case, I was working tech support for a school administrative system. I got a call from a school technology coordinator. "My middle school can't get their data to me via modem", so I said "okay, have them make a floppy". Shortly thereafter, I got a call from a school counsellor. "My disk drive is spitting out my hard drive," she said. So I spent five minutes verifying that a) she was trying to make a disk at the middle school to give to the high school with her graduating students for next year, because her school's modem was on the fritz and the central office told her to make a disk instead, b) she was talking about a 3 1/2" floppy disk, and c) her computer actually had a 3 1/2" disk drive (don't laugh, many of the school administrative computers dated back to the early 90's and had Xenix on them, and not all of them had 3 1/2" drives). Finally, I verified that d) she was not putting the disk into the tape slot. I said "There's two slots on your computer, one for the disk and one for the tape. The one for the tape is the big one, the one for the disk is the little one. Are you sure you're putting the disk into the right slot?" She said "Of course I am! I'm not stupid, y'know!".
So I sat there holding a 3 1/2" disk in my hands (I'm 100 miles away from the lady in a call center, of course), trying to figure out what she was doing wrong.
"There's a little wheely-looking thing on the disk. Are you putting it in with that facing DOWN?"
"Of course!" she replied.
I stared at the disk a bit more, turned it backwards, and pushed it into my floppy drive. Voila, it popped back out!
"There's a little slidey thing on one end. Do you see that little slidey thing?"
"Yes."
"Are you putting that end in FIRST?"
A slight pause. "Oh! Nobody ever TOLD me that that end goes in first!". A little more pause. "Don't tell anybody about this, okay?".
Of course I told the technology coordinator, when she called me back and asked what the counsellor's problem had been! And of course the technology coordinator repeated the story at the next user group meeting. And thus I got my revenge for putting up with stupidity for forty-five long excrutiating minutes.
That's right. Stupidity.
When I encountered my first 3 1/2" drive, I didn't know which way it went in either. I tried it sideways. Didn't work. I tried it upside down. Didn't work. I tried it backwards. Didn't work. FINALLY I tried it the way that DID work. No problemo, I was ignorant. I wasn't embarrassed or anything. I learned.
But the point is that I was *NOT* stupid. And the lady with the backwards 3 1/2" disk was, for not trying some other way to put the disk in when her first way didn't work.
I always treated people with respect if they made calls that occurred because of ignorance. I was always supportive of intelligent people who called me with questions that made them feel stupid, saying that's okay, you'll get the hang of this, etc. Sometimes they did some pretty stupid-sounding things, but I'd look at the documentation (typical sucky documentation), shake my head, and note that I'd make the same mistake myself if I didn't know about computers and was trying to go by the documentation.
But occasionally I got someone online who was a real candidate for the Darwin Awards (i.e., the world would be better off if they were removed from the gene pool). Isn't it better to make fun of them instead of going postal and seeking them out with an assault rifle and forcing the Darwin Award For Person Who Should Not Breed upon them?
And finally: I nominate for the Darwin Awards *ANYBODY* who says that working tech support is something that can be done with little training and no prior knowledge. Yeah, you can do tech support that way if you think that customer service is what a stallion does to a mare. But such a "tech support" person would a) not had a clue, and b) never been able to diagnose the problem through that big long decision tree that I went through to figure out what she was doing wrong. The idea that "anybody can do tech support" is why the only answer you ever get when you call Microsoft tech support is "reformat your drive and re-install Windows".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Quite simply, UF is poorly drawn and the jokes are not funny. And that's not even getting into the rant about supporting clueless newbies. Face it, we're all clueless newbies about some thing or other at some time. (I was 20 months ago when I tried Linux for the first time.)
Making fun of the newbies makes us computer geeks look bad. They're having a hard enough time as it is. For most computer users, don't expect them to become geniuses - they really only want to know enough to get their jobs done.
anyways, I've lived the Tech Support life, and I currently work as tech support at an ISP (but to my defence, just till I graduate college). I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of tech support. And, except for the lack of fuzzy balls of fluff with feet, UserFriendly is scary in its acuracy of tech support, and geek culture in general.
my advice... Lighten Up People!. Its a comic strip, a joke! Maybe you don't get it, maybe you do, but it doesn't matter either way. I personally don't like Blondie, but I don't flame the strip. I just turn the page and get on with my life.
Is anyone niave enough to actually think it makes matters worse to have "user-bashing" comicc around? Personally, I think it gives us tech's a sense that we're not alone, the tech down the street is also banging his head against the wall, trying not to blow-up at someone saying "well, where is the any key?"
I think the real problem is not the 'in-tolerance' of tech support, its the intolerance of users who don't get how tough tech support is (you try it someday), and the moronic "I wanna say something that will stir up contorversy because no one wants to play with me" authors like this guy.
My 2 Cents... Dave
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
As far as it putting down people who don't know what they're doing on a computer - I'm sure the content of these comics were not meant as an insult.
Once I had a call from a young man (he sounded about 15) who had decided to "straighten out" his hard drive, and his idea of organizing was to put like files in the same directory... when he called me, windows wouldn't boot because he had placed EVERY .ini file on the system in a special directory, not anticipating the consequences. I'm sorry, but this was FUNNY.. and the guy who did it was laughing just as much as I was. (I also give him bonus points for already knowing DOS commands, wherever he may be now) And I doubt he'd be offended if this story made it to a comic strip.
Another example.. my mom got a computer a few years ago, and got her first internet account. She spent a week trying to set it up, another two weeks talking with various techs, all the way up to the system administrator at her ISP and still couldn't get online. Seemed like a pretty major problem for sure! I went to her house, dialed up, and connected right away. She looked at me with disbelief and asked how the F#&%! I did it. So I disconnected, redialed, and very slowly logged in. Next she screamed "I DIDN'T KNOW YOU HAD TO HIT ENTER AFTER THE PASSWORD!!!" and we both busted up laughing. I dare you to tell me that's not funny.
Saying that someone is "stupid" or an "idiot" if they're clueless with computers is, however, wrong. No matter how frustrated I get with a user, I try to remember this: Everyone has their own skill set and interests, which operating a computer may not be part of. Additionally, there are many people who call tech support who do not have listening, following directions, spelling, mastery of any particular language, or the ability to admit they are wrong in their skill sets either.
Enough of this... I'm off to read userfriendly then help out a few users.
~Astraea
Here = location. Hear = the act of listening. Sorry to be pedantic. And yes, I quite agree with you. Willingness to learn and a good attitude go a long, long way. Whereas, ignorance combined with arrogance, will lead to no end of grief.
Yes people make mistakes, and it probably isn't right that others derive humor from it, but everyone has laughed at least once when someone's trippped over their own feet too. It's not like the comic strips take real people's names and post them on the internet for the entire world to laugh at the mistakes of a single person. Comedy works by taking a situation and adding a different outcome than expected. In the case of computers, the unexpected outcome may make sense to others, but to those who know what should be done it is unexpected and humorous. There is also the fact that if people are offended, or not amused by Tech Comic Strips, THEY DON'T HAVE TO READ THEM. Some people just like to complain and rant(and I would not be offended if someone found this to be a rant).
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
Who writes the reference cards and keeps them up-to-date? Do you even have reference cards?
Why isn't the software easy to use?
Why aren't the training sessions effective? Why aren't there training sessions?
The bottom line is this: Rather than add more people to the help desk (who only learn how to insult their clientele), why not hire some better teachers and technical writers?
I wonder what inspired Mr. Kurtz to write this particular rant, especially considering Mr. Pease gave one of his Smart Moves Awards to PvP last October..(how nice to turn around three months later and criticize Absurd Notions, eh?) Also, as an Absurd Notions fan, I know that tech support jokes are just one part of the strip, there's also the dramatized role-playing sessions in which the cast tests out various role-playing games (some of which are real stinkburgers, could that be construed as "offensive" as well?) and strips that focus on either one, a few, or all of the cast's neurosises and personalities.
Either Mr. Kurtz chose to ignore these aspects or he's never really read the strip, just focusing on one particular panel (I wonder if he got permission from Illiad and Mr. Pease to use those panels..) to try to make his `point'. Next thing you know, he'll be attacking Ozy and Millie for `offending' trendy people, jocks, bullies and various political figures. Kurtz, if you want to constantly badger people like this, become a political cartoonist or get off your high horse and make a good comic strip.
Finally, I'd like to say I'm very glad with the open minds shown by most of the posters on this thread, it's good to see that we're respecting each other's opinions and not criticizing someone just for liking or disliking a particular strip or strips; it makes for much more interesting conversation.
Peace!
"Fundamentalist forces are undermining the integrity of liberal and democratic political structures."
Everyone who calls TS is not necessarily dumb. Some people have a legitimate problem with the hardware/software/whatever, have read the manual, have taken a stab at the problem on their own, and explain the problem thoroughly when they call up.
Unfortunately, they're a shrinking minority.
As a background, I did tech support for four years at a university, and one at a bank. Now, thankfully, I'm a network admin, so most of the clueless questions pass through the Level 1 and 2 filters first, and are intercepted. I truly don't mind answering the legitimate questions of people who actually might learn something. My motto is this: Clueless is fine, ignorant is fine, lazy is not fine. I've answered the whole spectrum of computer questions over my stint in tech support. When my university first got dial-up PPP access in '94, the lazy people came out of the woodwork. Some sample quotes:
Bottom line: If you own a computer, you should know something about how it works. If not that, you should be able to follow spoken directions, retain information for an extended period, and not be argumentative.
I also understand user frustration at clueless techs, especially those of us who call up with problems that aren't on their list of questions. Trying to explain advanced networking concepts to a level one tech is not easy. Unfortunately for all the users, it's just going to get worse. Level one techs have it really rough...sweatshop call-center environments, low pay, and very little training or opportunity to advance to the next level. The turnover (and burnout!) is so high that companies can't really invest in an employee. Level one graduates to level two and beyond entirely on their own!
Having said all that, I think that strips like User Friendly and its ilk are a necessary release for techs. They make fun of some of the silly things that users do. For example, at the company I work for now, there's a senior executive who I seriously thought was illiterate. Whenever I called him, and asked him to do something with his e-mail client (he kept corrupting the mailbox on our server...) his secretary would take over reading screens for him. When I finally met her, she told me, "Oh, don't mind him...he just doesn't use the e-mail client." "OK, so how does he get mail?" "I print it out and read it to him." I think that's definite User Friendly material!
If you want another excellent perspective on how techs live and work, hop on over to the newsgroups alt.tech-support.recovery and alt.sysadmin.recovery. Just don't post there! :-)
Whassamatter? Scott break his cup holder?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Are you sure you didn't get that backwards? Wrong: "User Friendly is generally not funny" (this is a matter of opinion: more accurately one could say "in my opinion, User Friendly is generally not funny" if that were one's opinion). Right: "No topic is out of bounds for a properly done satire, and should never be." If we can't satirize something because someone will object, we might as well start giving up our rights one by one (oh, wait, that's already happening, isn't it?). :-(
UF not-funny-character-one, speaking to UF not-funny-character-two:Hey, what are you doing??
UF not-funny-character-two, in reply:Try to get first post on "Slashdot".
THIS ISN'T FUNNY, AS IN "NOT FUNNY".
This article is crap.
Stupidity should _NOT_ be encouraged. It should not be deemed acceptable when some idiot fails to type his username correctly 8 times in a row and then calls back in to tech support the next day with the same problem. This idiot should be publicly humiliated so that they don't do it again. Come on folks, they get the idea that it's OK to be stupid if we just ever so nicely say, "That's ok Mr. Bassackwards, just type B-O-B in the username box." Well, it's not OK to be stupid. I think you should let the user know what a damn fool he or she is, in a very uncomfortable manner (eg, public humiliation) so as not to reward negative behavior. Sure, it's one thing if they don't know how to re-extract wsock32.dll from the cab files through commandline but if they can't type BOB in for the username, it's time to pull out the ol' Smith and Wessen and clean up the gene pool a little.
---Father Guido
***Warning: The above post is known to the State of California to cause cancer in laboratory mice.***
Oh, enough of the sappy "Political correctness" crap!! It is written for those of us who have to deal with idiotic, biggoted users on a daily basis and is a way we can laugh at our common pains in our jobs. I finally stopped working at PC/UNIX shops and stick with unix only shops because of the attitude of PC users and the intollerance of them. Most of the cartoons I can relate to. Not all cartoons have to have universal appeal - these are niche cartoons. If you don't like them, don't read them. Oh, and before we even begin to give any merrit to this man's ramblings, did you notice the caption under the cartoons - "If this stuff is so funny, then why aren't [sic] I laughing?" I'm laughing that this person thinks they're a journalist, but doesn't have a grasp on the english language. I mean, "why are not I laughing" is not proper english...
That'd be hilarious, if you ask me. Fact is, most people ENJOY the old joke about the retarded kid who wins an ice cream cone by being able to touch his index fingers together, only to miss his mouth with the ice cream cone.
....because otherwise his essay was inflammatory and clueless. If he wanted to make the distinctions which you claim he was making, then he should have stated that clearly and avoided sounding like a pompous ass.
"Is it funny that Elsa Mae lost her panties? Not to Elsa Mae!"
Remember what got VMS to finaly laugh? A monkey got beaten to let go of some peanuts, and it immediately found a smaller monkey to beat up.
You can't insult users who call your help desk, you can't even play a laugh track to accompany their most glaring stupidites. But you can laugh about it later.
I remember one case, where a customer had trouble logging in. I told him his username must be all lowercase, and he firmly told me that he WAS using all lowercase (he could see it on the screen) and he still couldn't log in. After several rounds of back-and-forth I finaly restarted the tacacs demon in debug mode, and I saw him capitalize his username. When I asked him why, he said "I have to. It's the name of our company".
This after several times telling me quite firmly that he WAS NOT using any upper case letters in his username.
I can laugh about it now. I couldn't laugh about it then - the whole thing took an hour and a alf, and it literaly had me banging my head against the wall.
And that's why I find UF funny.
Duct tape + WD40 => DevOps
I totally disagree with Kurtz's article because of one main thing - the difference between ignorance and stupidity.
For those of you who are ignorant on the subject, ignorance is that you do not know something because you never learned it. Stupidity is that you did learn it but for some reason you decided not to pay any attention to the subject.
There is also a difference between doing something silly and pulling the most boneheaded stunt in human history. Case in point - someone posted here about a pager battery being in backwards and something about a typo in a line of code. Those are silly. You are looking for things that SHOULD be broken because you just know that everything else is right... right? I have done it, you have done it, everyone has. Hell, I wasted two hours one night trying to figure out why a circuit I built was clobbering the input signal instead of passing it through. Turns out I grabbed the wrong type of transistor. I should have known better, but because I was not paying 100% attention to what I was doing I screwed it up. I put the proper one in and everything started working great.
This is no excuse however, for people who are so fscking dense that they have to have flash cards held up prompting them for everytime they need to take a breath. I am not talking about people who have real problems because of brain trauma, illnesses such as Alzheimer's, or anything like that. I am talking about idiot fscking morons.
A perfect example is this lady who I used to work with. She was 63 at the time. One day I am at my desk with my head deep in some code and my phone rings. She is screaming and hollering for me to get downstairs because of this weird animal. I thought a snake or something had crawled into the building - which had happened a few years before. Instead, she wants me to see these animals out on our front porch. She had nooooo idea what these animals were. She said they were reallly spooky....
What were the animals? They were ducks! I am sorry, but I have yet to know anyone who can go throught 63 years of life and not know what a duck is. Worse yet, she had never heard of a duck before. Pardon me? Ugh....
Too be fair, perhaps he doesn't mean to suggest that 'Userfriendly' is unfunny, but we should simply be ashamed to laugh at someone else's cluelessness. If that is the case, all I can say is: "PHHHTTTHHH-hhppp-pp!!!". I'd love to introduce him to the lady who couldn't understand why her powerstrip wouldn't work when she plugged it BACK INTO itself. Then he can explain why I shouldn't laugh.
I work tech support every day from some of the most clules arrogant people youll ever want to run into. I also have some wonderful friends at the same place who i work for who ar just a clueless. THe difference is the attitude. I enjoy it when i get a stupid wuestion form someone ONCE and im able to answer it and fix thir problem. No problem, thats what im here for. The problem is the idiots who call again and again with the same problem, never once trying to fix it the simple way we showed them how (Im talking changing a password here, people) or lying about wether thay were following our instructions over the pone. Or refusing to e-mail us a document because they were in a hurry and wanted an on site, so a 3 minute e-mail fix took 1.5 hours in person. Those are the problem prople we make fun of and fuck em, they deserve it. You want it speled right, get a dictionary and do it yerselff, you lazy, no good....
Yes, I am in tech support and I am cruel. I am cruel to those with have no common sense. I am cruel to the functionally illiterate. I am cruel to lusers who don't want to listen to me or follow my directions. I am cruel to lusers who don't understand the power dynamic when they call me ("I'm a Doctor/Lawyer/Columnist so I'm going to treat you like my bitch"). I am cruel to those who think that the rules don't apply to them.
These lusers have bigger problems than not knowing how their computer works. They have problems with critical thinking skills they should have learned in grade school. They have attitude problems they should have worked out in middle school while picking their teeth off the floor.
Anybody with a clue will know how hard I laughed at the line "the general public is going to reach the level of computer knowledge that the typical tech currently has". The sad fact is that lack of computer knowledge is often not the issue. There will always be a demand for tech support as long as the school system continues to fail to educate people in fundamental, non-technical areas.
Why am I cruel? Because being cruel is better than going on a shooting spree. Even the people who have no larger problem than "the innernet don't work" can wear down your respect for the human race with sheer numbers. Figure in the people who shouldn't be let near a computer until they've learned how to READ and it's scary to think about how many tech support personnel are still on the loose.
To keep this on-topic, I will say that I do laugh at some of the things users do. I do *not* laugh at ones who are trying to learn, but at the ones who refuse to learn (it becomes a laugh-or-cry situation, particularly with one of my users.)
I wanted to comment specificially on the following:
>[...] who says that working tech support is something that can be done with little training and no prior knowledge.
*Thank You*. There are some skills that cannot be easily taught. We can teach someone technical skills and customer service skills, but it may not help.
A place I used to work for tried what I presume was a cost-cutting measure (they did lower salaries) of hiring people who were on "welfare." I feel I must note here that I'm not putting down people on such assistance - most are there by hard luck, and the abuser stories tend to be the exception - as they are some intelligent people. However, this company was just trying to get people on the phones (and other positions at the company, like trouble-shooting in the hardware dept - when laptops came in for repair) with a minimal ammount of training.
Making this worse is that due to frequent changes in software, the company relied on the helpdesk to maintain the procedures (how to deal with various types of calls, etc.) Need I say that it didn't work well? Management didn't help much as they had a team leader who was more concerned about keeping the harmony of the team then if the answer was actually a: the right way to do it or b: would even *work* - there were officially accepted solutions to problem where the solution would *not* fix the problem or would cause its own set of problems.
Example of such a solution: with a Lexmark inkjet printer (ColorWriter/WinWriter, IIRC) the reps being supported were not given access to printer control panel so they could signal it to move the cartridge carrier over for a cartridge change. Instead of trying to get this problem corrected, they decided the proper thing to do was to turn the printer off, open the access door, reach inside, grasp the belt which moves the carrier and pull the carrier over. One guess the result? Three things tended to happen: the belt ran off of its pulleys (only one some models, others were designed such that this didn't happen), in time, the belt was stretched enough that it would slip, or the belt was broken.
A hot topic is which is more importiant for a perspective tech-support person to have: technical or customer service skills. My response, which usually doesn't go over well for some reason, is "That isn't an 'or' question." A good basis in both is importiant, how much of each depends on the specifics of the position in question and the organization they'll be working for.
That all depends on *what* you're mocking them for. I do ISP tech support and have a whole page devoted to making fun of the idiot calls I get... **BUT** there's a disclaimer right on the page that notes the difference between the ones that call because they are trying to learn and just need a little guidance, and the ones that call and shout, "What's wrong with YOUR system?? I've been trying for *hours* to connect and all your system keeps giving me is "There is no dialtone". There's a big difference between people genuinely trying to learn and idiots. You can only help those that have a desire to learn. The rest? If you have to deal with them, might as well get some amusemennt out of it.
I'd almost rather believe that he was a cynical con artist then think that he really believed what he wrote. But I suspect he believes it...a cynic would have gone overboard whereas Klutz sounds pretty sincere.
If you think about it most User Friendly cartoons are not about making fun of people who call tech support. That's what makes User Friendly so great, the fact that Illiad covers a very wide range of geek-culture topics.
"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
... and learn the value of personal freedom.
I worked at Dell for nine months, specializing in laptop support and beta testing the newest machines before they went out into the new world to be beat upon.
I sat in a chair for 8 hours a day, sometimes, taking calls that never let up, from people who'd spent three thousand dollars on a computer, and by god because excel wasn't working properly it was my fault, Dell's fault, and we were going to send someone to their house this instant to make their computer work the way it should. You calm them down, talk with them, and then tell them to call microsoft.
That's one extreme. Another would be the guy who calls up, asks a pretty simple question, and when you tell him he says 'oh, wow, DUH.. i can't *believe* i had to call to remember that.. thanks a lot' and hangs up.
Then.. there's the guy I sat next to at Dell. Wonderful guy - quiet, maybe a little shy, always spoke softly on a call, or in person. Young twenties, wanted to go to Seminary (learn to be a man of the cloth) - had his first child, an awesome little girl, a few months before I left the company -
Great coworker. Calm, cool, collected and relaxed.
Until he dealt with angry people, confused people, and in some cases what seems like really stupid people. I remember when he got off a long, hard, call and yelled, not really a scream, but a *yell* about "How can these people possibly keep BREATHING" or something to that effect.
Wow. That's what frustration can do to you.
I laugh like hell at User Friendly, when the tech support jokes aren't one's i've heard 'around the campfire' and the question is really a *funny joke* instead of just "Hey, i don't understand windows" - "Well you're an IDIOT! HAHAHAHHA"
no.. i don't think so
They are jokes, most of the time carefully phrased, and we love 'em. Cope.
Here's something that really happened to me, and now that it's out in the tech world I'm sure it will turn into an Urban Legend - but remember it happened, Dell has the call log, and I have the spiral notebook with the entry.
To explain:
Call from an average male. First computer was a laptop (for some reason, some people guess that an all-in-one package is better than a desktop solution for a first time user).. and he had chosen a background image (in Windows) but it didn't reach out to the edges of the screen.
No problem, I thought. While we aren't responsible for supporting things like the windows desktop, I could spend 4 seconds with this guy, he'd be happy as a clam. No reason to tell him 'uh, sir, i can't help you', that's just silly.
So, I ask him what's on his desktop - nothing he says, just icons and an arrow, no windows are open.
Great, I need you to place your arrow someplace blank on the desktop, and right click.
*tick*tick*tick*ding
Hmmm, he says, that didn't do anything.
I wonder why the hell I heard his box *ding* and some tick tack sounds.
Ok, well, try it again. Just make sure you click where there aren't any icons.
Ok..
*tick*tick*ding
and.. he says to me
"Huh.. well, I wrote click and it didn't do anything"
I remain very calm, do not react strangely at all, and say "let's try the right mouse button"
The guy says, oh, okay, and it works (little box comes up with 'display properties' in it)
...
I ended that call, put down the headset and told every last person I could. We laughed, we hung our heads in confusion, we felt the entire weight of the world in our frustration knowing that at any moment, there are dozens of people just like that calling us to help them.
I understand that 'right click' could translate to 'write click'... but I have some issues with this guy's thought process.
Even as a newbie, back in elementary school with the Apple ]['s.. i would NEVER have thought that TYPING the word CLICK would make a computer do ANYTHING.
Why would typing the word click do *anything*?
Ok.. I'm done.
Tech Support jokes are funny, if they are jokes or puns or paradoxes or whatever, not 3rd grade humor like "You're stupid because you don't know what mastication means".
A lot of these jokes happen. And we laughed then too.
It's healthy to have a sense of humor about one's species, culture and job. One word:
Cope.
-jthm
You didn't really think Klutz practices what he preaches, did you? He had a bee up his butt about UF and (what was the name of the other strip?)....so he just made up any old reason he could think of to slam them.
When I started doing helpdesk and sysadmin work, users were expected to read the manuals. We would always answer their questions, but we also included a polite reference to the appropriate documentation. After a few examples, we only got calls about the obscure stuff.
I know that sounds harsh, but in the long run it's a kindness to both the user and your tech staff. The users understand things better, we have time to work at improving the system, and everyone's stress level is reduced.
Here's a paraphrase of an old proverb. If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, then comes back tomorrow to mooch. If you teach him how to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
When did users decide they didn't need to read the docs, not even the brief field descriptions on the screen? More importantly, when did tech support groups decide to coddle stupid lusers with one time answers, instead of teaching them?
I feel everything I would want to say is said already, but still....If the manual says: "Press and hold button till beep to store",
/* This code does everyting */
then DON'T release the frigging button until you hear beep. If you do release it, then I not only call you an idiot, then you ARE an idiot.
This is a long (and funny) list of people who fall into this category. Or as the lady with the burned out engine said: "I thought the oil-light was an
recommendation, not an order"
#include "whatever.h"
#include "whatever.h"
You fucking shrimp.
But but... school students are funny. I think the stories of zany grammitcal and spelling errors made in school essays are hilarious whether they are attributed to 1st grade or college students. I think the ones attributed to college students are funnier because they're "supposed to know better."
If this is in bad taste.. well.. maybe it is, or maybe tech-people just have a different sense of humor. I usually manage to laugh at my own mistakes while learning so at least I'm fair about it..
Earlier /. posted an article about several ten commandments of calling tech support and for tech support people. Every commandment seemed to be a common sense idea (such as be near your computer with it turned on and ready before calling tech support). Now as long as people don't use common sense, I think everybody should make fun of them. I think User Friendly is extremely funny because of how close it does come to situations I have personally.
Besides, laughing at people who don't use common sense has a long history. (Come on isn't that what makes the three stooges so funny?)
experienced.
I've had the cupholder call. I've had people in the middle of domestic disputes. I've... had it all. And I need, nay, ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE a sense of humor lest I go insane and become more evil than I already am.
Look, Scott's over there, with his viewpoint, and I'm over here. All I'm saying is that I worked tech support and he didn't. You be the judge.
Why is it that we have to take everything so seriously? Nothing is ever going to be funny to everyone. Some people want a well drawn comic. If so, try Mary Worth. Others want simple humor, try Family Circus. Then there are some that want humor that they can relate too. If you do technical support, you can probably relate to UF et al. I'm not looking for a masterpiece. I want something that I can chuckle with. Parody and sarcasm are valid humor lines. When training departments don't train and tech support becomes defacto trainers, you are going to have these situations. UF just puts into pixels what a lot of folks would love to do; but can't. Personally, I am sympathetic to a user who has problems; but is willing to learn. A user who thinks that learning to use their computer isn't part of their job is useless to me. The computer is a tool as is a car or a phone when it comes to business. You HAVE to learn how to use them.
I digress, though. You may think that a strip is funny or not, thats AOK. To go on a diatribe and say that it is wrong is very judgemental, shortsighted and ultimately make the person look like a close minded fool. No one is harmed by a comic strip that makes fun of computer users. It is a parody of real life. Just as the Simpsons parodies cops eating doughnuts and King of The Hill parodies Texans. A parody will always extend the towards the absurd. I personally don't find PvP funny. I'm not going to write a rant about it.
For the artist of a strip to attack other strips rings of sour grapes. Especially when the same person admits to being guilty of the same thing he is ranting about. Please check your hubris and hipocracy at the door, I'm too busy having fun to care.
PS. Ob-Flame: The grammar in the subtitle under the plucked strips is wrong on the rant page. Aren't is horrible and should have been 'am I not'.
I've worked tech support for many years, in a variety of places. One thing is common: everyone pokes fun at everyone else. It isn't just tech support poking fun at users; it is librarians poking fun at patrons, managers poking fun at workers, lawyers poking fun at clients, fast food workers poking fun at customers. EVERY profession jokes about "the rest of the world" as a stress relief, nobody ever means anything degrading. Kurtz really needs to lighten up. UF and Absurd Notions are great comics, and just because the Tech Support Community's "release valve" for tension is more easily found on the web, doesn't mean that we're the only ones.
....that's why its funny. In the early 90's as a grad student I got internet access for the first time. I hated going to the computer room to use the VAX terminals because there were no instructions on how to use the thing, and the one person on duty, if you could find him, was not very helpful and had other business to attend to any way. But when I finally ran into a techie friend, he explained the basic ways to use e-mail, usenet, and the rest. When I wanted to login from my computer, my modem would not transmit properly and the place that sold me the PC would not help me. Amazingly I learned how to read the manuals, and help files, and managed to configure the modem with the proper terminal emulation, all by myself. Me, the clueless newbie. I'm sure the techies laughed at me in my early days of internet use because of my clueless questions. We all have to start somewhere. But if I had refused to learn, and had simply pouted and insisted that someone do everything for me, I would have deserved a much more severe reaction.
I don't understand. If he doesn't find UF funny, then why does he persist in reading it everyday like he says he does? It's just entertainment. A joke. Nobody is forcing you to read it.
I don't like American football. I find it boring and frustrating to watch. But lots of people feel a different way, they find it entertaining. I don't, so I don't watch it. Perhaps he should consider doing the same.
Bah!
harshbutfair: you know it makes sense
www.harshbutfair.org
Mr. Kurtz should learn to use the bookmark features of his favorite browser. By eliminating links to those comics he finds offensive he could lower his blood pressure several points over what is a meaningless issue. If he doesn't like these strips then why is he reading them?
My first e-mail my Dad sent me was ALL IN CAPS, JUST LIKE THIS. Now, _that's_ funny!
First recognize the problem. Generally, the person will be stamping on the thing, and a few things are happening but not much. Make sure that the person actuall has hands by getting them to type something while stamping. Now, to play.
Tech: Oh yes, that is a tricky foot pedal. Do you have a bare floor or carpet.
If carpet recomend a firm surface like a phone book. In either case, get the mouse pad under the mouse.
Tech: You will have to be very delicate with this foot pedal. Are you wearing shoes?
Get them to take the shoes off. Get them to turn the mouse around so that they can operate buttons with their toes! Get them to actually do something with their foot. Now for the fun part.
Tech: Not very easy to use is it? Imagine that did not have the use of your legs. Not to worry, this OS is handicap accesible and you can use that foot pedal with your hands!
No offense is inteded for people, such as my step brother, who have real disabilities.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For the most part ppl who call into tech support are the same ppl who don't 'RTFM'. Normal users who are even slightly interested in learning to use the equipment they are paid-to-use/bought will peruse the documentation that comes with the equipment. I, for one, will only call call tech-support if I know that I have a legitimate problem, and am positive that I have thoroughly browsed through any/all documentation that I could find in both the user's guide as well as any info I could find online. I do this primarily so I don't sound stoopid/clueless/ill-informed. OK, it's a given that I've been doing tech support for awhile...go figure, but I'm a very stubborn person and I don't give up unless something is seemingly impossible to fix. As I see it, the tech-support jokes are more of a Right of Passage. Once you know enough, strive to learn something instead of have someone force-feed it to you, it is no longer directed to you. I know that I don't know everything...hell, if I did I'd have a much better job. Someone KILL me. The Less-Than Almighty, kILLERhAIRDO -Born with a Tail-
One of the big cost issues with cable-modem tech support is truck rolls. There are quite a few customers who just want a cable guy to come out to the house, they aren't willing to troubleshoot over the phone and will just say "it doesn't work, it doesn't work" to the helpdesk person so they can get a trouble call.
There is a lot of gatekeeping going on and this is why-truck rolls are really really expensive, especially when it turns out the reason we went out is because the user didn't have his modem plugged in, or some other easy-to-solve problem.
Poorly drawn? Why should we care? I've never cared how well a newspaper comic strip is drawn (comic books, on the other hand, must be well drawn). In fact, I've found an inverse relationship between how well a strip is drawn and how much I enjoy it. I read daily comic strips for the humor and dialoge (must be room for lots of talk bubbles in limited space), not for the artwork. Hence wordy comics tend to be minimalist in their art work and drawn with simple lines (Doonesbury, Bloom County, Dilbert, User Friendly). The only exception I can think of offhand is Zippy the Pinhead, which somehow manages to be both cerebral and have fairly detail intensive art. But then, Zippy is a bit minimalist in the dialoge sometimes. If I want good artwork, I'll go buy a comic book.
on the Web next to predictions on how great W2K is going to be for you.
Oh, that's not meant sarcastically. I realy find both to be gut-wrenching funny.
Steven
or Sluggy Freelance... PVP and Penny Arcade are the only online comics I waste my time on.
Lighten up. Those song paradies are some of the funniest things I've read in IT humor.
I think User Friendly is funny. Hell, I've had some of those problems :P and I just know everytime I call up tech support, someone there is just laughing about what i screwed up this time, ooh well, at least someone's getting a laugh outta me screwing my computer up, hehe
The big difference between making fun of a kid learning to read and making fun of a clueless user is that the kid is _learning_ to read. When I did my time on the other end of the tech support phone, I had three sorts of calls:
a) Real, actual problems. This was the rarest of
the bunch, even though the machines we were selling were often cheap clones.
b) Users with reasonable questions. Now, I've been known not to read the manual before trying something, and I don't expect anyone else to. But I do read it before I call tech support. These users did, too. Sometimes it didn't cover what they were trying to do. Sometimes the manual lost something in the translation from taiwanese. And sometimes they user didn't have enough of an idea of what was going on to be sufficiently "literate" to read the manual-- but every once in a while, I'd get a call saying something like, "I'm trying to do X. According to the manual on page 48, it says I need to do these three things, but I don't know what they mean by the second one!" I'll never make fun of someone like this, because this person _is_ like the child learning to read: He's learning to use his computer. He just threw $2000 at this thing and he'll be damned if he doesn't figure out how to use it, and he'll use every resource he's got to do so. This sort of call was slightly less rare than the real problem-- which implies to me that there are actually more people out there who _want_ to know how their computer works than there are faulty computers...
c) The people User Friendly makes fun of-- which, oddly enough, are the very same people that Dilbert makes fun of. These are the people who just threw $2000 at this thing and they'll be damned if it doesn't just automatically do what they want. These are the people who refuse to learn how to use the equipment. They believe that tools work for us, not with us.
I often laugh at User Friendly. User Friendly makes fun of the third sort of call, which, annoyingly enough, is the most prevalent sort of call that a tech support person gets. Heck, we ex-tech-support people probably even believe that all users are clueless-- but I bet it's just that we only usually hear from the idiots.
To make an analogy:
There are people who drive a car for two or three years and get rid of it before it starts to fall apart.
There are people who buy a car and actually do all the preventative maintenance on it. They may not know exactly how an internal combustion engine works, but they know that it's not black magic and that certain things need to happen to make them work right. They may not do their own oil changes, but they could given a little instruction-- they're not afraid of what goes on under the hood. These are automobile users.
There are people who work on cars for a living as automotive technicians.
There are people who design cars for a living and understand every bit about a car, or at least a given aspect of a car.
(...as people begin to wonder what kind of an idiot makes an analogy away from computers on Slashdot...)
The way I see it, if you're in one category but you have only the knowledge of the category before it, and you have no intention of learning more to get into the category where you belong, then you're a fair target. So if you're in the second category (users), but you don't have that much knowledge of what's going on, there's a good chance that your ignorance will be truly funny.
The part I find amusing is that it works the other way-- we geeks will always be made fun of because we want to know more than we need! (and now we see why I make the analogy...) Many of us are automobile users-- but often, we geeks who are automobile users will know _more_ about our car than we really need to! We have some idea of how it does what it does-- we may not be in the "automotive technician" category of knowledge, but we refuse to have a magic black box sitting in our driveways.
The question is not "why do people think poking fun at clueless idiots is funny?" The question is, "Why do people think poking fun at people who aren't clueless idiots is funny?"
Damn...I know I shouldn't laugh, but the mental image your description gave me is too damn funny. Sorry, it is funny. Ah well.
Things are getting more and more touchy feely every day and it makes me sick. If we are to take into consideration every type of person's feelings in everything we do, we may as well just drop humor from society. Make it illegal or something.
I don't know about the other comic having never read it, but as a former tech, User Friendly really makes me laugh. Illiad and crew generally tend to make fun of tech life more than the ISP's users. Oh sure, every now and then, we see Miranda or the tech guy (Scott is it?) dealing with a clueless customer, but that is the nature of the biz and what makes UF funny to its audience of, guess what, current and former techs.
Every time I hear someone say that this makes these people feel bad, and that makes those look bad, it really gets my undies in a bunch. Take a friggin' sociology class some time. That's the basis of humor. Humor is based on either slap stick (Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, the New Orleans Saints, etc.) or taking a real and plausible situation and showing how it could be humorous in either extreme or situational settings. While these aren't the only foundations of humor, this is most of it. BTW, I didn't mean to offend the New Orleans Saints Organization or any Saints fans in implying their football team sucks so bad, it's funny.
What are we supposed to do? Cut all humor back to Peanuts and For Better or Worse? Sorry dude, but that's just not going to happen. I'll kill without my daily dose of Dilbert and Doonsberry. What about folks like Deniss's Miller & Leary? Are they just mean and bad people? No, they're funny people. They have a talent of seeing the funny aspects of people and life and bringing it to light. What about Gallagher or George Carlin who makes fun of the entire USA (the "We'll bomb the hell out of you" bit)?
Most of the time, people who don't know dick about a computer ("What mouse? Where!?") laugh about their shortcomings and see the humor for themselves. I actually had a guy ask me if I would rather talk to his 7 yr. old since she knew a lot more about the computer than he did. He thought that was hilarious. When I see UF joke about clueless customers, I think of the moronic a**holes who brightened my day by yelling at me because I couldn't get their damn Laptop WinModem connecting at 56K. Folks who know they don't know squat, but rather than graciously ask for and accept help, thay get defensive and assume that all techs think they're dumb simply because they call in. Fact of the matter is, most techs realize, if everyone knew as much as they did, they wouldn't have jobs. In my opinion, most of these supposedly mean spirited comics poke fun at groups of people who deserve a little ribbing. If you can't laugh at yourself, you really have no healthy sense of humor.
/Sig/
Despite the topic shift to computers, I've had just about all I can take of naive jokes from the Family Circus. Bil Keane seems to think that children incorrectly assimilating vocabulary or not possesing a tongue deft enough to properly pronounce a word "heart-warmingly funny". Which it very well might be, if the comic strip had any other legs to stand on. so I guess the point here is that- yes, there are some times when based upon our "indoctrination" (maybe that's too strong a word, "mind set" might be better)we encounter an outsider's point of view that make's us fall down and laugh. Hey, make a comic out of it! but don't make that the basis of an entire strip. So in the case of Dilbert's lame rants against management (regardless of how deserved they are) I get bored, because that's all it is. P.S.- I still laugh at /dev/null jokes.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Scott, I knew I shouldn't have played those Dennis Miller Rants for you, hehehe. Well, having worked along side Scott Kurtz in the tech support industry, I have to throw my 2 cents in. There are semi-intelligent people out there capable of learning about computers, but everyone has their limitiations. I remember helping him put together that computer about 6 months ago and the joy and elation he had when he did it, but it still doesn't make him a good Sysadmin candidate. I beleive everyone has their own talents (Scott's being art and web mastering) and some people just aren't cut out to be computer techies, if everyone was, we wouldn't need tech support. There are smart people and idiots out there when it comes to tech support callers. I think people who work tech support like to make fun of the ID10T's to releive the stress of having to deal with one phone call after another. Tech support is a good learning experience, but I would recomend anyone doing it for more than about 2 years or you would go crazy. Ok, that is my rant on the subject. Scott - In gobble-de-gook you will dwell, hehehe.
--- jumpg8 (Vexx)
- people who call because they're lonely?
Like Justin Kaufman! What a silly little runt.
(Inside Joke.)
User Friendly is highly overrated - just something for Linux geeks to call their own.
Kurtz = Klutz
This is entire article / thread is a huge troll.
There are a couple of hard facts that can be distilled here, however.
1. User friendly is funny to some people.
2. User friendly is not funny to some people.
3. People get really angry when other people don't agree with them.
I see it like this. When I worked tech support, I lived half of those calls. I thought it was funny. Hell I still do. I also think that 80% of the strip isn't funny at all. I think that the tech support call strips are funny, and some of the MS strips are funny, and the rest just get groans. I think a valid point was raised with the "family circus" analogy- To SOME people , User friendly is funny. To others, it is silly and sickeningly cute.
Mel brooks said it best when he said "Tragedy is when I have a hangnail, Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole."
Humor is almost always at someone or thing's expense! Soemtimes it is yours. Laugh a little.
ds
I think the author of Help Desk might be suffering from a nasty case of "political correctness."
I mean, in 1999 a show like ALL IN THE FAMILY would never have been approved for airing. Archie Bunker's rants would have gotten the network sued by every political group except the kitchen sink. (shrug)
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III (love him or not) is definitely correct in this sense: we have essentially lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. Remember the self-deprecating humor from Jewish comics from the first half of this century? We have replaced that with nasty invectives that if any person says the "politically incorrect" thing they get condemned--or worse. Think of Atlanta Braves closer John Rocker's joking comments in Sports Illustrated magazine, which may end up costing him his career in professional sports.
In short, people--no thanks to the "politically correct" movement--have lost their sense of humor and replaced it with nasty sniping back and forth that will one of these days lead to armed clash from both sides--the "Balkanization" of the country.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Two things :
... " (you can guess the rest).
1. It's not all about tech support.
What about the long running series of strips where the techs are fighting which distro of linux to use?
Or Mirandas random destruction of Pitrs source code?
They make the techs the butt of the jokes. Does that mean that all techs instantly get offended? NO! Why, because we can laugh at things we've all done, no matter how stupid, thoughtless or ignorant.
2. End users can be very very stupid.
I'm the sysadmin and tech support for a group of care homes. I received a phone call once from a satellite home saying that their email had stopped working. I told them to open Outlook Express and was told that it wasn't there anymore. After getting them to search for the executable and finding nothing I knew I would have to go to their site to fix it.
Two hours later I arrive and indeed Outlook Express was no longer there. Internet Explorer was, but no Outlook Express.
Upon asking them what they'd been doing just before they noticed this, one replied :
"I went to Start, then Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs
This was coming from a manager of a care home for people with learning disabilities! He had about fifty sets of letters after his name and wondered why a program didn't work after he'd deleted it!
That's why Userfriendly is so funny. And that's why I read everyday. If I thought I was the only one who had to put up with this kind of crap I'd have gone postal a long long time ago.
Just my thoughts anyway.
"It's f*cking seabird flavour."
Teachers should not mock a student in front of the class, but sometimes humor used properly is OK in class. I had a HS physics teacher who was very sarcastic in a very high level manner; he could make you feel like an idiot, but in a way which made sure that you knew damn well why you were an idiot and how not to do it again. Like when I tried to answer his question (poorly) and he informed me that my response was an example of circular reasoning. I was embarrassed, but I sure learned something in the process. I've got nothing against teachers who properly use this kind of humor in class; however it is pretty rare to find a teacher who can do this in the right manner. The subtle touch is rare.
I've read through about half the page of comments, organized by highest scrore first. I hate using terms that make me sound like a 60 year old school teacher, but I'm disgusted that the only commnents that are getting any semblance of justice when it comes to ratings by the moderators are those that essentially support the idea that jokes about dumb ass computer users are indeed just. If you take an airplane somewhere, does the pilot mock you for your inability to pilot it? In comparison to what many people are used to, computers are relatively complex devices. If we were forced to fly jets every day to our respective places of work, if a problem developed, how many among us would be able to fix it right away? Baring professional jet repairmen, none. It would take us many months of seeing and being explained how to repair the jet, which we would view as solely a functional tool. Perhaps after we understood the inner workings of the jet, it would take on more of a divine quality, and we would feel quite swanky in our new found knowledge, but would that give us the right [I hate using that word] to lambast those who are in the very position we were in at one point?
If you are any good with computers you do something more interesting than tech. support, ergo tech. support people aren't very good with computers. As a computer user, I would like a comic strip devoted to the stupidity of tech. support people. I could certainly supply myriad examples of the extraordinary ineptitude of this self-congratulating breed.
Must....not....make...fun of.....clueless...stupid...arrogant users....Must....hunt....them....down...and chop them into bloody....CHUNKS.....must...not....make fun...of....clueless...stupid....ignorant....arrog ant....users.....must.....
This is a perfect example of metaphor shear, which Neal Stephenson talks about in his essay, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line. The problem is that to make computers easier to use for the common (l)user, analogies are drawn to everyday real world items and concepts. Good idea, but the analogies always break down at some point leaving the user frustrated. This is the tradeoff that always gets made: force the user to learn a new paradigm (Unix) or reuse (imperfectly) an existing one (Mac/Windows).
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Okay, I do admit that some tend to go BOFH.
Firewall
Early in my career, I'd worked tech-support too. In many technology companys this was the fastest way to train a new engineer/programmer in the way their buisness is done. The calls that I'd taken and the problems I'd solved prompted me to research and learn more about a complex distributed process control system than would have been possible through classroom training. (and a hell of a lot more productive too!) Yes, I've dealt with some idiots, a few PHBs and the like, but on the whole, it was a good learning experience for me.
On the other hand... don't get me started on the HELL of doing general system admin/user support/babysitting for college undergraduates!
-MattT *** Not speaking for my employer, or any other sentient beings ***
I agree with you, Angstrom^ and also disagree with Kurtz comparing laughing at a guy calling tech support with a teacher laughing at a child learning to read. People that buy computers or work on computers should be expected to learn about their computer. It's funny when they call in with a question that is answered in the manual or found out is some other easily accessible resource. A child cannot be expected to just know how to read and can't be expected to go and find out on his own how to read. They are on two totally different levels
This review that a friend of mine wrote a while back seems relavent to the discussion here.
Take today's User Friendly for example. This time the joke is on tech support.
But seriously, these kinds of geek-strips are very cliquish and not at all funny to non-geek types. But think about this. Dog lovers probably think that Marmaduke is one damn funny cartoon. I think it's pointless. Kindergarten teachers love Family Circus. I think it's positively dreadful, maudlin, sentimental, Anne Geddes postcard tripe. Bloom County (and Outland) were for people bent enough to enjoy that kind of thing. Some people, I am told, didn't get it.
User Friendly and the others have found a niche. Nothing wrong with that.
Nice job stealing the icon gag from UFie.
If it's wrong to laugh at "people that are trying to learn how to use linux, or windows, or any other OS or computer related topic" then it's just as wrong to laugh at other people. In fact, we might as well declare humor to be politically incorrect.
When jokes are outlawed, only outlaws will make jokes.
Yes, there are cartoons that make fun of novice users mercilessly. Is this a wrong thing? Of course not, people do it all the time and I don't think its going to come to an end anytime soon. Kurz likened these 'bad' comic strips to teachers making fun of children for learning how to read. How many of you have ever gotten an email with a subject like "real things kids actually wrote on their reports" or something to the tune of that. Some teachers, while still concerned with the education of the kids, still found some of the things that were turned in funny and decided to compile and pass them around in public. I've never heard anyone say "thats just cruel to the children" after reading that email and I think the same logic applies to these comic strips as well. The authors of these comic strips really aren't making fun of the attempt at learning some people put out. They just are taking a few bizarre instances that come about when people assume that think they know more than they actually do gets in over their head. There is nothing malicious about smiling at an obvious novice mistake, its just human nature. I feel that the point that these authors are trying to make with the jokes about clueless end users is that there is not enough being done to educate the public en masse and is degrading our life as a whole and something must be done about it.
My love for you is ticking clock, BESERKER.
For my 2c. let me say that I have never found anythign funny in PvP. That makes us even.
Let me continue with a little textual analysis:
Kurtz says that he has "discovered that jokes about computer games aren't funny" but that jokes about people who play them are. Welllll, gee, lets apply that to UF. Users do funny, very stupid things, things that make IT people go insane from frustration and from the inability to respond to aggresive insulting barrages. There is NO harm I can see in a cartoon that makes light of it.
And NT isn't up to snuff, and I think parady songs are funny, at least when they aren't sung at SCA filk/bardic circles. *Shudder or mortal terror*
Side note: what made people start insulting Sluggy? Is this a demosntration of the fundamental division in society between the likers and haters of the three stooges?
-Walter Moore
I don't know if agree with Kurtz that making fun of ignorant people isn't funny. Most comedy seems to the based on somebody else gettin' dissed. Comedy almost always puts somebody down. I guess it's just a matter of knowing your audience.
What I will agree with, is that some of strips he used as an example are not particularly funny (at least not to me). PvP, however, keeps me laughlin' all the time.
--
InstantCool
But the first level is the wrongest. Why in earths name does Kurtz think some 'topics' are less funny then others? Humor is not about topics, its about plots, punchlines and timing.
Jokes about poop, we do not seem to think funny anymore after age 12 orso. Unless we of course listen to Stand Up comedy, then its ok. Topics DO NOT matter.
Humor "at the expense of others.." Kurtz calls it, namely the poor ignorant users out there. This is of course totally a non-issue. Humor ALWAYS is at the expense of _someone_. The best humor, some people argue, is therefore humor at the expense of one-self. Moronic over-friendlyness if you ask me, but sure. UF by the way, often pokes fun at GEEKS, not users I might add.
Now humor is, at the expense of geeks, quite common in the tech strips, if someone is made looking silly on a regular basis, its the geek/internet community.
Who else would be willing to kill each other over a discussion of vi vs emacs? (Yeah look that up Kurtz, you 2 week trained tech support monkey)
Tech support. Geeks are incredible funny.
Users too, the dumb ones are even funnier.
Do you ever watch standup comedy? Well heres a good one from the Nutty Professor : Your mother is so fat, her waist size is "equator"
Now if you read this, I doubt that you laugh. But given the correct psyched up standup comedy acting athmosphere, the right timing of the standupper, and you will cry out on the floor laughing.
Do all Mothers in the universe have to unite and write nasty letters to Disney? Do mothers in general feel offended? I think not, unless they have a serious mental problem.
So do users identify themselfes with the UF (l)users? I bet they dont..
So what is Kurtz problem? UF isnt making fun of racial diffences, which would be politically incorrect. It sometimes makes fun of users, it sometimes makes fun of managers, it often makes fun of marketeers. This is cruel? Kurtz still is a luser me thinks.. a bad one too, despite his two week trained tech support job. After all, he feels himself attacked by these anti user jokes.
I got two words on the cruel bit, or the "I think Jokes at the expense of others arent very friendly, Its Just Plain Wrong" Attitude :
Grow Up.
Its a strip, like many others, for a sub-group of humanity, this sub group thinks its funny. Some dont. Who cares.
Humor IS in exsistance to poke fun AT. At yourself, a phenomena, or at others.
Another one of those BS comment :
It took me a while to figure it out, but when I write PvP I try to remember one important fact: jokes about computer games aren't funny. However, jokes about the people that play computer games are.
Where is this wisdom carved in stone? Could Kurtz enlighten us all? So we will never be not funny?
The key word seems to be "people" here, so to be funny there should be some "people" involved?
Sense of Humor, as a final note, I think is a product of character, and "taste". Taste being formed by expierence, hence your humor changes over time.
Rant on Kurtz, its good to have people spread opnions, even shortsighted ones. And if you dont like out little, serve-chilled, snack of a daily static, well, dont hit CTRL-D.
ps Kurtz, it might be good for your geek-culture touch, to try read BOFH once. Promise me you will not laugh.
Greetingz SlashDread
People on the job, who have never had the luxury of a computer are very difficult to teach and should be treated with respect. No WIMP opperating system is truely intuitive, and everyone has to learn at some point. Microsoft is even worse, and there that person is with their promotion and wages at stake. They don't want to talk to some condesending snot.
We live in an increasingly technical world, and it is employer's duty to train employees to do their work. Where I work, we get people who can barely read, but they are increasingly required to operate computer driven equipment. My employer offers literacy and math training to make up for what public schools failed to provide, or what was lost in years of brute labor. Sure, computers are getting easier than some older analog equipment, but people can be made to fear computers. The kind of cartoons being refered too create some real negative perceptions on both sides and foster an atmosphere of distrust. When the phobia sets in, that person is less productive and we all loose.
People were cool to me when I needed to learn, and I'll bet you did not get too much flack either. Fifty years from now, "You're too dumb to own a computer" will sound as stupid as, "You're too dumb to use electricity." Be nice to people.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think the line that you cross between 'fun' and 'mean' is one to think about here. I mean, the funniest tech support war stories aren't about people struggling to learn so much as those horrified that they *must* learn in order to use this expensive piece of equiptment they've bought.
_User Friendly_ doesn't attack novices, it jokes about the people who use CDROM trays for cup holders, stick diskettes to the fridge with magnets... It's not about elitism, it's about common sense. I mean, if someone stuffed money in a CD slot in a car, hoping they'd invested their money wisely, would you chalk that up to the person learning how to use a car?
Sure, I agree, some tech support humor can be mean, but I submit that the funniest ones aren't "can you believe he didn't even know how to ctrl-alt-del ha ha ha", but rather "This guy thought his PC ought to work during a power failure!".
Just my opinion.
EChris
As someone who has worked both in-house tech support (for a util company, so a wide variety user base), and for ISP tech support...
I have little to no problem with internal user support.. the employees know what should happen, and call us if there is a problem.. 99 percent of the time, its legit.. network, printers, file shares.. etc.. Why? Because they have some basic training on the matter
Most people that have no problem with computers got training.. how? They either got a book from the local libary, bought a book, got some formal instruction on the subject, or were not afriad to try it by themselves..
The most annoying calls are those that are not afriad to experiment alittle themselves, and for whatever reason, able to connect A with B (or as better said: Cause and Effect). These people invariable become repetive callers.. usually things like 'I cant get into MSN chat!', and out of the kindness of your heart your try to help them.....
I dont mind legit problems (Email clogs, DNS prob), in fact I find them alittle challaging (SP!) sometimes... sigh...
Sigh.. Just another day on the phones..
Uncle Drax ( to lazy to log-in.. )
I've seen more cases of secretaries (and/or those effectively acting in that position) on power trips, than their bosses on powertrips. This is not to say that ALL secretaries are, but yes some definetly are. Have you ever heard the expression: gate keeper? You ever wonder why salesmen, employees, coworkers, and many others feel the need to kiss up to the secretary? Some secretaries can, and do, make or break careers simply because they hold all the keys to accessing the boss.
On another note, speaking for one technologically inept boss, my stepfather, people generally ascribe the wrong motives to people like him. Yes, he has a secretary. On the other hand, he is also extremely busy. When, and if, he learns to use computers effectively he'll still need a secretary. '
He is an intelligent guy; none the less, there is a certain learning curve to learning how to use computers effectively. In other words, he'll need to spend 50 hours (out of the air) to make computers more efficient than having his secretary take dictation. This might not sound like much, but when you're as busy as he is it is a significant effort. You've got to understand that he does not even have the time to devote time to himself (personal life, a.k.a.: fun). Real or imagined, he does not have the time. Though you might make an argument that learning would ultimately pay off, when you're this busy you also lose patience. Little things like windows system crashes simply make it far too aggravating (from his perspective). Add to this, a crash/bug/misunderstanding can take him hours to get around (that he literally can't fit in his schedule), while someone like myself (whom exists at his office, in addition to his secretary) can work around it in a matter of seconds.
In summation, neither lack of intellect nor arrogance would be the proper word to describe my stepfather's situation. There are many like him. Though a rare few in 'power' might adopt a certain anti-intellectual approach to computers (viewing them as for the underlyings), I feel they're still in the minority. To further generalize this intentional ignorance to people such as my step-father is simply a mistake. Overgeneralizations can be dangerous, because it, too, is a form of affected ignorance.
IIRC, Bill Cosby had a show where they mocked what children said to their faces... Ahem.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I think I have fairly good and typical tastes in comics. I laughed at Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, the first year of Robotman, 1970s-era Doonesbury, Dilbert, The Far Side. When I read the funnies I just gloss over relics like Beetle Bailey and Blondie, which are government sponsored projects to get kids familiar with old and corny jokes so they don't laugh at them when they're older, making the US look stupid.User Friendly, and some similar comics like Penny Arcade, are in the same vein as Beetle Bailey and Blondie in that they go for the obvious dumb vaudeville jokes, except that this time around they have a geeky slant. But just beeing geeky doesn't make them funny.
Not to totally dismiss Kurtz's complaint, but I think there's a bit of subtext to this as well.
I think part of PvP's beef here is that Iliad has, from their perspective, managed to accrue a major following and a nigh-steady income with scarcely a shred of style or talent, while they toil in relative obscurity. Seriously, looking at cartoons like Penny Arcade or PvP, these guys have obviously dedicated a lot of time to making their strips look good, clean and stylish, whereas User Friendly is hardly a notch above "Cathy" on the scale of artistic effort.
Personally, I read both PA and UF as often as they come out. I *don't* read PvP, probably mainly because the only time they ever come to my attention is when they're bitching about Iliad. Kurtz has a nifty and unique style, but the actual comics just don't grab me.
Of course, the *only* consistently brilliant, funny and well-drawn comic on the web is Bob the Angry Flower. If only he'd update more than twice a month.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
I am going to begin my rant by quoting Buddha
... otherwise we miss its point. -Lawrence Durrell
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."
We have the ability to see things as we want them to be. Our reality(world) has the ability to be shaped. We have the ability to choose to read what we want to read. We have the ability to interpret that book, those words in various ways. Whether we use them positively or negatively is a choice all of our own.
Our goals should be to see that everyone benefits from the mutal relationship we share with one another.
However, we can't have things just one way. Compromise, although looked down on these days, can provide us with more beneficial results.
We can laugh. We should laugh. However, we should not just laugh. We can change. We should change.
What I mean by change, why not attempt to educate rather than always draw humor at someone else's expense.
Why can't we use humor within education?
If you look at the truths --
In general situations, I can vouch, working in a customer support/tech support position, that most of the customers take little regard of your effort or time spent on an issue. It is a rare case when you meet someone who doesn't try to but the boot down on you because they think you are there to serve them. Mistakes are not allowed. Simple human error is not a possibility. People who call you for help expect you to be god.
I admit I am still a fresh kitten in the tech field..../ customer support field..I haven't lost my kindness or sympathy..but they know how to try to strip you of it.
Who should you sympathize with more... techs or customers? Why can't we have laughter in our life because customers/users laugh at us if we fail to play god to their disrespecting gestures?
It really isn't about who is right or wrong. It is all about your reality right....makes you think. You find yourself in a paradox most of the time.
Second Quote I would like to provide you with is:
"We should tackle reality in a slightly joking way
If we didn't set the bush afire then no one would see the reality of an issue. In other words, if we did not present things that cause people to go "oooh...I don't like that...." "oooh...that isn't fair" "oooh...that can be harmful" we would never understand what motivates us and what guides us to becoming better human beings.
Growth and development are essential. So is there something we can do to keep the laughter but recognize our need to develop ourselves with better intentions to others? I have not seen many plausible if effective solutions yet. I still hope, and in my own way, I am searching for the answer.
People today crave to have everything done for them. Not to say that is bad. But, people, speaking in terms of majority, don't seem to want to push themselves harder or develop their minds.
You would think, by having more conveniences, it frees up some time to take advantage of more opportunities presented..
Even though I love computers and digital devices, what in the hell would a percentage of the population, who can barely count or read, do if everything computerized or digital stopped working??? I don't mean to pick on fast food workers, but honestly from the ones I have met...they would be in a real fickle.
What is shameful is that more and more youth are steering down that path? Who says, we the minority, can't care about the majority? Do we just ride the wave or do we sail across the ocean? Do we limit ourselves by not trying to do more?
I will leave you with two closing quotes I think of when my self confidence suffers from doubt:
"Laughter is the jam on the toast of life. It adds flavor, keeps it from being too dry, and makes it easier to swallow." - Diane Johnson
"Every child is born a genius." - Einstein....
Thanks to Slashdot for letting me air my thoughts...
From someone who has worked in the tech support field, it sucks. You spend a lot of time dealing with rude, obnoxious people who have no real desire to learn. The ones who do want to learn are usually the easiest to deal with. So after spending all day long wanting to yell and scream at rude people (but refraining yourself of course), it's a nice release to read a harmless comic making fun of those people.
Let's take today, then. The drawing is as atrocious as ever, and Illiad can't spell 'millennium', but more importantly, there simply isn't anything funny here. It's no good saying technical support people find this funny because they've installed Windows NT; they're hardly the only ones. Having installed NT many times, surely I should find it funny as well. Do I like NT? No. Is it better than 95/98? Of course. Hence it is entirely reasonable to describe it as an upgrade, even if you think Linux infinitely superior. The idea that you'd have to be sick and sadistic to install NT is as far as the 'humor' gets. It took no intelligence to write this strip: all it does is pander to the very obvious prejudices of its audience in a very clumsy manner. Anyone with a supply of Bill Gates jokes could do as well. Hell, they might even be able to draw and spell.
The plumber's job is not how to teach you how to take a sh*t, it is to make sure that your equipment and service that enables you to sh*t properly is working correctly. If the plumber can come over and take a sh*t in your toilet and everything works ok, why should he have to hold your hand over the phone while you attempt it? Same goes with computers. If you are too stupid to use a damned computer, go take some classes! Tech support people are there to help with PROBLEMS related to the systems they care for. If these people genuinely had a problem, i.e. they couldn't login because some idiot in billing deleted their account due to an error, then I could understand it. But 99% of the calls I got when I did tech support were stupid crap that could've been avoided entirely if the user would've either read the documentation or done a little research themselves before calling tech support.
In regards to your recent rant concerning Help Desk cartoons and how they are cruel.
I have been working tech support positions for the past 6 years. I am currently in a senior position on an advanced help desk. This new help desk actually helps users instead of just transferring calls to a real tech. We have no-one to escalate the problem to and we built over 2,000 computers that we support. Our current success rate is over
86% on solving all calls on the first call.
Most help desk's are not helpful. For example, there is one at my company that employees over 300 technical analysts and every time I transfer a customer who called the wrong number I get some idiot on the phone. Last time, we just needed the new phone number to dial in. It took three help desk personnel and a manager before we got the correct phone number!
Putting unskilled persons on the phone just to get users off hold is not acceptable. This is why we formed our new help desk. We took the desktop support people (level II) and some engineers (level III) and put us on the phones. We are extremely well paid for the position. I trouble-shoot any problem a user encounters on their NT workstations. This invovles common NT issues as well as all of the office applications (Word, Excel, Exchange, etc) and business applications (Oracle, Sybase, SQL Anywhere, Interbase, etc).
Most of the time, I don't get silly calls but now and they I get some real zingers. It is nice to read comics like UserFriendly which makes fun of users. Heck, I used to be a user and remember not knowing anything. That is not the point. I need to blow off some steam and laugh about it or I am going to burn out and quit!
Everyday, I get yelled at or swore at by some fool who can't even use a mouse. I get calls where they tell me they have a 10 million dollar presentation in two hours and they shut off their computer in the middle of an SMS Logon script then wonder why it's now Blue Screening of Death every time they boot! I get calls where they argue with me about whether or not the laptop is plugged in the power supply when it turns itself off every 10 seconds.
Yesterday, I got a call from a non-employee that we support that transmits data to our mainframe via a dial up system called Advantis (IBM Global Services). The problem was we sent out sixteen mailings over 6 months ago advising them they needed to upgrade their software for Y2K. We even sent the diskettes with the mailing. Minimum requirements were specified on hot pink paper. We told people they had to upgrade their computers and operating systems then the software or it would not work. We had three different calls where it was the same problem. They still had a 486 with 8meg running DOS and Windows 3.1 and running the DOS version of the application which is 16 versions too old. They ended up with a date like 1/4/100 instead of 1/3/2000 and said our system screwed them up. It took 20min per call just to prove them wrong! Even then we got yelled at! It was not our fault!
That is why I read UserFriendly and why I enjoy it so much. There may have not been mission critical Y2K issues but we still are in the trenches dealing with it.
If management would spend half as much on training the users as they do at buying wood and leather furniture, this would not be a problem. I shudder to think what the average office workers productivity must be like when they spend all day on the phone with us.
If the artwork doesn't matter, then why have artwork at all? UF could well do without the artwork, since most of it seems cut&paste anyways. The real skill in cartooning is the ability to make a point or express an emotion using a few strokes of the pencil. Schulz, to pick one example, is a master of that skill.
I have to agree. I've worked call-in tech support for Internet and User Friendly's call-ins just make me break my ribs laughing.
;-) is with a customer who was having problems with their Internet settings. I asked them if they could click the start button please, and then click on 'settings', yes, ok, I'll wait, etc.
... ..."
One of my experiences (the short version
Well, they were pretty slow, but finally I'd got to the point I wanted to be at and asked, "So, what does it say in the window?" and they answered "I don't know."
I don't know???
"Umm, why's that?" I asked
"Because the computer's at home, and I'm at work."
"Oh," I continued, "were you following those instructions on your work computer?"
"No, I was writing them down to do them when I get home
"Our tech support hours are until 9PM, please, give me a call when you get home." and I hung up.
Yes, these things _are_ funny.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
(A response from the author of #15)
The joke is that the user was so pissed off at his computer that he picked up the keyboard and started pounding on the software box with all his might, which broke the keyboard in two. Which is something, I might add, that I've wanted to do many, many times with Microsoft Office.
At any rate, I agree with what Scott's saying about "clueless user" jokes, but I love User Friendly anyway. I'm just glad the "clueless user" jokes are few and far between...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I'm personally quite disappointed in Scott Kurtz at the moment. Several months ago, he ran a series of UserFriendly jokes, bordering on UF-bashing (in my opinion) in PvP. I sent him an email pointing out inaccuracies, and he and I ended up in a nice discussion about the various types of UF fans. He even joined #userfriendly on Undernet, where, as I recall, he received less than a warm welcome. However, I continued to think of him as a talented and decent person, and read PvP somewhat regularly. The subject matter wasn't always in my area of expertise, but I appreciated it nonetheless.
I'm seeing somewhat of a disturbing trend amongst some of the online comic strip authors - PvP and Penny Arcade in particular. It seems that rather than concentrate on their own strips, and make them as good as they can based on their own merits, some folks feel the need to try to bring other strips down to make theirs look better. "UserFriendly sucks, so read my strip instead!" It's akin to political mudslinging campaigns - and if politicians would wake up, they'd realize that they alienate many more people than they're expecting.
I'm proud to be involved in a comic strip which brings a smile to so many faces, and does it without trying to stomp on someone else in an attempt to look better.
"During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I was riding the pogostick."
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
everyone has a different opinion and different sense of humor
So true. Humor is a form of release. And it's not as if stronger stuff isn't already out there. If you think that UF is, erm, "impolite", you surely don't want to read the "Monastery."
UF = "mild twitting";
ASR = "hack 'em and stack 'em";
They're both funny, imo.
1) most UF strips are not about tech support calls 2) lots of good programmers and sys admins got their start in tech support 3) tech support is not easy 4) I'd like to see you last a year or two in tech support 5) you are an @sshole.
I do Tech support right now and something that I have noticed is that most of the people that I work with are not willing to bother learning anything about the "Magic Box" on their desk. I guide them through these things as much as I can and tell them in as simple of terms as I can what we are doing and how they can do it on their own later. And 9 times out of 10 I will get these same people coming back with same exact problem and they have not even bothered to try and do the same things that I guided them through a couple of weeks ago.
It becomes quite disheartening to get these people over and over again asking the same questions over and over again. And then they blame you for their own silly (and I do mean silly) mistakes. Now the why of this occurance is something I have been bemoaning for more than 8 years. We, meaning the geeks of the world, have been asked and payed quite handsomly to "dumb down" computers. What has happened is that users no longer feel the need to learn anything about the "magic box" and they panic and blame everything except their own ignorance for the the problems that they may have.
For instance. Presently the most common problem I see (I am working for a large ISP) has to do with a certain type of modem that needs to have its firmware updated regularly or they will no longer. We tell people this all the time, and do they ever take this to heart? No. You tell me why, because I don't understand it.
My strip is based on the premise that computer companies swindle PC users out of their money, provide crappy products, and divert attention away from bugs instead of supporting users. How is that PC?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Unfortunately, many of the problems that tech support people encounter are the computer equivalent of the user trying to flush a disposable diaper down the toilet -- i.e., sheer stupidity. And the sad part is that it's the same people over and over again, finding new ways to clog the plumbing.
I once disagreed with the concept that some people were too stupid to be allowed to breed. Then I worked tech support (grin).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Comics like UserFriendly and Dillbert become funny only when an individual's selfhood is so wrapped up in his job that life begins to imitate kitch.
It is better to remain silent and have people think you ignorant than to mention Calvin and Hobbes and remove all doubt.
Amazing magic tricks
In the second place: don't you all remember what it was like when you were first fiddling around with computers? You didn't spring from the womb/tube fully certified. I remember my first few computer classes, at a schmancy private school, but even more clearly, I remember the principal of my elementary school, who let me hang out in his office at recess time and learn Basic from "Kids and the Apple II."
If dealing with real human beings with actual shortcomings really harshes your mellow so badly, try being a short-order cook or something. Or get a technical job where you don't have to speak to end users -- I have one and I know they're hiring.
Many people did NOT appreciate that, but at the time I was in a position where I didn't have to care. (And I had written that manual myself, so I darned well knew what was answered and what was not answered there!).
The point, the point -- there's too many people out there who think that the concept of reading is something that applies to other people, not to them. This attitude starts early in their school days, when they learn that they don't have to read the assignment because they can demand that the teacher spoon-feed it to them verbally, and it continues through their adult life.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The bastard operator from hell is one of the funniest things I have ever read. Messing with clueless users is just good, clean fun.b
Computers are intricate pieces of hardware.
It takes more then 2 weeks of training to simply learn how to troubleshoot a PC.
Troubleshooting is a skill acquired over many years of experience. Its not learned within a span of 2 weeks.
What gets me about users are those that "think" they know it all, but really don't. I don't know it all either, and I don't make people think I know everything, but I bet you any money I can find out the answer. I have the skills to know where to look and I know the basic's. ex. If a user asked me about SMTP, I'd fork over RFCxxx#.
UID also applies to users. User Intelligence Deficiency.
Some users just don't get it. Some users are IGNORANT and LAZY and want everyone else to do their work for them. I don't like those users. Some users don't have the brains/capacity to remember certain things, like their password.
I'm more inclined to help users who actually show some brains when asking me for help, rather then some dumb user who asks me the same question week after week.
I guess that means simple things for simple people...
I'm not saying all users are loser. I'm just saying the users who are lazy and ignorant and who refuse to learn are dumb.
I'll give everyone a first chance, after that, its up to them to impress me.
For example, what about those loser admins who are setting up web servers and then they end up getting the site defaced because of inexperience? People need to LEARN about setting up operating systems first.
Are drivers allowed to drive without some sort of license? I don't think so...
Dearest Scott,
I have to tell you Scott you have really struck a nerve with me.
Who died and left you in charge of judging "what is, and isn't funny" ?? I read some of your strips, the humour is remeniscent of the sunday comics, amusing but far from funny.
Mind you I have never laughed out loud at UF, but the familiarity and the frustration that the cartoon portrays, I can surely relate to. Therefore, I find it amusing. On the other hand, playing video games against what appears to be Barney, I cannot relate to.
Your "Help Desk" experience is quite impressive. You are/were what is referred to as a trained monkey, your actual computer experience/knowledge is limited to that of memorizing (as you put it), a script. Or as some people would call it, a FAQ. You memorize the FAQ, and it's answers, and you are magically made into a computer technician. BS!! You are a low cost alternative to a skilled and trained professional.
Building systems? Assembling the componets of systems is not at all a difficult task. I could set up a boot disk to ghost an image onto the hd, after you "assembled" it, and you would be building systems. Does that make you knowledgeable? I think not.
Overall, I would (if looking for a trained monkey) offer you $8 an hour. Need a job Scott? Keep it in mind.
I will tell you whats funny though... The VP of marketing calling you once a week to ask how-to make a shortcut to a folder on the server. Then 15 minutes later getting calls from a dozen marketing people saying all the sales reports have disappeared from the server... Can you imagine what he did? So then I patiently walk down to his office and go over with him (again) how to make a shortcut, while he glares at me like I am an asshole. The "poor under-educated users", BS!! These people have been working on computers for years, staring at them for 8 hours a day, and have never even once attempted to learn anything. WHY?? Cause it is sooo much easier to pick up the phone and call the SysAdmin , and harrass him with this BS, than to put forth any effort. It's sad. If I can spend my evenings in the office reading man-pages, the least they can do is take notes when they call me and ask me how to do the same thing, over and over and over and over. Their lazy, obnoxious, self-important bums.
When I first started using Linux (coming from a M$ world) it took me a few hours after that initial install to figure out how to mount a floppy. But Ya know what Scott? I (when learning new things) keep a pad and pencil next to me, in order to take notes. I wrote it down Scott, yep thats right, so I wouldn't have to embarrass myself again by asking that question in #linuxhelp. Ya know what Scott, after writing it down, I didn't have to look at it again. Ya know why that is Scott? Because I have the ability and desire to learn new things. It is the latter that the users are lacking, and it is the latter that me mock. We(I?) mock their laziness. Not their inability to learn, because I have users who can learn. they remember what I tell(teach) them.
I tell you what Scott, you stick to your little fantasy world of playing Madden2000 with Barney and I will stick to reading UF and laughing with my fellow computer professionals about our users.
Sincerely,
Sys Admin
"there's a big difference between kneeling down, and bending over" - FZ
He doesn't laugh because he has a tepid sense of humor, witness his comic, PvP, the graphic equivalent of AM radio. It's there, I see it, but it's got no flavor. It's background noise at best. But I'm not a heavy gamer... so he doesn't care about me, I'm not his target. He's not a help desk tech so I'm pretty sure Illiad doesn't sweat him in return. And I'm sorry, I WORK tech support and some down right morons call all day every day, sometimes all I can do is laugh when I say cp 'space' file.txt and the user types S-P-A-C-E... sorry, but that's dumb. And it gets worse, believe me. "I log in, I type my password, I get root@localhost /root and a dollar sign... so how do I get into Linux?" User:"My network doesn't work" Me:"Sir, let's start by just re-seating the cables" loooooong pause User:"Cables?" Me: "Yes, sir, they should run from your network card to the hub, or cable modem" loooooooooooong pause User: "Network card? I need a network card?" Me: "Uhhhh... yes sir... you did say your network didn't work, right?" User: "Yes! I can't use any files from my other machines..." Rather than tell the user how dumb they are, I correct them and laugh behind their back. So WHAT!?!? It's better than letting the stress of a repetetive and mind numbing ordeal get the best of you and even worse, letting spill out onto the user. User Friendly is incredibly true, just because Kurtz is an artist and gamer and doesn't see what it's like to work at an ISP or as an interface for low level users doesn't make it false. It has it's target market, and that target enjoys this type of thing. If you're a tech and you have insomnia, read PvP, if you want to laugh til it hurts, go elsewhere.
Absolutely. Some of the people I support have been using computers as long as I've been alive, and I get calls like "Help! I lost my Word Perfect!" all the time. I remember what it was like before I knew how to format a disk (age 5), and I have some practice dealing with them, having spent some time teaching newbies Windows ("Okay people, hold the mouse like this so it doesn't drag when you click..."), but it gets real frustrating, especially when the same people accidentally recycle the same icons week after week after week after week...
jpowers
-jpowers
Something that Mr. Kurtz isn't taking into light is the fact that these comics aren't directed towards your average computer user. This is why we have sites like CNN and Yahoo. These sites cater to a mass audience of people from computer tech guru's to the stay at home house husbands/mothers of 5.
UF caters to UFies... those of us who deal with computers daily and have to deal with the non-user on the other end of the phone. Its an outlet for us. We deal with a lot of people who may not be stupid... but are clearly not trying hard enough. to simply learn. I have clients that will run to me every time their computer locks on them and I have to explain the same old tired story that it happens once and a while, reboot, let scandisk -or- fsck do its thing and try again.
I just got a call from a user who has a webpage on one of our servers... the original was done by a person much like myself who did the page (in FrontPage no less iCK) and then left the company later for whatever reason. The client was calling me to ask me how to change things. Since this was out of the scope of tech support and into teaching someone how to use a program I simply told them their options.
1. Learn how to HTML yourself with FrontPage
or2. Hire someone to do it for you.
I told them I would be happy to make any regular changes to their page, but at my usual rates, they thanked me for my input and we left the call on a good note.. If seen in a comic strip I would have simply laughed my ass off and identified with it. Which is why the techs like myself like the strip. It gives us something that we can all laugh and identify with. We... are his audience.
Whats next... are we going to have people with no hair, bad fashion sense and a lousy pitching arm going after Charles Schulz for making fun of Charlie Brown's poor baseball game?
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
He doesn't laugh because he has a tepid sense of humor, witness his comic, PvP, the graphic equivalent of AM radio. It's there, I see it, but it's got no flavor. It's background noise at best.
/root and a dollar sign... so how do I get into Linux?"
But I'm not a heavy gamer... so he doesn't care about me, I'm not his target. He's not a help desk tech so I'm pretty sure Illiad doesn't sweat him in return.
And I'm sorry, I WORK tech support and some down right morons call all day every day, sometimes all I can do is laugh when I say cp 'space' file.txt and the user types S-P-A-C-E... sorry, but that's dumb. And it gets worse, believe me.
"I log in, I type my password, I get root@localhost
Or even worse.
User:"My network doesn't work"
Me:"Sir, let's start by just re-seating the cables"
loooooong pause
User:"Cables?"
Me: "Yes, sir, they should run from your network card to the hub, or cable modem"
loooooooooooong pause
User: "Network card? I need a network card?"
Me: "Uhhhh... yes sir... you did say your network didn't work, right?"
User: "Yes! I can't use any files from my other machines..."
Rather than tell the user how dumb they are, I correct them and laugh behind their back.
So WHAT!?!?
It's better than letting the stress of a repetetive and mind numbing ordeal get the best of you and even worse, letting spill out onto the user.
User Friendly is incredibly true, just because Kurtz is an artist and gamer and doesn't see what it's like to work at an ISP or as an interface for low level users doesn't make it false. It has it's target market, and that target enjoys this type of thing.
If you're a tech and you have insomnia, read PvP, if you want to laugh til it hurts, go elsewhere.
Sorry about the re-post, it makes more sense formatted...guess I'm just a stupid (l)user.
His name is Chris Jackson. Look I tend to disagree with Mr Kurtz but he has the webspace to speak his mind and if you don't like it, don't read it. Get your facts straight before you blast a guy. Nothing worse than a person telling off another with wrong data
Well, why don't you take your own advice? Seriously, you think we don't laugh at ourselves, at how ignorant we used to be about computers? You don't think that short order cooks laugh about some of their customers? What is so hard to understand about this? Has everyone lost touch with basic human nature? Complaining is a constitutional right, in all senses of the word. (sorry, there's a play on words there, if you can see it)
Leaving aside questions of whether anyone can really say "such and so is objectively not funny," leaving aside questions of whether clueless users "deserve" mockery, I think there's a fallacy in both the original rant and many of the comments. Humor is not always a weapon or a punishment to be doled out as retribution for real or imagined sins. A given target doesn't have to be "wrong" or "bad" to justify a few jokes about it.
Think of the tradition of the roast, where a bunch of your closest friends stand up and make jokes about you. By the logic of Kurtz's essay and many of the responses to it, you would have to be an unpleasant or evil person to "deserve" such a treatment. The way I see it, it's just a recognition of our universal fallible humanity.
Which is not to say that there isn't such a thing as cruel mockery. I think most of us understand that there's a point where you go from having a sense of humor to just being a jerk (even if that point varies from observer to observer). But if we start requiring a justification of deservedness for every joke, we may as well tear down the comic strips and replace them with nice, dry, unambiguous political essays.
In addition to being stupid, User Friendly is just the most unfunny, awful and ugly comic I've read. Don't publish it! Get rid of it!
The real fact is that tech support is intended to help a person through a problem. Not teach them how to use a computer. I and the other techs I have worked with all agreed that users should make an attempt to learn the basics (whether through a school, book, or other means) before coming to tech support. Those users who did not know the difference between a mouse and a keyboard (and there are many!!) should not be asking tech support. They should realize that they need training on what a computer is and how to use it. Scott Kurtz is asserting that techs are there to teach users. The reality is that techs are computer mechanics. Users come to tech support with specific problems that they cannot fix. You don't take your car to a mechanic and complain that you can't shift into "Drive" when you have manual transmission. Nor do you ask why the car won't run if you haven't put fuel in it. You should know this already. The fact is, users that ask stupid questions(ie "My cupholder is broken.", or "Where is the any key?") have no business running a computer until they learn what it is and how to use it. They should know enough to figure things out on their own and only call tech support as a last resort for difficult, non-usage based questions (ie driver problems, hardware errors, etc.). -john
Maybe PvP is an acquired taste. I looked back on the archives and nary a snicker did it cause me. I too have worked in tech support and have felt the pain. There is a huge difference betwen ignorance and belligerence which is what I got from a good deal of customers that refused to try to solve their problems logically. Humor is subjective and if this gut can't laugh at UF then it's best that he doesn't read it. Ironically there is a drop down link box with UF in it on his page.
Try reading Spacemoose. If you have any reason to hate online comic strips at all, you can find it here. :)
-- queef
I think he misses a big point about comedy. You must know your audience.
UserFriendly is not targeting my customers as an audience. It's tatgeting me. I think it's funny. I'm sure my customers would not think it's funny.
...."life is like an NT service pack; you never know what you..." sorry, could not resist. So you don't like geek humor. That doesn't mean it isn't funny. Please don't lecture us on what we should find funny. I for one am not a geek; I and other non-geeks do find UF funny. You do not. Deal with it.
Songs about an OS sucking are not geeky. They're NERDY. They're what make people look at us and think, "JESUS GOD, THESE PEOPLE NEED TO GET A LIFE."
Linux is an O/S, not a lifestyle.
Robert Heinlein in _Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land_ observed about humor: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting."
When you laugh, is it not at some thing or one? Is humor ever 'innocent'? Heinlein was right on; humor is a pointy stick that hurts in a very real sense. But that should not denegrate humor. People just need to be less thin skinned about being the butt of a joke. Hey, it happens to everyone.
Humor is not something that you can defend against. And it is certainly not a one way street. How many times have 'geeks' been on the pointy end of the humor stick? Not that we are made victims by that -- but it is ironic and absurd to suggest that geek humor is unfair to the non-geeky.
-P
Come laugh with me.
I read UF with ritualistic regularity. And if there's one thing about it that stands out far and above all others is that Iliad isn't laugh AT anyone (except maybe M$). Rather, he's asking us all to come and laugh WITH him -- oftentimes laughing at ourselves.
It hasn't been all that long ago that A.J. and Miranda had their 6 episode "date". And I found it quite refreshing (adding to the overall humor) that Iliad put the 'day star' as Miranda's words. A female geek fully immersed in the secluded life so characteristic of 'geekdom'.
If you can't laugh at yourself, well... I pity you.
~~~~~~~~
Signature illegible, could be somebody else.
...at getting him some publicity. That was the real point. Now if PvP was just funny it might actually do him some good.
What if these users were operating the heart monitors in an emergency room? Shame inflicts pain, but sometimes it outweighs the negative consequences as in: giving a child a pop on the rear end to keep them from running out into a busy street, or taking a drunks keys away by force to keep them from driving drunk. Having grades humiliates people (at least the ones that get low grades) but the pain motivates them to do better next time. Any new endeavor requires learning, and failing, and the ability to laugh at our failures is part of just growing up.
This troll was so obvious I'm surprised no one else has called him on it. User Friendly gets lots of publicity; how many of you even heard of PvP until now?Nice try, Scott. And too bad, because I actually enjoyed your DnD rant. Why stoop to something like this? IPO envy?
Jack
My wife is a physician who specializes to some extent in dealing with people who've been in horrible accidents, disasters, etc., and also deals with the rescue workers, medics etc. who have to go in. In a nutshell, the only way that the rescue folks cope over the long haul is a lot of cynical humor, or "gallows humor." The same is true of soldiers in combat. When you're getting slammed every day, you have to make light of the situation somehow.
When Kurtz says "...a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read...", he's actually right. Both are cruel blows to someone trying to learn (I leave out the many tech support callers who do not want to learn--others have documented them well enough). But then Kurtz makes the leap that a COMIC STRIP making fun of callers learning how to operate a computer is equivalent to REAL LIFE tech support doing the same. COMICS ARE NOT REAL LIFE. They are an escape from real life, where characters say what we wish we could say without losing our jobs. The users calling tech support in the strip aren't real people, so their feelings can't really be hurt.
The people who find the UF tech support strips funny are often those who have lots of things piled up they wish they could say. And as another poster mentioned, teachers tell jokes about their students too, just not where the kids can hear them. I certainly did when I used to teach. It doesn't detract from your ability to be supportive and helpful in the classroom--it makes it easier by removing some of the tension and frustration. Let people have their escape: comic strips are healthier than a lot of other forms I could name. And don't mistake comic strips for real life.
Jenny
I can't disagree more with your opinions.
And I think the point that he's trying to make isn't that experiences in tech support can't be funny. Strips like UF don't make fun of the tech support occupation. They make fun of the people that tech support is supposed to be helping.
UF doesn't make fun of the tech support people? I think it sure does. There are plenty of shots at tech folks in there.
At the company I work for, customers aren't referred to as 'users' because many don't understand that as anything but a negative term.
My company does the same thing. Just because we call someone a 'Business Partner' instead of a user doesn't mean a thing, IMHO. It has nothing to do with the name as much as it has to do with the attitude.
Tech support is about helping people. It's not about solving their problems, but getting them to solve their problems. Tech support employees are educators, because the more education they do, the better they serve their company.
Half right. TS is about helping folks. However, education is up to the person on the other end of the phone. My first question is 'Have you read the manual?' At least two thirds of the time the answer is no. In at least 75% of those, the answer was in the manual. TS is not a manual via phone. In my company, we have a training unit. They do a poor job. Not all their fault. Most training methods are junk these days.
We don't call them names behind their back because you never know when that information may be subpoenad and you get caught red-faced.
I save this for last. WHAT A JOKE! This is the most incredulous comment I have seen. If you and your company or you is that worried about being sued that you can't even joke on downtime, you need a new life or new company. Sorry. It has nothing to do with 'being professional.' Humor is simply part of life. I laugh at myself as much as I laugh at anyone else.
Im sorry, but this article is just so _wrong_. I find it hard to believe this person worked tech support anywhere for a _day_, let alone for four years. This article should have been laughed off of /. .
" Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read."
That is a genuinely horrible example. When I read this, I winced.
Reading is a basic life skill. There is no manual you can hear or watch to teach you how to read at a young age that you can absorb. You need personal instruction, repetition, and practice.
Computer use, however, is an advanced skill. By the time you have matured enough to read a manual. If you are signing up for internet service, it is assumed you know how to double-click. If you can't master the basics, you can't expect to learn the advanced.
What User Friendly mocks is not the user, it is the foolishness of people expecting something for nothing. While it is true that smart people can do stupid things, let's not forget that stupid people do a lot more stupid things.
If you want to drive, you have to try to learn. The same goes for anything else you learn as an adult.
"Anyone in the world, can learn how to work in tech support. It's basic memorization, there is no real math or intelligence skills required"
I can give you the 'math' part of the rant, if what you mean is 'theory' or 'education'. Because no such program exists. But it takes a great deal 'intelligence'.
I help train tech support staff for my company, Crosslink Internet Services. It is a small ISP, about 18,000 customers or so, but we run a small staff, so the employee/customer ration is about that of much larger companies. I have trained about 10-15 techs individually, and I can say, with personal experience, that not everyone can do this job. It takes language skills that many people do not have. It takes logic and problem-solving abilities that are uncommon and untrainable. It takes common sense too, which is what a lot of users lack. The very best ones have professionalism and a strong work ethic, which is another thing that many people lack.
"...the truth of the matter is that knowing how to operate a computer is not an accurate measurement of intelligence."
That is highly debatable. Ever notice how people that are generally regarded as highly intelligent tend to have relatively little trouble learning new programs? That they can do things like program VCRs, TVs, computers without even checking the manual? That they can adjust to new operating systems faster then those who -aren't- regarded as highly intelligent? And have you ever noticed how people who are generally learning-disabled or considered 'stupid' (I'll be brutally honest here) have problems doing simple operations, even when told exactly and precisely what to do?
"Almost every caller I ever helped was an intelligent person who used a computer for work or entertainment."
Most of the the people I talk with are genuinely stupid. They believe that, if they have a problem, they have the unreasonable expectation that it should be solved for free immediately and require no effort on their part. Do people have the same opinion of tech support people they have of auto mechanics?
"...jokes about computer games aren't funny. However, jokes about the people that play computer games are."
So, we can't make fun of inanimate objects, but we can make fun of people. But they can't be computer users who are learning, because they are just learning. At least he doesn't come out and say 'We should mock the people who are being paid to help users'.
"Ultimately, as we continue to move forward, the general public is going to reach the level of computer knowledge that the typical tech currently has."
How many of us have owned a car for over 10 years, and how many of us are qualified auto mechanics? How many of us use a toilet, and how many of us know how to fix busted pipes? How many of us know how to use a stove, refridgerator, microwave, TV, VCR, dishwasher, laundry washer, and how many of us know how to fix any _one_ of those devices should they break?
"When you read Help Desk you start to realize that the Scott Adams model of asking your fan base to send in material for your strips is a really bad idea."
I can see why. Scott Adams is published daily in thousands of newspapers, I can see why his model is a failure.
it is to laugh at just stupid tech support questions like "how do i print?" (press the the big fucking button that says print bitch!) This is what is to laugh at, not tech questions that we may find easy enough, but rather common fucking sense questions that have little to do with computers at all other than it happens to be the situation that the common sense is being applied to...refer to the printer example...
Seems to be a lot of redundancy on this thread. Allow me to repeat a few thing so we can all get it out of our systems once and for all. 1) "There is no accounting for taste" (Latin geeks, insert "non gustum whatever" in here), therefore lectures to us about how "UF is not funny" are inherently stupid, no matter how many arguments or "facts" you line up. If you really think you can prove that something is "not funny" when thousands of people think it is, then you are an idiot. 2) Telling us that we must not make fun of people is stupid, because that is what humor is all about, and in any case no one is advocating that we be rude to anyone. 3) Telling us that the UF artwork is crude or simple is pointless, because we read it for the humor, not the art. If art were the deciding criterion, most of the daily newspaper comics would never be syndicated. 4) Lecturing us on how UF is geek humor which is stupid and boring - what the hell are you doing here then??? Go away and stop contaminating yourself with geekiness. Have I missed anything? Now that I have repeated these for the Nth time, could you drop it and move on to something else?
I'm sorry. Truly, I am. I just dont have the 'heart' that most people do. I tell columbine jokes. I tell racist jokes (i'm mexican myself, and those are my favorite type of jokes) I can literally joke about anything. The only requirement, is that it's funny. Why am i like this? Because i just dont see the point in censoring life, at all. I respect others rights that are not this way, but no one is forcing them to look at cartoons. No one makes people visit user friendly. Where do you draw the line? Columbine perhaps? Yeah, i can see how some people would find columbine jokes totally wrong and offensive. What about air jokes? Man, there are some 'recycle' freaks out there that might find air jokes offensive. What about people that enjoy sex with animals? They would be offended if i made bestiatlity jokes, no doubt. Who's to decide? Where do you draw the line? How about we all practice the impossible, and live and let live. No one forces you to listen to these jokes. No one forces you to browse the user friendly cartoon. Respect their right to live, and hopefully, if you ever do something that 1 person on this planet considers to be offensive, they will have that same respect for you. It's an impossible ideal, but i can do my part and practice what i preach. Can you?
And he needs someone who understands websites to help him with his.
If I'm reading a comic on a web page and I click on the link for previous comics, why would I get a comic by someone else?
This doesn't happen with www.dilbert.com
or
www.userfriendly.org
or
any of the other sites I've seen.
But it does on his site.
And he's the judge of humour.
I think both of you need to get out a little more.
You can PAY to go to CLASSES on HOW TO USE A COMPUTER or a SPECIFIC PROGRAM.
Many techs and sysadmins do this (or their boss pays for the class).
Tech support is not a substitute for TRAINING.
Let's take a teacher trying to show a child how to read.
The teacher didn't write the book.
The teacher didn't print the book.
Nor does the teacher work for the company that did.
So, if a child wants to learn to read, he or she should buy a book and then call the company that printed that book or the author who wrote that book and have them/him/her teach the child to read?
Does anyone else see the problem here?
Scott Kurtz declares voce ex recto:
>'Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. It's just plain wrong.'
First off, teachers teach kids how to *learn*. How to read is just a part of it. By the time they are adults, they should have the patience and fortitude to pick up the items and books necessary to learn how to properly use a piece of equipment such as a computer, or they should know to just leave it alone. Instead, the average computer user hits their learning curve like a wall, and immediately starts whinging for someone to tell them what to do before they've even cracked the shrinkwrap on the manual. "{whine}How do I..." "page 7." "Where is..." "page 4." "But then why doesn't it..." "Printed on the cover." "I want it to just *work*!" "have you considered using a pencil instead?" I have sympathy for people who haven't learned something yet, pity for those who can't learn, and nothing but scorn for those who refuse to learn. Imho, this is pretty typical of anyone technical, let alone IS professionals.
*shrug* laugh, cry, deal, or leave.
--yaBOFH
A lot of what's said in the comics in question is about some dumb stuff people say that should be common sense. I've had people before when I worked tech that didn't even know your computer needs to be plugged into the wall or to have their modem plugged into the jack to make them work! Plus, if this guy thinks we should censor the comics, then we should treat him like any other censor in this country and tell him not to read it. I would suspect the "people" being made fun of probably don't even know about these comics. If techies didn't relate some of their funny stories or vent some frustration with harsh clients, you'd have a lot of sullen techies.
I just wanted to let you guys know that the "13 things people with email should know" was an email joke that was sent to Scott. I received the same email from his wife at the same time. He did not personally write it. You have to take these rants with light hearted attitude. Scott is a funny guy in person and he just tries to relay that to the internet to share it with the world. As with most typed text, the emotions get lost in the mix.
-- Jumpg8
More seriously, I think there's a very real distinction he's completely missed between people who don't know something and those who won't know it. Everyone's been in the first group at some point. Membership in the second group, however, requires someone to resist any attempt to learn about the tools they're using. Almost everyone would find it ridiculous if someone refused to learn how to drive a car but insisted on driving anyway ("What do you mean I have to get a license? I paid $BIGNUM for this car and I want to drive it NOW!"); sadly the same behaviour with a computer is not only accepted but almost lauded in certain circles...
I find User Friendly extremely funny. A lot of times the subject is right on the mark. The inexperienced are not always the target. Microsoft is a favorite target. THe strip also pokes fun at some the "geek stereo types". Once they even poked fun at the Sceintist that blundered the Mars landing.
Personally, I think some of the replies are from people who just don't get it. Face it. Some people are just plain stupid. For example, Hemriod Cremes in the U.S. have a warning on them to not ingest them internally. The reason it's there is because someone was stupid enough to ingest a creme internally.
Just because you don't get it...that doesn't mean it's not funny. I have read a lot of the User Friendly Strip (including the archive), and I have yet to find something that was done in poor taste.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
There is 2 types of computer users:
1) those you wish to learn
2) those who have to learn
Those that wish to learn, trully and utterly enjoy learn about differant aspects of a computer, inside and out. The people in group 1 their goals are to
learn computers.
have fun with computers.
create things with computers (programs, networks, etc)
When these people in group 1 can't firgure out a problem, or takes an extended amount of time to firgure out a problem, they rarley get mad, if ever. They think about the problem in a logical manner, if that doesn't work, they try viewing the problem in an abstract way.
The second group of people, think the computer is something they have to use. Either because they are forced to on the job or some other reason where they can't 'wiggle' out of not using the machine. The people in group 2 goals are:
avoid computers.
find a "freind" that knows allot about computers.
use the computer to get XYZ task done.
put 'computer skills' in their resume.
When people in group 2 have a problem with a computer, they ussually react to their envoirment in this matter.
Find someone who knows about computers and ask them to fix it.
Find someone who knows about computer and DEMAND them to fix it.
Get highly irrate with the computer and extremely mad (ussually removing themselves from the envoirment).
Start going into a panic fit, thinking that they did something wrong (even if it is a program bug, or even a normal operation, like a window opening).
This types of users don't sit down and calmly and logically thing about the real problem they are having.
These users secertly HATE computers and wish NOTHING to do with them. They HATE computers and EXPECT the people in group 1 to slove ALL their problems without ANY effort on their part what so ever.
When people in group 1 make fun of these computer users, they are not making fun of the newbie that are willing to learn. NEVER has a newbie been flamed for reading a how-to. NEVER has ANYONE been made fun of for reading books, trying on their own and for putting an effort into their learning. The people be made fun of are the people that want everything done for them, the ones how don't do anything for themsevles, the ones that can't or won't even try. Those are the ones being mocked, and I see nothing wrong with that.
But if you EVER flame a newbie for reading a doc or for honestly tring, I will be on you faster than stink on a monkey! that is just not cool man
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Scott's completely missed the point. Having work tech support for well over three years there are people out there that are abusive, rude, crass and uncaring. I had to take calls from people who, if their problem wasn't fixed 5 minutes ago they were cussing and screaming and hollaring and would *NOT* listen. After 1/2 hour of abuse we'd come to find out that he was doing something wrong. He'd hang up. No thank you, nothing.
Then there are the people who are utterly opposed to the idea of learning anything at all about computers. Their mantra is "But I shouldn't have to know that!" Sorry pal, yes, you do need to know that. Computers, like any other tool, requires some learning and training to operate.
Finally, not everyone can be tech support. It takes a great deal of patience, a lot of training and a good helping of intelligence. The good techs know how to solve a problem not because it is on a script, but because they can work through the problem. In my shop we couldn't script 1/3rd of the problems and each time Microsoft or Netscape came out with a new version we had to start from scratch since the "options" wasn't in the same place. "Options" became "tools" and was moved from "edit" to "preferences" and so on.
The bad techs get fired, the good techs get burnt out and either quit or finally get paid their due in a better position with better pay.
Through all of that, ALL of it, the techs have two options. Either laugh or blow up at the customers. The latter isn't an option so the former is all they can do and keep getting a paycheck.
That is where User Friendly (the *only* strip I read on a daily basis) comes it. I'm out of the tech game now but I completely sympathize with those who are still in it. I know how much abuse they get and it isn't pretty. I knoew there are users out there who are rude, are crass, are complete and utter pricks and don't want to learn anything. I know all that, read UF, and laugh. Not at any one individual, nor at the techs or anyone else, but at the whole absurdity of the situations presented and knowing that yes, I *have* been there!
Finally, I took a look at PvP to see what Scott viewed as "humor". I picked a good 20-30 different comics from his archives. Not one laugh, guffaw, snort, shook head. Nothing. It was not funny in the least. He wishes that we would all move "past" the humor presented in User Friendly and get onto something with "real" content. The first strip of PvP that I read was someone shooting someone else in the eye with a nerf gun. Oh, that is real content. Then I read a strip about someone being forced to wear a Pokemon costume at a Holloween party. Ohh, stop my laughter now.
From what I can see Scott can not nor will he ever approach the wit and humor Illiad has packed into UF. Just remembering the whole "raid" on Microsoft by the gang brings a smile to my face. That is real nerf gun content. The ROT13 y2k joke is just so subtle that geeks would get it right off and write a perl/vi/sed/etc macro to read what the strip said. All the fun poked at the battles between Linux and FreeBSD, the different distributions of Linux, Open Source and Microsoft with a hint of BeOS and even the classic runs of Dust Puppy versus Crud Puppy. Hell, Illiad even got the classic editor wars (vi vs. emacs) thrown into a rather unique and fun situation.
That is comedy.
Scott clearly doesn't get it for if all he sees is UF belitting people who call into tech support and equates all that belitting with the common user instead of the rare luser when it is clearly so much more. Obviously, he isn't a geek.
Scott, leave the geek humor to the geeks and keep your non-geek self out of it, ok?
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
Don't get caught helpless and clueless about something on your computer, especially if that cluelessness resulted in the accidental wiping out of your hard drive or something.
Somewhere out there, Karma will be laughing.
((Scott seems to miss the point entirely on his way to his politically correct rant. We're not laughing at the "dumb" user. We're laughing at the comedy of the situation itself. The sheer outrageousness of the moment.))
Nope. I'm laughing at the user. Look, anyone who saw something LABELED cd-rom and tried to put something else (a cup?!?) in there is a MORON. YES, they should be laughed at - this is not ignorance (lack of knowledge), this is stupidity (lack of desire for knowledge). BIG difference. Ignorance isn't laughed at by anyone I know; people will generally try to help rather than just laugh at it. But stupidity sets itself up to be laughed at.
From the article:
((They usually involve an incredibly smart technical support agent forced to suffer through the ignorance of his clients and peers.))
No, they usually involve a tech support person forced to suffer through people who don't know how to put the plug into the wall, or who absolutely insist that, when they forget something (password, where they put a file, what they did with their lunch) it is YOUR FAULT. Really stupid people, in other words, not ignorant ones.
(( Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher
making fun of a child learning how to read.))
No. Making fun of these morons is like a high-school teacher posting to a teachers' board about the students who were supposed to read 'Romeo and Juliet' - and then go on to say that it was written by Napoleon. Or the ones who were supposed to read their history lesson and try to say that Edgar Rice Burroughs built the Panama Canal. It's not about ignorance, it's about STUPIDITY.
((I use a toilet everyday but never has
a plumber openly mocked me for not knowing how to fix a pipe.))
You've never tried to do your laundry in the tank, either. Nor have you tried to use the toilet to dispose of sulphur (That one happened at a school I went to). Get the idea?
Frankly, my mother in law is totally clueless about computers. She bought one, in an attempt to find a new way to do her artwork (she's having breathing problems after years of professional oilpainting). She flat-out admits that she's afraid of the thing. Attempts to get her to do anything more complex than turn it on are likely to send her running from the room. But I've told her some of the 'clueless' jokes from UF, and she's found them amusing. They aren't about newbies, or people who are afraid or don't know. They're about total morons who refuse to read the directions or even use common sense.
If my mother-in-law can laugh about them, I can't imagine why anyone else wouldn't.
-Elthia
1) The entire cast of user friendly are losers. That's what's so funny. Sure, the phone support guy can laugh at the clueless users, but they can't ask someone out for a date unless they're in a chat room. None of them have lives or even decent clothes. The manager is devious and clueless at the same time. They're all convinced Linux is best (oh god, they're slashdot moderators) but then fight over WHICH linux is best. One of them is even a Slashdot "first poster".
2) If you don't find it funny, read something else. There's a lot of strips I don't find funny for one reason or another. Sometimes the strips seem cruel to me. I won't miss Charlie Brown having the ball pulled away from him repeatedly. Maybe that just hit's too close to home. On the other hand, Thelma the sperm burping gutter slut from the Dysfunctional Family Circus always made me laugh. I miss it dearly. We all have things we find funny.
3) Humor is Tragedy. If you didn't get that in high school then watch TV for another 30 hours this week and pay attention. The basic plot for a comedy is for something so terrible to happen that it becomes funny. There will always be people who don't like it, often because the problem hits too close to home. On the other hand, I noticed that when I had stressed out too much certain dark films became funny. Brazil can be funny or horrible depending on my job.
4) We really need moderation on these news articles. I really think this one, if it had been a response could have quickly been moderated down to -1, troll. Something I'd like to see in slashdot 5.0 is the creation of an "uber message board" where anyone with a Karma rating of 25 or more (the score:2 posters) can suggest an article, and there would be people chosen to become article moderators (with articles ending up in the usual +5 to -1 range). This would allow us to go through articles based on ratings the same way we can go through responses. Or would it be better to build that as a competing alternative to slashdot?
No Zen is good zen
There is that other comic they print in Linux Journal (not the UF one) that is MUCH funnier than UF...
Of course it's funny. That's why there is some (albeit dry) humor in my topic. I find it hard to believe that this guy spent 4 years working tech support. I've spent two, and learned a lot about the human nature in general, not just computers. For one thing a good percentage (I'd say 40% from my own experience) of ISP tech support calls are simply people who either have not read the instructions that were provided (what gets me is that they will dig through the manual to where we buried our tech support number and not read anything in between) or people who read the instructions, and instead of following them call for a 'walk-through'. I just got off of the phone with a customer who read to me the entire set of instructions for logging onto his ADSL service and then asked me what to do. It says to click onthe red button, what do I do? Ok, it says to type in my username and password here, what do I do? These issues aren't about learning how to use a computer, they're about following instructions, parsing simple english statements and not being helpless (or what I call "willfully stupid".) Telling a person on 3 seperate occasions to please write down the error message that they are getting is not uncommon. This isn't humorous, it's depressing. Most people do one of three things here, either quit for a better job, learn to laugh at it, or like me, learn how to push it back onto the customers who are the worst. Try this at home folks:
Tech Support: Ok have you followed the intructions on page three?
Luser:no
TS:Turn to page three and read step one to me.
C:"put the cd in the drive"
TS:Have you done that?
C:no...
TS:go ahead and do that
C:OK
TS:OK, now what is step two?...
And so forth and so forth, by step three they're totally pissed and off the phone, you have a good laugh and a nice story in your callers database...
Yes and I know I'm a meanie, asshole, whatever you're going to call me. The only thing I can say to that is you're right, but at least one person has learned to RTFM before calling thanks to me...
Before the comics there were the email and USENET postings about the guy calling in about his cup holder (cdrom tray) and the mouse on the screen and the any key.
One should look at it as the vaudeville of the 21st century -- we can laugh at ourselves and our incompetant and primadonna users as well -- but we hold back all the best wrath for our ignorant and uninspired executives.
Who champions the Execs? They are more like children than anyone else!
-- memoid
>'Folks, a tech making fun of someone
d !" mile a minute attitude, and a whole host of others.
>learning how to operate a computer is
>like a school teacher making fun of a
>child learning how to read. It's just
>plain wrong.'
First of all, let me say, that taking your moral indignation out on a comic strip is rather silly. Comics are known to mock, ridicule, and hold the parts of our soceity up to light that most people wouldn't. Same with comedians.
Secondly, without any moral value placed on it, I'd like to explain why this "Once upon a Time" tech support guy used to mock his users so badly.
I started out my tech support gig with 3com. I was paid $6 an hour to do "pre sales" tech support....essentially configuring entire networks for salesmen calling in that didn't have the first clue how this stuff worked. Finally, one day in frustration of having to hear "rooter" one too many times, I asked the guy how much he made a year. It was something in the realm of $50k (or so he claimed). "Isn't it nice to know that your big fat paycheck is solidly built on the back of someone who knows what they are doing and is being paid slave wages?"
And that's what tech support is.
I've had to deal with insurance agencies and blue haired old ladies afraid of their keyboards, New Yorkers and their "I'm right, you're wrong, fix it now goddamitbecauseIamthemostimportantpersonintheworl
What kept me sane?
Mocking them. I had no other real choice. Its the curse of the "Customer is always right", you can't SAY the things you want to directly to the customer, unless you don't mind losing your job. So outside on cigarette breaks we'd have out 15 minutes mocking session, laugh, and let some of the venom out. (That and all the nickelodeon toys like Gak, Smud, and floam. Those are pretty darn good stress relivievers, and perfect to strangle while you cheerfully tell the customer "Annoy me? Not at all! Let me fix that right up!")
So I cheer the comics for giving the frustrated techs out there a release. And still think it's a little odd for someone to get bent out of shape for.
since when has humor EVER BEEN PC ??? THAT is why its' funny :)
Why don't we all acknowledge that sometimes what we find funny others may not? Humor requires an objectivity that some possess and some don't, and those who don't may never be able to step far enough away to be able to laugh at certain situations. So instead of getting into a "It's funny!" "It is not!" "Is too!" type of fight, why not just say it's all good as long as no one gets hurt and let it go? (And yes, since most of you will be wondering, I love UserFriendly . . . but I'm also computer illiterate. Objectivity anyone? ;))
Humor is Humor. Everyone sees it differently. Someone who may think User Friendly is the best thing since sliced bread, maybe think that PvP is the worst thing since a root canal. And vice versa. Personaly, I don't think Mr. Kurtz suggestion of the strip Help Desk to be that funny. Instead of making fun of the users, it just makes fun of the tech support instead. It's all in the eyes of the beholder.
Why has it grown to the point in this nation where people can't have a good laugh. Have a little humor to laugh at themselves and others. No permanent harm is intended, it's not the end of the world. I've been the butt of many jokes when I've been living in my dorm in Wisconsin. From being made fun of for being a Bears fan, to just simply being from Illinois and therefor being a "F***ing Illinois Bastard," or FIB for short. I don't let them get to me. Sure, it might get a rise out of me for a second, but then I realize it's just a joke. No harm is intended. It's just an attempt to make people happier. See themselves in another light.
As for the comics that make fun of the users, I would like to think that they, the users, take a moment to laugh at themselves and maybe even learn something from them. Like what to and not to do to a computer and when calling tech support. It's good to learn from other peoples, and your own, mistakes. Why hide the fact that it does happen and let more and more people do it, when you can put a comic spin on it and let them know what to avoid.
Of course, these are just my opinions, I have been proven wrong before.
Junon
Insanity is only a state of mind...
I see Kurtz blasting because UF is better than what he can generate.
Does it poke fun at newbies? Sure!
But... the biggest fun poking is at the brain dead... Come on... if you complain that your computer isnt working because your house's power is out you dont have any business operating a toaster!
I think fun should be poked at the brain-dead..
because it's the brain dead that make this world a pain... "suing a Mc.donalds because the coffee was hot comes to mind....."
I actually think they dont go far enough.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I agree. UF is a skillfully humorous strip in that it relieves us of the need to feel pity for the plight of the caller through either having the caller relentlessly persist in their folly, despite all advice to the contrary, or by having the tech support person suffer to a similar if not larger degree in response to the callers situation.
/., but I must say he is woefully clueless about the ways of the world. Good-natured but insightful humor is extremely difficult to write. The closer you get to being openly antagonistic, without actually doing so, the harder the laugh you'll get. UF is getting better at this all the time, and I salute them. This is why I like the South Park tv show better than the film, because the tv show forces the writers to work within certain limits, which in turn forces them to be more clever, thoughtful and downright devious in getting laughs. ('Uncle Fscker' takes the cake tho', I must say!)
The kid who wrote the article probably didn't expect a write-up on
Peanuts, in its hey-day (1970's) did this all the time. There was a LOT of mean-spirited ranting at the foibles Charlie Brown, which was the most common 'plot' in the strips. Remember those little books we used to order from Scholastic Book Service? Read 'em again! We didn't really feel sorry for him though, because he would almost always have some cheerfully apologetic excuse for what had happened the irony of which would cause Lucy or whomever was confronting him to flip over and go "AAAAGH!" The 'meanie' suffered more than Charlie Brown.
Is it *nice* for Lucy to rant and call Charlie Brown a Block Head? No. In real life it would be upsetting. In the context of a skillfully written and drawn comic strip, it *is* funny, and gives us all a good chance to blow off a little steam and/or laugh at ourselves.
UF is more of the 'blowing off steam' variety, and is hence *more* funny to 'insiders' than it ever will be to 'outsiders'. Some sensitive souls will feel 'bruised'. Some sensitive souls have a strange (I think perverse) *need* to feel 'bruised' by others on a regular basis. These people annoy the hell out of me with their righteous posturing and soapbox whining. Such is life.
Go figure.
**>>BELCH
When I was 10 years younger, if you bought a printer, it came with complete documentation that included the full command set of the printer and how to program it. Now you get a three page color splash sheet telling you how to plug it in. But the deal with computer programs is even more scary. When I bought WordPerfect 4 back in 1986 or so, it came with a thick binder full of documentation. That documentation include a) a reference guide, b) an introduction, and c) a "howto" guide. I scanned the binder prior to installing WordPerfect for the first time, and had no problems.
Meanwhile, Office 2000 is undeniably more complex than WordPerfect ever was. Office 2000 comes with no (zero) printed documentation. RTFM? *WHAT* FM?!
What happened was this: Software vendors said "well, it's costing a lot of money to print dead tree copies of our documentation and revise and update them regularly." Software vendors said "and oh, BTW, we don't have any tools that'll produce documentation both in hyperlinked form and in dead tree form." And thus software vendors said "thus we'll only provide documentation in hyperlinked form." Generally in a format that only their own proprietary browser will read, with no real search capability or ability to go straight to a section without going through a bunch of hokum...
The problem is that consumers don't care! They didn't read the manual anyhow, and still don't read the manual (because they can no longer find it), so why should they care?
Sigh.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
While yes, laughing at the technologically impared, IS like laughing at a child learning how to read. But on the other hand, is there any form of humor that doesn't make fun of something? That's the nature of humor. Something out of the ordinary is poked fun at. Even the old joke "Why did the chicken cross the road...to get to the otherside" joke pokes fun at a person's attempt to find the 'funny' answer only to find that it's the obvious answer.
If you look deeply into any humor, you will find that there is now way that you can avoid ofending anyone. How many of you out there can remember your parents laughing at something you did as a child that hurt your feelings? How many of you have laughed at something your kids did later on in life?
The real issue here is the fact that we as a society, seem to have lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. I read userfriendly and I remember my growing pains in learning the PC. The reason I enjoy it is because I can remember the days when I was that clueless newbie. I can remember falling down off my bike as a child and scraping across 15 ft of gravel, looking up at my mom (whom I was racing) and saying "I won". It still hurt like hell, but I was STILL able to look on the bright side of it. If more of us could do that, then the world would be a better place.
We need to learn to laugh at ourselves again. It's as simple as that.
BTW: The rest of the UserFriendly comic posted in his rant was the customer saying "You don't know if I'm being stupid or being smart do you?"
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Read Kurtz's "13 things everyone on email should know" I'd say it's just as condescending. This stuff would make a few good user friendly's. . .
My other computer is your Windows box
Granted, I love my job, I love solving problems and giving our customer's the security they need to sleep at night, knowing that their financial data for the past 5 years is not ruined. But there is a side of the job where one needs to laugh at the circumstances.
Tech Rep: "Ma'am, do you still have the box your computer came in?"
Customer: "Why, yes I do, I keep all my unopened manuals in there."
Tech Rep: "What you need to do, ma'am, is get that box, put your computer back in, and ship it back to the company with a note saying that you are too stupid to use a computer."
On the true end of things, I have taken all of the funny UFie Tech Support Cartoons (and some personal favorites) and hung them on my cubicle walls. I have become a mecca to some of my co-workers who need a good laugh.
ie.
June 13, 1998
June 14, 1998
But, I can see why some would not find it funny, but to attack it as this article did, was uncalled for. Humor comes in many levels, and personally, this is what gets me through my day.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
I don't know about everyone else, but I've had to work those sorts of tech jobs before. There is a lot of emotional abuse, but there are a lot of friendly people who are intelligent but unlearned. Myself and coworkers are often very patient with the very, very unlearned people, but yes we'll poke fun at them later for missing things that seem obvious to us. I don't like dealing with the former group however, because they attempt to belittle me and so on and so forth. They usually blame the technician for their idiocy and understandably it causes some grief. Things like user friendly are a great way to release some of the tension people like this can create in in the tech, because at the very least it shows s/him how amusing the whole situation is (from his/her standpoint) and that s/he isn't alone in her/his frustration. The people placing those sorts of calls are almost surely the same people that made fun of me in gradeschool because I was pudgy and not the best at kickball or something. They play an emotional game with you where they assert their dominance and you are forced to knuckle under, and it makes them feel even better. It feels rather good, however, because I can play the same game with them, but better. I'm their best bet for a tech, and I'm going to have the same sadistic fun with them. I'm not hoping they learn a lesson, but there is a kind of irony there. I don't expect them to find that, though, if they have trouble understanding ``no, nothing was missing from the box, those extra ports on the back of your computer are for later expansion.''
UF is stupid and tech support people are lame idiots that generally full of misinformation.
The phone is ringing! Better not roll another call, tech-boy!
>> "But Scott, I work tech support and we constantly get calls from complete idiots." They're not idiots, they just don't understand how a computer works internally. <<
No, Scott, they are idiots. Adults who can't tell left from right, who can have a single phrase repeated to them five times and still forget it a minute later, who can't recognize patterns they've seen repeated a hundred times, who wonder (and I'm not making any of this up) why smoke pours out of their machines when they force plugs or connectors into incongruent sockets, are idiots. No one gets out of kindergarten without understanding that the circular peg can't fit in the square hole.
I recognize that the reason it's me answering the phone, and not them, is that I get excited about computers and technology, and I want to learn how it all works, and they don't. I understand that computers aren't for everyone, and that people who don't care as much as me shouldn't be expected to learn as much as I have. I'm more than happy to help out a polite user with a shred of intelligence who simply can't figure out how to work what is, I admit, a very confusing interface (no matter what OS you use). I get plenty of users like that every day, and I'm always glad when I do. I talk them through their problem, sometimes I shoot the breeze with them for a minute or two, I offer general advice in case their problem recurs, and when I'm done I always feel good about having, in some small way, made a contribution to society.
But, as anyone who works in customer support of any kind will tell you, there are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of rude people with unrealistic expectations. And if I'm less likely to get upset about those people because I can read a few comic strips that sympathize with my situation -- comic strips that the idiots in question will never read anyway, because they don't find them funny -- well, then that's a great thing. Tech support people put up with a hell of a lot, including the idiots -- do you think, Scott, that we laugh at them while they're still on the phone? that we'd be able to keep our jobs if we did? -- and if a couple of relatively harmless comic strips are what we get in exchange for having to deal with callers who (a) won't accord us the basic human respect & decency that everyone deserves, and (b) won't take a few seconds to step back and think of any possible alternate solutions to a problem before they rush to call us, well, I'm sorry, but I don't see what the big deal is. Their inability or unwillingness to exercise their own brains is their problem, not ours. There's help for it, but that's a different phone number. And, to be quite honest, I don't think that we, as a society, should tolerate or enable people who won't think for themselves. That's irresponsible behavior, and it only makes life harder for everyone else.
In any case, the analogy:
>> a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. <<
. . . is an inaccurate one. We're not there to teach; if we were, we'd have to have the appropriate certification before being hired. We're merely damage control, there to provide quick fixes for relatively small problems. I'm all for teaching people who are willing to learn -- I know full well that none of us were born knowing the slightest thing about how to use a computer, and I also realize that the better I educate a user, the less likely they are to need to call me back -- and I do what I can in that capacity, but unfortunately it's really not something I can spend a lot of time on if there are others waiting to be helped.
I do hate people who mock newbies, partly because, lord knows, I've been a newbie many, many times in my life, and I will be many, many times again before I die. But there's an important distinction to be made between those who haven't learned yet and those who refuse to learn. And believe you me, I'm definitely not getting paid enough to save the latter category from themselves.
[We Have No Product] [The Swindle
Anybody ever watch SNL anymore. I know ITS not funny, but its interesting to note that they have an occasional skit starring "Ed the Tech Support Guy" which is basically just about the most under-socialized, geeky, poorly dressed, unhygenic tech support guy who basically just wanders around, acts arrogantly, insults everyone who asks him questions, and basically considers everyone he works with an idiot. ... And people laugh at him... not WITH him, AT him. So every time I wander past a cubicle in tech support with a dozen User Friendly's pasted on the walls, or coffee cups with "I don't have time to explain this to you" or posters on user idiocy... I just have to think back to that skit, and realize that the world at large has only so much respect for our profession as we are willing to give them. Not that I haven't laughed or screamed at the obstinancy and bull-headedness of some users, but I don't really try to make a habit of it. Because I don't really want to be crammed into the already well-established stereotype of the ubergeek jackass.
Tim Gaastra
Tim Gaastra
Build a better mousetrap and the world will immediately get their fingers caught in it.
Hi,
;)
i work in techsupport also, i understand your point totaly.. but please, don't let it get to you.. you sound awfully frustrated in your posting..
you have to understand, some ppl just do NOT WANT to learn.. they hate computers, it scares them, they have been doing well without them for years.. and then one day, their managers decide that they should start using one..
and the bomb drops..
they dont want to but they have to..
so.. obviously, when something goes wrong on that mysterious machine, it is the fault of the machine.. and we - as poor techies - are the symbol of that machine. After all, we created them, understand them, brought them into their lives..
therefor.. we are evil..
don't you just love it..
don't let it get to you.. i for one live my job, no matter how frustrating it can be.. i like helping ppl.. and i like userfriendly..
I fully agree with Kurtz on all counts: while it is one thing to make fun of the willfully stupid, it is another thing entirely to bash newbies and inexperienced persons who are just starting out in the computer world. Three years ago I had to ask my class instructor how to delete files from my disk on the Macintosh- if I hadn't used my connections to land in the output room of my school, I would not have the experience I do now- a fairly high-level understanding of Windows and Mac OS.
Making fun of the less experienced can be equated to high school behaviour, noteably that of the "in" crowd in their treatment of the "not in" crowd. As long as the person is inexperienced, s/he will be doing things and asking questions that seem silly to us- but odds are that we've all committed our own faux pas in the course of learning. Ridicule has proven to be a detriment to learning- if someone makes fun of your incapability in the area in question, it's an easy leap to the conclusion "Screw this, and screw you!", further retarding the learning process by turning ignorance into a sort of conditioned phobia.
Truth be told, I find neither strip that Scott references to be even remotely amusing- Goats and PVP seem to be more my line. Humor for the sake of humor is the way to go- humor at the expense of another is going to hurt the butt of the joke if they are not the sort of person to take it lightly.
Having been on both sides of this, the clueless and the techie, I think that strips like this are perfectly fine. It seems like as time rolls on we are more concerned with being as proper as we can be and stopped having fun. Nobody seemed to complain at the BOFH series, and I know a lot of Operaters who aren't ashamed to admit they fit that definition at times. We were all newbies at one point, nothing is wrong with stepping back, laughing at ourselves and seeing how far we have come.
"Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt" - Chris DiBona
Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read.
Okay, fine. But the people UF is making fun of are not trying. Same goes for any other tech support strip, or even any other tech support joke.
Someone calls me up (worked tech supp for a while) and tells me that we broke their computer. Tells me constantly that they didn't change anything. Turns out that they'd written their email address in the address field in windows TCP/IP setup. They just aren't trying.
Now, if someone calls me up with a real problem; say their modem driver is kinda screwy so they need an init string, or maybe the line they're calling is down; that I don't laugh at. That's just not funny. Laughing at them because they don't know the init string, or how to find the init string, or even that they need one, just doesn't make any sense.
---
END OF LINE
Comics like User Friendly vent the anger and and despair felt by techies trying to clue the clueless, when the clueless assume that they know what they're doing and they end up making the problem worse. How is this bad?
You know, if his comic didn't suck so damn much,
I might listen to this blowhard. Who cares what he thinks? If humor didn't exist in Tech Support, most folks would quit anyway. You HAVE to have a carefree, easy going attitude about thousands of idiots screaming at you for mostly
their own ineptitude or inexperience.
da' fly
I do find there to be a problem with his analysis of User Friendly/Dilbert et al., though. These strips make fun of the fact that sometimes people who are incapable of doing the work are the ones who get to make the decisions as to how the work ought to be done. That is a problem because it can lead to disasters. To take a game related disaster let us look at the events that lead up to the American video game industry collapsing. The key event in this was, in my opinion, Atari's aquisition by Warner Brothers. After the aquisition, Nolan Bushnell was forced out, and people who didn't give a damn about the technical or creative requirements of making games but were more interested in maximizing profits took over the industry. Game designers were exploited and forced to create badly designed, rushed out code by people in the upper echelons who just didn't get video games. (Hence, Pac-Man for the 2600, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and other abominations.) When I read the story of the downfall of the American video game industry, I laugh a bitter little laugh. It's not a "fun" laugh it is a sardonic laugh at a terrible folly. The final joke on these executives was they way they tried to convince everyone that console gaming was just a fad that had burned itself out. (This was later proved not to be the case ;-) It would've been better, though, if people had been laughing at the way the industry was being run before it collapsed, though. It might have made some of those suits think, "Hey, look at the way they mocked us in the latest insert strip name here, maybe we'd better make some changes, I don't want to look like a fool."
So, mocking people who call tech support, may be a cheap shot. Mocking Dilbert's Boss when he is easily convinced an Etch-A-Sketch is a laptop isn't a cheap shot, however, it is perfectly sound satire. I'm hoping the message people will take away from that is, "Well, I guess if I'm going to be running a computer company, I might consider trying to make an effort to learn something about computers instead of spending all my time on golf. Otherwise, I might look stupid like the pointy haired boss in Dilbert."
Besides, there is plenty of comedy that is based on cruelty, anyway, it is part of the nature of comedy. Heck, just watch any episode of Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python or even lowbrow fare like The Three Stooges to see the point.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Oh yeah, I distinctly remember writing in my post "Oh By The Way, I'm Telling You To Not Like User Friendly, This Is My Command".
/., you are definitely a geek.
Get off your soapbox. I didn't tell you the time of day, let alone what you should find funny.
As for you not being a geek, you're reading
- Techie asks what the password is, response is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk'. First joke: clueless user who thinks the password is what is shown on screen when he types.
- Doubletake! Techie is unix guru and for a horrible second wonders what would happen if every character in the password was a wildcard character! This, not the first frame, is what had me LOL.
- Twist! Techie begins stammering and trying to find out if the guy REALLY TYPED that, and bam! Suddenly the victim, the hapless luser, turns on him with a "Muahahaha! You don't know if I'm an idiot or really really clever, DO you?" And sure enough, the techie doesn't...
- ...but in fact the joke is also on us the readers, particularly if we're Unix savvy but not really clued enough to be _sure_ about the password characters. The final joke is if we aren't sure- then, not only does the techie not know, WE don't know who the joke is really on either
:)
It's absolutely fscking brilliant. And there are so many levels that are inside jokes for the Unix friendly (everything after the doubletake) that it makes it all the funnier, sharing a _private_ joke. Didn't this editorializer see the last panel with the suddenly-nefarious luser turning on the techie with an evil laugh? See the techie getting very flustered? Did he seriously think the joke was entirely on the luser? Geez. Some people ought not to be allowed to come in contact with humor without adult supervisionRight on. I love UF and laugh at it everyday. Apperently, this guy has never been mildly associated with techies. I think if anything, UF is positive, becuase of all the strips I have ever read, the tech never takes it out on the customer. They just joke afterward. That is REAL. I do it everyday. Not becuase I think they are stupid (although some are) but because I deal with it for a job. You have to get frustrated after an eight hour shift or laugh I rather laugh and go, "Hey guys, this user just asked me if double clicking was left and right at once." I love UF and will continue to laugh daily. BTW, this both cartoons he listed, suck. The one, 'help desk' sounds like the main character should not even be working tech support. What is funny about that? That is like me reading a cartoon, about chef that gets an order and does not know how to make it. WTF?
Next we'll have people criticizing Dilbert saying that it isn't fair to the clueless executives or managers of companies. Give me a break.
From what I've seen (I only been reading UF for a few months plus looking through a few archives) UF doesn't make fun of lusers much at all, if ever anyone got an example? If anything they make fun of the techs more than anyone (see the AJ and Miranda thread and the hilarious Lord of the Ping). Seem to me if political correctness has reached the point where we can't make fun of oursleves there's not much point in having humour in any form anymore. I mean "A man walk's into a bar, realises that he's a womanising alcohol and goes home to cry to his wife and kids." ain't much of a "funny".
Chris
Oh, come on, who gives a shit if making fun of people makes us "look bad"..? Are we concerned about our image here? Is it really all that important that the entire world embrace geek sub-culture? I think the opposite is closer to the truth - having a little something of our own, something that "outsiders" don't understand, is what gives us definition. Isolating ourselves from those who don't understand what we do or why is how we keep that definition intact. As long as the "outsiders" are still treated with what respect they deserve, I say laugh it up.
This isn't something limited to geek culture, it's a common element of how human society works. "In" groups are defined by shared traits, shared habits, interests, characteristics, whatever, and used to isolate and distinguish from other groups. Sports fans divide themselves from non-sports fans by measuring levels of knowledge and, presumably, understanding of sports history (past and present), and divide into smaller groups by team preference, locality, etc. People form social circles by doing the same things - like smoking, for one - being told they shouldn't, or being forced into uncomfortable situations in order to continue, is just one more way their group identity is strengthened. Racial identity works pretty much the same way, esp. when there's persecution and misunderstanding involved.
"The respect they deserve" is the key issue here as far as whether, for example, UF is abusive or not. (As far as funny goes, I've found UF to be hit-or-miss. No, I haven't worked tech support or sysadmin) Everyone deserves a simple measure of interpersonal respect to start. Certain things can cancel that out - persistant, obstinate ignorance, for one. People with problems caused by their limited understanding of the situation, wanting a quick fix to the problem without their learning anything, for example. This is obstinate ignorance - not only does the person not understand, they don't -want- to understand. I believe it's because they don't want to take the responsibility on themselves to figure anything out. That's how they earn disrespect, and mockery. UF isn't even very hard on such people.
---GEC
Bow-ties are cool.
-Scott Kurtz, PvP
SUPEROSITY is located at http://www.superosity.com
Your Pal,
Chris Crosby
Your Pal,
Chris Crosby
Check out my daily comic strip, SUPEROSITY!
I've been a UFie for almost 2 years now and since I started reading it, I've been, for the most part, laughing at every cartoon Illiad has posted. Upon going to Scott Kurtz's sight, I was subjected to his idea of "humor"...gaming. He admits comics about computer games are not funny, but I have to disagree with his idea that comics about gamers begin funny. Even his "HelpDesk" comic recommendation is bland and not what I would consider humorous. Then again...my mom doesn't find Monty Python or George Carlin funny either. I suspect Mr Kurtz lacks the same sense of humor that my mother lacks. The ability to laugh because something is funny and forget about the fact that it might be "morally wrong". One famous comic, I forget his name, has, what, 2 videos filled with people making toasts and totally making fun of him. People love those videos but, alas, they are morally wrong.
I really don't they they would hire someone who knew absolutely nothing about computers for tech support...and after four years of tech support you shouldn't really be proud that you can build a computer.
We're not laughing at those who DON'T understand. We're laughing at those who wouldn't understand. That the Human race can encompass someone like Einstein or DaVinci, and then some one who can't be bothered to learn the difference between which is their Username [First Initial+ Last Name] and which is their password [PSWD1234] is almost inconceivable to me. (Off topic-I know the example is not secure, it was an example of simple things that aren't understood) Instances like this, of such a casual abuse of the human intelligence should be a criminal act. It's either laugh at these people, or go looking for a 2x4 to start smacking some sense into them, and the second choice is generally frowned upon. (Sort of reminds me of an old joke involving a prospecter, a Donkey and a big stick, the punch line was "First, ya gotta get their attention...")
OK, to be fair, maybe it's just because I'm not a kid anymore, but it really does seem like the funnies just aren't funny anymore. (MST3K did a pretty good bit about this a while back) I'd cite Dilbert, Calvin&Hobbes, and Far Side as exceptions, and two of those are no longer running. Too many just aren't clever, insightful, or comedic in any other regard. How many strips were padded out with Y2K material for last week's paper? Either "Wow, the world really is still going", or "Wow, I drank a lot last night", or "We wish you all a happy new year!" (Blondie) - and that's the whole strip. I'd include the gaming strip in the lot, too. So the kids take the football video game too seriously... alright, good premise, where's the gag? He finds a stand in because his eye hurts... "Ummm... ha?"
I think he's too quick to condemn the Dilbert method of E-mail suggestions. At least Adams is taking feedback - maybe that's part of the reason why Dilbert is usually funny.
---GEC
Bow-ties are cool.
Because only one person can be president at one time. The article I recall was talking about more general jobs than that one. :)
It may have been dentists as #2, not surgeons, but I don't recall exactly. However, it's not just suicide, but a combination of suicide, divorce, substance abuse, committment to mental facilities, etc.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Yep, I think it's hysterical. You hate it. Isn't it wonderful that humor is subjective? Humor cannot be defined. It's funny or it isn't, to each and every one of us.
All of this nonsense should remind us that far too many people are running around looking for reasons to complain.
To all those who write strips like User Friendly: I might laugh, I might not. You shouldn't care, and I applaud your artistic endeavour either way.
I was working for a company in NY state and the printer went down. I was unavailable at the time and when the call went through on my cell phone, I had them call IBM tech support. On the phone, the techie asked her all kinds of questions and she didn't know anything. Finally out of frustration, the guy asked her if it was windy outside. This woman looked outside and said "yes it is, why?". IBM man said "well that's the problem...when it's windy, it affects the way printers work". The woman said "ok" and hung up.
Or how about the classic problem "My printer doesn't work...help me!"
Tech: "is the cable that connects the printer to the computer tangled?"
User: "yes, why would that make a difference?"
Tech: "Because data travels in 1's and 0's, the 0's slide through curves alright because they are rounded, but the 1's get caught and can't move"
User: "Oh, that makes sense. Thank you, goodbye"
Never even checks to make sure uncoiling the cable will do the trick...
Yes the cd rom cupholder is old...maybe you can use these huh?
Once, I asked a user to power off her terminal, count five, and power it back on. The phone clunks down onto the desk, I hear footsteps moving away, two minutes later footsteps come back, she picks up the phone and tells me its done. I re-aquired her device, confirmed that she was back in session, hung up, then fell out of my chair laughing. She, like most of my callers, worked for a freight company and when I told her to power down the terminal, she had done just that; she had gone back to the circuit box and powered down the entire building (the "terminal" building from a trucker's perspective). (And yes, I started refering to it as a "computer display" from then on...)
Therein lies my first point; help desk people either laugh at these things or go seriously postal.
The second point is more of a rant; The help desk is there to solve problems, not teach! I have been working IT for sixteen years now (mainframe and PC) and I have never seen a company (or even heard of one) that made more than a token effort at training their people on how to use the PC's and such that get dropped on their desks. While I can forgive someone for not knowing what a general protection fault is, I find it appalling that no one ever takes the time to show a new user, "This is the power switch for the monitor, this is the power switch for the computer itself, this is the mouse and moving it around makes that arrow move around, see?" Etc...
In a nutshell, laughter is a way of dealing with a frustrating and often unrewarding job. If that offends Mr. Kurtz, well, life can be pretty unfair...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Ignorance can be fixed by knowledge. So he didn't know how to load your pager battery properly. He made the mistake once and won't do it again. He was ignorant in the fine art of pager battery replacement and got a quick lesson, and now, with that knowledge gained, he loads his pager batteries properly. Stupidity, however, is when he can't figure it out after being told how several times. Ignorance is lack of knowledge, where stupidity is a state of mind.
Beer wants to be free
This is off topic but I'm ticked-off and will post this anyway.
I read the story and then took the link to Kurtz's rant. From there I saw a link that made my blood run cold.
You see, Mr. Kurtz didn't write 'Brent's Thirteen Facts of Email you Should Know' though he does take credit for doing so . Not only does he take credit for the thirteen facts he has applied his copyright to it lest someone steal it from him.
The real author is my friend Erynn. She sent the message on August 31, 1998 in an effort to save Bernard's life. Since then, the message has turned into a rather popular forward.
And, yet, folks who know they didn't write it continue to take credit for the content. How do they think they can get away with that?
The bigger question to come out of this Slashdot article is not whether or not technical support comics are funny but is Kurtz going to come clean about where he got the email facts.
InitZero
I must say that I think your comments about tech support cartoons were pretty much off-target.
First, it seems bizarre to me that you would start off by claiming that providing tech support is a no-brainer and that any moron with a pulse can do it. As a tech support person and trainer, I know this to be patently untrue. And then, after claiming that tech support is a dumb-and-dumber sport, you turn right around and complain that it's cruel to disparage users! What -- but it's okay to disparage tech support people?
Second, if you actually read User Friendly for any period of time, you would know that strips that poke fun at users make up only a few percent of the production; and that most of the cartoons poke fun, instead, at the tech support staff itself and at the management. Thus, your article starts from a dubious premise that strips like UF are "about" ridiculing users.
Third, humor is cruel in its nature. The significant factor is not in its nature but in its use. Yes, it's cruel and wrong to belittle people, and especially right to their faces. That's why I don't watch and have no interest in watching television sitcoms. They're nothing but one mean-spirited putdown after another. But that fact has nothing to do with cartoons like UF, which are aimed at and predominantly read by geeks.
Humor is a safety valve -- as the old saying goes, "laugh or you'll cry." Or hit somebody. Every person I have ever encountered who worked in a high-pressure situation responded by a combination of ridicule of himself, cow-orkers and clients. And if you don't think that plumbers are making fun of you behind your back -- you need to widen your circle of acquaintance.
Fourth, I've never mocked a client to her face, nor would I. Despite the fact that I've been shouted at, cursed at and called about every filthy name you can think of -- just because I happen to be tech support, I'm fair game for every moron with $3000 to buy a computer. As you write, the inability to use a computer may not be an indicator of intelligence. But, in my opinion, the unwillingness to learn more than the minimal amount necessary to turn it on and start a program; coupled with a readiness to blame all the outcomes of ignorant usage on either me or on the computer; which qualities number among the major ones I meet every day on the phones -- those indicate, not lack of intelligence, but lack of character. In a word, they're lazy. Why learn how to do it yourself, when you can just call tech support? Personally, I see no reason why I should cut slack for people who aren't willing to invest the intellectual energy necessary to learn how to operate their equipment competently.
You think that someday everyone will be able to do tech support on his own computer. I can't imagine where you got such an utopian notion. Certainly, not from answering the phones -- computer users today are no more savvy than computer users of 10 years ago. If anything, it's worse. 10 years ago, you bought a computer, you pretty much were on your own. If something went wrong, you figured it out. Nowadays, if something goes wrong, you call tech support, click on command through a bunch of menus, it's fixed, you hang up, -- with next to no idea of what you just did. The next time you have that problem, you call back again.
Finally, most cartoons I have observed mock actions, not people. Perhaps, the reason you fail to laugh at UF is because you fail to distinguish between the two.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
The worst part about what passes for tech support humor is that much of it urban legend. That and the fact that tech support "phone talkers" (that's right, they are not engineers of any sort!) are basically washed up losers.
When I started working at an ISP five years ago, I was the "Mac Guy" needless to say I was "looked down at" to say the least. So I learned Telnet and then Pine and then Perl and then I got a linux box to go with my mac... Needless to say, fear of ridicule == Good Incentive for learning. If I'd been coddled, I wouldn't have bothered to learn.
'nuff said.
Mr Kurtz started out at the wrong end of the business. He started out knowing almost nothing and worked up from there. After four years on the job, he seems to think that putting a PC together is a great achievement. For those of us that are used to using technical jargon all the time and having it instantly understood, the average user is incredibly tiresome. They are at the stage now where we started ten years ago. At that time, we had to learn it ourselves and were not spoon fed by any helpdesk.
That's pretty lame. But it appears that they are getting exactly the kind of lame support they are willing to pay for- A "tech" that is probably very underqualified, reads slashdot all day and thinks that stupid in-jokes like "fsck'd" are funny. I'll bet you also think Magic the Gathering is cool and wear a black trenchcoat.
Get back on the phone and give another customer a bunch of incorrect information.
As coincidental luck would have it, this flamebait discussion has surfaced days after Kurtz is showing off his new domainname, www.sixtosix.com. This, IMO, falls into the realm of "secret documents leaked" by a corporation in the midst of a legal trial.
UF is not that funny, and neither was that dude's rants. Wanna hear something funny? I jumped on a worf, it crush my little dorf. Oh no oh no, do you fear the elephant borf? My name is Big Willy, I live in a computer I ate all the speed, now the chip melts like a scooter in an oven Either that or... http://www.dreamscape.com/muffin/library/library.h tm http://packetstorm.securify.com/unix-humor/ Also rinkworks.com for their Computer Stupidities!
Penny Arcade's ragged on UF as well in the strips. Strangely enough, I don't have any problem with their approach but I think Pvp's strips regarding UF were off-base (Illiad, if you actually read the strips, isn't the Linux fanatic straw man of PvP) and the rant was just wrong. Who is he to tell me what's funny or not, especially considering he's made Ultima Online strips? Talk about humor funny only to a few...
This idiot preaches on like us tech support folks are a bunch of malicious psychotics who revel in the fact that the people who call us don't know nearly as much about computers as we do. The reason that we bitch and moan and joke about the calls that we get is simply to keep our fucking sanity intact! Tech support is easily one of the worst jobs you could assign a geek to; we're required to interact with people we don't know, we have to deal with the same crap over and over and over again, we don't get to play with any cool, new toys, just the same old shit repeatedly. I don't joke with my fellow techs because I think that my customers are morons (well, most of them anyway), I do it for therapy. And it certainly doesn't help that we have to sympathize with these folks who call, yet they don't give a rat's ass for our situation; shit, if everything doesn't come out roses and cherubs then we're the fucking bad guys! Kurtz can kiss my ass; although to be honest, I envy the shit out of him, as he is obviously lucky enough to be a techhead who likes associating with people. But I'll try to think of his wonderful words of wisdom the next time I wake in a cold sweat or puke my guts out on my lunch break as the stress finally cooks off.
At least UF offers some perspective, whereas his useless bitching only serves to show what a pompous ass he is. I read UF and I laugh my ass off as I see my life parodied on a daily basis. I read Kurtz's column and could only think of how badly I want to drop this fucking headset and walk out the door. Unfortunately for us folks who have a family to take care of and can't afford to hang out in college for four years, tech support is our only door into the industry.
I just got off of a call that left a guy very dissatisfied, but there was NOTHING that I could do because it involved matters that were out of my hands; of course, those folks who were only too happy to inform me of these policies were able to pass their wisdom onto me and walk away while I got to tell this guy all of the great news, whereupon he unloads the miseries of his world on me, like I can do something. So I've got a few choices: go back to renting videos to people for minimum wage, putting my wife and daughter in a very shitty situation; shoot myself in the head and make it all go away, leaving my wife and daughter in the aforementioned shitty situation; or laugh as much as I possibly can. More and more every day I hate my fellow man, because I get too many calls where the person on the other end of the line is an asshole; this has nothing to do with their level of computer literacy but with their shitty attitudes when they do call, especially considering that they called us for help! So fuck you and your holier-than-thou bullshit; I'm going to go read some User Friendly and try to get some perspective back.
Deosyne
First I want to say thanks for all the email I got today. I've read almost all the posts here on Slashdot too and a lot of you made some good points. Some really good points. Let me try to touch on some of the more common ones and dispel a couple of myths. 1) I did NOT do this as a publicity stunt. I posted that rant on my site for my regular readers. I did not send any mail to Slashdot about the rant. I don't know the person who did. I'm grateful for the publicity, but I am not responsible for it. 2) I never said User Friendly or Absurd Notions were bad strips. Those individual strips were simply the most obvious examples of the point I was trying to make. I like Robin Williams, but I don't like all of his movies. I should have been much more specific about that 3) Many people posted that I didn't know what I was talking about because I've never been a tech. However, my rant clearly states that I worked tech support for 4 years. I think a lot of people simply commented on a previous post and never read the rant iteslf. I don't mind if you disagree, just make sure you're disagreeing with something I actually said. My experiences with tech support may be radically different from everyone elses. I'm only operating on what I observed on the job. For years I was exposed to the biggest bunch of assholes I could ever care to meet. These were people who thought they knew everything but in reality knew very little. These were people who took out their insecurities on their callers. These were people who thought casual day was an excuse to wear their rennaisance festival costumes to work. Some people who call tech support are grade-A assholes. I admit that. I have no problem making fun of those people since they are, after all, asking for it. Some people who call are abusive jerks who aren't calling for help, they're just calling to make you feel as bad as they do right now. I took those calls, but that's not what I was talking about. And stop telling me that users should RTFM. Don't call me hypocritical and then tell me that you want people to RTFM. When was the last time YOU RTFM? When was the last time you ripped open a piece of software because you couldn't wait to dive in and start reading that manual? How many manuals do you have in your desk drawer right now with the cellephane still on them? Not to mention that fact that most companies dont' even bother to write one. They just post a one page faq on their site and include a flyer with their tech support number (at $35 a pop). I think it's just as valid for a user to tell a tech "RTFM? How about DYFJ: Do your fucking job." But when everything's said and done, It's just my opinion. It wasn't a very well thought out opinion either, but it's mine and I stand by it. I'm terribly flattered that you all thought so much about it as to spend a day debating it. I hope you all come back soon (or later) and give PvP another chance (those that didn't like it at first). That's all. Have fun posting.
I assume some of those e-mail were religiously anti-you. Nice job handling the pressure.
My only problem with UF, is the sometimes ongoing stories building up to a pretty good punchline -- but there are a couple of days of mediocre strips between.
That's exactly the point. He should learn to cut to the chase, like Dilbert. Dilbert isn't the best drawn, but the characters are cute and goofy looking. A dumpy looking guy with a curled up tie is inherently funny. A guy with a beard (one of the crutches of a poor artist) just isn't.
Read it if you want, but your mouse time should be spent supporting more worthy causes, not giving advertising revenue from a hack to claims to be all Mr. Open Source while he won't let you even link to his strip.
Almost lauded? I've noticed many of the luser-types patting one another on the back for their stupidity, practically reveling in it. Just plain pitiful, if you ask me.
And to Scott Kurtz - if you read this comment, I just want you to know, I looked at Player vs Player for today and yesterday - I think UF is funny (and After Y2K and Sluggy Freelance as well), but in my opinion, PvP is just weak. The "humor" completely eludes me. Maybe the latest 2 aren't representative of the entire strip (damn, I'd hope not) - but what I saw didn't bode well to me. I am NOT impressed.
At least stuff like Space Moose, while beyond being scathing, can at least make me laugh at times.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Linux is an O/S, not a lifestyle.
Heretic! Heretic! hehehe
j/k ;)
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Scott Kurtz dose not get the jokes in UserFriendly but that hardly makes them unfunny.
Look at the strips and you'll see they are jokes about people who are prepetually stupid. Illiad colects tech horror storys for his strip. It's not entirely fictional.
Kurtz dose not know what it's like to work at a helpdesk. It is far from the student teacher relationship he likens it to. Instead the help desk is the target of harrasment by users who would rather not use computers to start with.
He seems to think User Friendly is far fetched and not truely representive of what it's like to work at a helpdesk. However the reallity can be found by doing a websearch for "helldesk" the nickname for helpdesk given by it's victoms.
Computer Stupiditys is a website full of examples. Rather than a commic strip this is just the storys from people who work at the helpdesk.
There is annother website with audio recordings from accuall tech support calls and in some of thies the caller screams and yells and dosn't even let the poor tech talk.
Kurtz seems to believe thies are purely attacks on newbes. True newbes do need some help and thats what the help desk is for. The problem is far to often the caller dose not want help instead they want the computer to be byond reason or to conform to some bizzar idea of how computers work.
Some examples of the kind of calls the help desk gets:
Screaming loon.. person will not calm down long enough for the tech to understand what they caller is trying to say... some times the caller just called to curse out the tech.. some times the tech didn't give the caller the answer they wanted.. some times the caller is just to paniced to be reasonable.
The Expert.. Caller is a newbe with just enough knoladge to be dangerous.. he dosn't know computers but he thinks he dose. As a result he dosn't like answers that don't conform to his little world.
Your fault.. User did something newbish.. after all we all make mistakes so it's just a matter of helpping the user fix the problem...
Only the user dosn't want to fix the problem on HIS computer.. he's dead set the problem is on your end.
All three: User did something stupid he knows it's on your end becouse he's an expert and he'll scream at you to fix it...
After all that it's comforting to read a commic strip like user friendly and see that your not the only person sitting at a hell desk.
While Scott Kurtz dosn't think making jokes about idiots is funny he thinks spreding Linux fud is.
In one strip he mentioned how Linux is stable as long as you don't install a sound card...
A sound card dosn't make Linux unstable...
In the past a lot of sound cards didn't work on Linux... but dosn't work on Linux means just that... no sound card... it dosn't exist. Linux remains just as stable as ever..
However on Windows dosn't work means.. crash...
Maybe this is funny to someone who uses Windows and dosn't know better but it's not funny to the person who acually knows what Kurtz is saying.
In short... pot.. kettle.. black...
I don't actually exist.
Nipok Nek
Why choose white shoes?
You guys are taking this too personally. Scott is not bashing your precious User Friendly comic, just stale jokes used in comics. I am sure he is guilty of it as well, but his comments were for the plethora of the same old jokes coming up like cupholders, etc. If he hadn't used user friendly as an example, these postings would not be near the 600+ they are right now. Chill out! hehe
---- Jumpg8
Way to respond buddy. As we have said before, these techies took this personally. I just hope that one day most of the ones who are in these loser tech support jobs go out and get real computer jobs like we did. Tech support is the McDonalds of computer jobs: low pay, crappy hours and no upward mobility. After a month of working tech support, I was bored because there was nothing else to learn and I had to deal with angry people who wanted me to kiss their ass all day. I am glad I got out of that racket, and as I said in a previous post, put in your time and get out! There are better, higher paying, more skilled computer jobs out there. With the global internet growing by leaps and bounds, demand for skilled computer users will only grow. Don't limit your potential by staying in a dead in job.
PEACE OUT!
---- jumpg8
Baaaah! Moooohh! Oiink!
Users are stupid and deserve no respect.
Take away the users and all problems dissapear =o)
PC Technical Support.
However, stress was measured by several catagories, including suicide, time spent in a mental institution, divorce rate, substance abuse, etc.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
First off, I'd like to say Support Technicians are the most underrated workers of the IT industry. Who deals with the mass of phonecalls and angry customers, convincing them to stick with their ISP, when the boss won't listen to reason, won't purchase a backup server, and decides the server needs to be "upgraded" in the middle of the day (Yes, true story). Tech support deals with the most crap and get's paid the worse. Of course, the technical expertise between a programmer and a support technician is usually pretty far, but you don't hire a support tech for their technical skills, but rather their people skills. Sure, any idiot can learn how to use a piece of software, but you've also got to have patience, creativity (to come up with another way to explain a concept or task), patience, teaching skills, and yet again, patience.
Second, there is a difference between User Friendly and a tech sitting there telling a user to "RTFM". What User Friendly (and the old Bastard Operator from Hell) fulfills, is our need to vent our frustration of helping these people day to day! It get's to you at times, and how often has a tech just wanted to tell an user to pack up their computer and just return it? Teacher's would never make fun of their kids right in front of their face (well, then again..), but after class, you can hear all kinds of stories! (Having a elementary school teacher for a mother, I've heard plenty). People need a release, and just how often have you gotten away from someone/people from work, home, school, etc. and just let go and tell all kinds of anecdotes and stories about them?
Also, there is a difference between a clueless user and a stupid user. The user who doesn't realize that computers run on electricity is truly, stupid (well, I guess we can maybe forgive them if their from the bush and don't understand the concept of electricity itself). A lot of the time, clueless users will laugh at themselves along with you, once they realize their mistake.
The only other point I'd make, is about users who DON'T want to learn. They just expect it to work, and have no patience or willingness to put a little bit of time into using a computer and understanding just how it works. These are the people that truly disgust me, and make tech support more of a pain in the ass, than a frustration. I just remember the guy who was all upset because his netscape wasn't maximized, so he could see a window outlined behind it. When I told him he needed to pick up a book on how to use windows, since as an ISP, we didn't support the OS, he got really angry and started spouting off about how much he paid and that all he wants to do is get stock quotes, and otherwise he would't have the damn computer. Since his connection was perfectly fine, I should of just told him to go return his damn computer if he couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
Oh, and I also hate old men who've been programming microchannels for 15 years or something, and explain to YOU (the technician), how YOUR service must be broken since he couldn't of possibily made a mistake, while your sitting there staring at a whole wall of modems running smoothly, and his is the only phone call in the last hour. Arrogance breeds incompetance.
Either way, I'm just glad I'm not doing tech support anymore.
I just read the example he gives of a realistic view of tech support.
It seems Scott Kurtz thinks the avrage tech at a helpdesk is a clueless boob.
At least thats is the image he is trying to present as a realistic view of technical support.
It is exactly this addatude that generates so many problems for technical support.
Should cartoonist rant about other cartoonists?
In my opinion the answer is:No...