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The Hard Drive Is Inside the Computer
davidmwilliams writes "Those of us who work in technology have a jargon all of our very own. We know the difference between CPUs and GPUs, between SSD and HD, let alone HD and SDTV! Yet, our users are flat out calling everything 'the hard drive.' Why is it so?" As much as I hate to admit it, this particular thing drives me nuts. You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks!
As an outsourcer I ran in to an issue for a while trying to talk someone through something on the phone, because as it turns out, everything in side the server room is a server, even the switches, the routers, and and other piece of equipment. It really just comes down to people hearing one or two terms and thinking they're talking "tech-speak" with you. Only problem is often times they're either unable or unwilling to learn, or take offense at suggestions on what the difference is.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
People that use the equipment every day should show a level of professionalism that suggests they at least care enough about their jobs to learn the proper name for the equipment. If a truck driver wasn't able to use the correct name for the parts in their rig, whilst asking the mechanic for help, wouldn't the mechanic have the right to judge their ignorance with concern?
As far as some people are concerned, their computer consists of four parts: the monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive. The latter is the big case where they put CDs. It's the only component their software and other users regularly mention, so it's what they've come to know the box as.
If you remember those boxes with 8" screens....
The MAC OS would throw up a message that said something to the effect you were running out of memory (we had 2meg installed instead of max 4). I believe the message said please close some applications (Multi-finder).
Anyway, the natural step was for the user to start deleting icons (ie programs) from the desktop.
Then they would reboot. Then they would notice that some documents couldn't be opened and perhaps notice the icon has changed.
The trouble ticket would be "Can't open a document that I could open yesterday".
Why did they remove MS Word? Because they created all their documents with Word Perfect and only used MS Word to read docs from others (so they never clicked on the icon itself).
This happened so often that we had a server with an 'image' of the standard licensed software that we could drag over at moments notice. At the speed of Appletalk. Probably should have just turned off multi-finder... Oh well.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
sorry but you're making some errors in your analogies. They sound diferent: Braking fluid and fuel can both be measured in mililiters, liters,... You compared something's name (braking fluid, fuel,...) with a measuring unit (megabyte, gigabyte,...). And in that aspect: No a hard drive and RAM doesn't sound similar, not the least bit. They also look different to boot, they however don't really smell different. Not so sure about taste, never tried to eat hard drives before.
Your comment, sir, should be made sticky and sent to every person in the world who uses a computer. I do tech support part time, and I get to field calls from people who don't know that if the building doesn't have internet, they can't check their email. They work on a computer all day, every day, and have no idea how to turn it off. They think the monitor IS the computer. I know that some PCs, like Dell and Gateway, and Apple has for a long time, have the computer built into the monitor, they don't use those kind. Some times, they call to say the printer is broken, but then they don't know where the printer is. Once I even had a guy tell me the printer is broken and is beeping, and asks what a printer is when I ask for the serial number.
There are some people who just don't care, and will call things whatever they want to call them.
If you know that, in your friend's jargon, "hard drive" and "CPU" are both terms used to refer to the entire computer other than external peripherals, you should tell him "a part inside your computer is broken but it can be fixed or even replaced without you having to buy a new computer."
That's why our shop has developed the crazy idea of "informing our clients". We drag 'em to the back, 'n' SHOW 'em their hard drive. We then show them an open hard drive, and even our older clients get the "record player" analogy once they've seen the guts. We've found that the clients walk away more informed, and happier that we actually took a few minutes to describe the problem. Otherwise, all they hear is "the framjabulator snonked on the whooziwhats, so pay us money to make your computer work again..." and just look at the dollar signs. On the extreme cases, we plunk their rears down for the install itself.
Informed clients are generally happy ones.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Been using this analogy for years. Swap oven for chef for CPU, and it works wonders.
There's something I didn't quite grasp yet: Being unable to answer computer related questions makes people feel incredibly stupid for some reason. And I can't find out why.
My car is broken and I can't fix it. My mechanic asks me something and I can at best reply "Gimme slow instructions to do what you want, but don't expect me to know a muffler from a spark plug". I have no problem telling him I have no idea what makes that machine work. That's his job, after all. I turn the key and it goes 'vroom'. If it doesn't go 'vroom', I call him.
Same goes for many things in life. People don't expect to be good at anything but what they're actually good at. Should be a 'duh' moment. Yet when it comes to computers, people get irate (and, I assume, because they feel they should know and feel stupid in that moment when they can't answer your "simple" question) when they can't even answer a question.
First thing I usually do is reassure them that this is a very tricky problem but I'm sure he's up to it and together we can figure it out. Most of the time it calms them down when they think that it takes someone with years and years of experience to even begin understanding what's wrong.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, it's not so much the case anymore, but I remember in the early 90s trying to explain to lots of different people that the monitor was not the computer. Even though you can see representations of the files on the monitor, that's not where the files are. Even though moving your mouse causes the pointer to move on the monitor, the monitor doesn't know where your mouse is.
There's a spacial disconnect going on, a certain level of abstraction, and it has to be learned. It makes sense, in a lot of ways, to assume that the activity is happening in the monitor, since you see it happening there.
But I've known people who understood all that and still called the computer a "hard drive" because they didn't know what it should be called. I've also heard people call it a CPU, which is more correct, but still a bit confusing. They don't want to call it the computer because, in their minds, the whole thing is the computer.
The worst part is that they never leave it at that. They want to go into their whole life story of how they fail miserably to learn basic computer tasks, but some hotshot 12-year-old nephew does it all the time, and isn't it amazing. It's like saying "I know nothing about cars, but I'm going to try to talk about engine repair for fifteen minutes." If you don't know anything, stop talking!
I have stopped telling contractors and salesmen that I work in computing. If you say you work construction, they're say that's neat, and go on with whatever they were doing. If you say computers, you get fifteen minutes of the most boring tales of computer failure you have ever heard. I literally once thanked a saleswoman for *not* doing that, as I had been shopping around and had heard the stories at every stop. She immediately proceeded to go into EXACTLY THE SAME STORY I just thanked her for skipping.
So to anyone who is not in the tech industry, I am now a part time carpenter, because no one loves to tell a carpenter how much they just don't understand wood.
My (American) wife thinks that (I'm Australian, she's from WI in the US but now lives in Australia too). It pisses me off to no end. Apparently an entire nation of people are elitists. Any attempt to convince her that words or phrases that sound "elitist" to her are just words in regular usage in the UK (and most other English speaking countries) falls on deaf ears, it seems.
What's worse is that my (Australian) accent apparently sounds English to Americans! When I visit the US, EVERYONE thinks I'm English for some reason, until I tell them otherwise. I suppose the Australian accent is fairly close to standard English Received Pronounciation, but there are a few big differences that should give it away. I think Americans just hear 'cahn't instead of caant' or 'tomahto' instead of 'toe-mate-o' and instantly just think 'English'. So I guess I get lumped in with the 'elitists' too, in their mind.
We shared quite a few laughs over people misunderstanding technologies that are so elementary today a child can use them.
My father worked in Saudi Arabia in the early 60s, and the oil companies hired a lot of bedouin workers. Said workers were sometimes provided quarters. Electric stoves were provided, but the cooking elements had to be replaced quite frequently, becuase the bedouins would use the electric stove to light camel chips, which they would then cook on. (They had, for the most part, never eaten anything not cooked on burning camel dung, and found food cooked on an electric stove too bland to eat.) The local sheik finally got air conditioning, after complaining long enough that his refrigerator wasn't keep the food cold (because he'd leave the door open to cool the house).
At the first orientation when my father arrived, they were told to never pick up hitchhikers, because someone who has never traveled except on foot or camel-back simply doesn't understand that it's not safe to just open the car door and step out when they get where they're going (at highway speeds).
None of this reflects on the locals being stupid or slow. It all reflects on the fact that they had never seen any of this technology before.
"Download." For so many people I work with (and in my family as well) the word "download" ends up being the universal verb for everything computer-related. Save a document? Downloaded it. Move a file to a USB drive? Downloaded it. Run a program? Downloaded it.
Another common one is for someone to refer to a whole computer as a CPU. This doesn't irk me as much, but still...
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The correct answer is they wouldn't need it reinstalled. MS office will sometimes complain it needs the install disk after mirroring a drive because the serial number on the drive changed and it does some stupid checks when it accesses install when required features. Antivirus software sometimes complains about the boot sector being different and you have accept the changes too.
But you have to question the ethics of companies like the "geek squad" and outfits like them. They may all act differently in different locations but we have seen the reports of "secure destruction" of older upgraded drives ending up being selling them at flea markets instead of drilling holes in it or baking it in an oven like they claim. I actually had to send a cease and desist letter to the local best buy/geek squad back in 2003 or so because they were telling potential customers that if they took their computer to my shop, it would void the warranty and that I would take the good parts out and put old parts in to make it break faster. I found this out after sending a customer who needed a working system faster then I could build it to best buy to purchase one of the cheap bulk systems. Turns out they were saying that about any tech shop if it was mentioned during the sales pitch to get the geek squad to "set up" the new computer for $30 or $60.
One day, I sent a customer to bestbuy to pick up a US robotics hardware modem for a Linux server because I was out a job site in another town and wouldn't be able to swing buy to get one and fix his system before everyone closed. When I showed up at midnight, I found that he returned with a wintel modem and an XP home CD because after the sales droid got stumped on the difference between a hardware modem and a software modem, they asked the geek squad which told him that XP was the better OS and he should be running it so he could use the cheap wintel modem instead of the then $90 US robotics modem. Of course XP, especially XP home, can't run hylafax, nor does it have the ability to control the robotic tape library attached to the Linux box (at least not without buying some expensive software). Then best buy was refusing to take the XP home retail software back until I went down with him and explained how the only reason it was purchased was because of the incompetence of their sales staff and repair team and I would be more then happy to have that splashed all over the news papers when I filed the lawsuit that was going to be the only alternative acceptable to us outside a full refund.
What a customer needs isn't important and places like the geek squad. It's what they can sell and how gullible the people are. How about that extended warranty they sell you that mirrors the manufacturers warranty but costs $100 more then the sticker price of whatever you buy?