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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?
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.
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!
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.