I'm curious to know the effects this has locally and what the opinions of it are
I don't remember the name of it, but NPR did a story last month about an Indian playwright who has written a play about this very problem. Maybe a look at www.npr.org may help.
As far as the ethics of it: salesmen try to act like their customers the time (Herb Tarlek from WKRP in Cincinnati comes to mind:-), so I guess it hinges on how you feel about salespeople. I've had electronics distributors reps lie to me about their knowledge and background in their attempts to seem more like engineers and research has shown that some of the best salesmen unconsciously emulate the breathing patterns of their potential customer. The more at ease someone feels with you, the more likely he is to sign that big P.O.
My feeling about it is that it's just one more way that the business is trying to make a customer more comfortable. I personally couln't care less about a support tech's accent as long as we can communicate and she fixes my problems. However, enough people feel otherwise to make these silly activities worthwhile for many support organizations.
India has close to a billion people and on average it is POOR
[Shrug] Yeah, so? How many of those billion people have ever seen a computer? How many of those billion can educate themselves, or how many of them can the Indian government afford to educate to the level at which it becomes feasible for then to do work for US technology corporations?
If you really feel that your job could be done just as well by a poor, uneducated street dweller in India, then a career reassessment may be due! If you feel that it takes more skill than that, then you may realize the problem isn't as severe as you paint it.
Indian salaries don't have to rise to the level of Americans' before outsourcing stops being economical. Right now, a lot of the inefficiences are being "paid for" by a huge disparity in pay levels. As the Indian programmers become better paid, then other issues become more of an issue. If you will mow my lawn for $2.00 I won't mind if I have to look at your work every 15 minutes to make sure you're not missing spots, goofing off, etc, or provide my own mower. But if you start charging me $15-$20 to do the same job, now the extra time I have to spend checking up on you, keeping my lawnmower in good condition, buying gas etc, is an additional cost to me and having you do the work starts to look less attractive.
Of course the other way to look at it is that he's running a public business and Unix/Windows principles are meaningless when measured against shareholder value.
Come on people, we're not talking about using child labor here. This is software; it's about money, not principle.
But the thing you and other posters except Jim Wicked seem to be missing is "why should they care?" And the answer is not some idealistic belief in shutting down unreasonable monopolies. The gas company in most areas is a monopoly. Ask your neighbors if they really think about that on a daily basis.
I mean, really, do you think the average person wants more speed and cornering ability out of the family car? It's certainly possible and usually not that hard. But most people see computers, like cars, as appliances. It does what they need when they take it home,and you can even add functionality to it later by installing more software in the case you need to.
The average person really has no need to be concerned about these details, and unless a compelling reason to care comes along, all this handwringing is pointless.
Business, on the other hand, does care because of the annoying and expensive (and usually unwanted) upgrade cycles. And anyone looking to reduce Microsoft's market share should concentrate their efforts on demonstrating the effectiveness of Linux to business.
Why does all the orbital speed have to be discarded so quickly?
I was wondering the same thing. Wouldn't it be possible to come back into thin atmosphere and decelerate slowly by essentially being a high altitude glider? At LEO speeds, you're still below escape velocity, so even if you skipped off the atmosphere a few times, you're still going to be coming back to Earth. It would take an airframe configuration that allowed controllable lift over a large envelope, but I don't see anything that makes it impossible.
The issue I see is that you need to both maintain a low enough altitude where control surfaces work but which is high (Read: thin) enough that heating isn't excessive.
Be careful trying to use what you design in the USA. Some software is classified as a medical device in the US and needs FDA approval before it can be used. Outside USA, other countries have their own approval procedures.
Why does everyne think the X-prize will revolutionize space?
Just because someone's doing something for money they will necessarily do it well. Microsoft does stuff for money.
Well you've just answered your own question. Like it or not, Microsoft did revolutionize software: they provided a common platform and a consistent interface at a relatively low cost and so enabled businesses the world over to automate. Whether you like the actual product/quality/lack thereof/ or not is a separate issue.
The 'real life' photos suck because they have no meaningful context for you.
I can see why I might like something like this. Often I remember a past incident fondly... or angrily, and I want a better visualization of the incident, or I suddenly think of someone I knew for a short time -- a few days or even a few hours: the old guy I worked with in that dusty warehouse in NYC a long time ago who had a wire in his chest; a one night stand that didn't work out, but who had amazing eyes; the old Jewish guy with a number tattooed on his arm -- and I enjoyed my time/conversations with that person and want better memory of them. Life is full of fleeting moments that seem insignificant at the time, but grow in meaning later. I remember the smile that was on the face of the woman who became my wife in the first second I saw her, but I don't remember what she was wearing: that kind of thing.
Email is often the only record I have. Sometimes people I lost contact with had emailed me pictures and I remember them that way, or I read the things we discussed in mail. There are many people from my 'earlier life' whose photos I would love to have had. I don't always think of taking a snapshot of someone or something I see every day until it's not there anymore. Something like this would be fun. It could be a great experiment to see how many of life's boring, banal moments are worth remembering.
This occurred to me about two years ago when I was going crazy trying to find an off-the-cuff email I had sent someone I was dating because I was bored. It was just meaningless poetry composed in real time then, but as time passed, I realized there was real significance to what I said and I wanted to see exactly what I had written.
So,as time (and boredom:) permits, I've been making an effort to go through my old hard drives and store all the old emails in ASCII text so I can read them when I want to. It's funny how vivid a memory becomes when you read a silly joke or whatever you sent a friend seven years before.
Actually, the article you referenced makes exactly the point I thought of when I read your post: it's not the fact that they're jerks that attracts women, it's that they're confident and oozing testosterone. You make a similar point in your second paragraph when you say that confidence is what makes a difference.
Most so called "sensitive guys" (no, it's not a personal attack) are whiny wimpy doomats. If I was a woman I wouldn't have any interest in them either. Be assertive, project inner strength and try to come off as someone halfway worth talking to.
If I had known design patterns that worked.... why would I share them?
Why wouldn't you? It's not like you can corner the market on 3 billion women (though it might be fun...) or whatever your MOTAS is.
Anyway, the most important things for meeting/having fun with/hooking up with for a night of fun/ the attractive sex are: (a)look clean and neatly groomed and (2) be interesting. Everything else follows. In fact, in a relationship with a woman who is only interested in getting laid and could care less how smart/dumb you are (oh I love women like that!:-), just (a) is sufficient.
Now shut off the puter (or point it to a personal ad site) and go have fun.
Surely, this is only true in countries where utility power is unreliable (like the US)?
No, truly precision devices (by that I mean measurement instrumentation) can not rely on the powerline voltage remaining within 0.1% of spec as a cheap, off the shelf voltage reference chip can.
In short, I guess I'm suggesting that assuming that all electric devices are built to handle unreliable power (brownouts, spikes etc.) is perhaps country specifc.)?
I sure hope not. Would be pretty poor practice on the part of the engineer who designed it to not account for voltage fluctuations. The reality is that the real world outside a computer (actually the +5VDC voltage inside a computer is pretty ugly) is messy. Refrigerator or A/C compressor switches on == big dip in line voltage, lightning strike a few miles away induces big currents in the line. No engineer in his right mind would power electronics directly from the AC line without some sort of filtering/isolation.
OK, here's a dumb question. Not a troll, just a question.
Why bother streaming the data when the client can simply download the file and play it at the remote site? Music data typically isn't very big and downloads quickly (assuming a 10/100 Mbps network) and there are no issues with jitter, etc.
When a new "upscale" grocery store opened in my old neighborhood, I was pleased that they didn't have loyalty cards. Now I notice that one of the major grocery stores I shop at (Rainbow Foods in Minneapolis area) has dropped their card. The other large competing chain, Cub/Supervalu doesn't have one either. Together they probably get 80% of the grocery shoppers in the metro area. Neither do the others: Lund's, Byerly's etc. I can't think of a single grocery chain around here that still uses loyalty cards.
Q: Is this a nationwide trend, or just specific to this area of the upper Midwest? I suspect that the rise in numbers of people paying with credit cards makes these loyalty cards superfluous. I rarely pay for groceries in cash and I tend to get pretty well targeted register coupons when I shop. e.g., I bake a lot so the register often prints out coupons for flour, sugar, chocolate, etc...
Assuming you're not being sarcastic, this seems like an awfully complicated way to do something as simple as grocery shopping. If you don't want the junk mail, why not just give a wrong address and leave it at that?
If you're so worried about anyone knowing what you're shopping for, you're going to have to resort to wearing disguises and paying only in cash. OTOH, I have a bunch of fake noses & mustaches I can sell pretty cheap to anyone interested...
I meant to add to that post that it wasn't intended to be judgemental. Just a pet peeve of mine when I see women being referred to as "females." Never seems to happen with men.
Anyway, congratz on your upcoming marriage. We have the opposite joke: that she's pretty low maintenance.
The problem is, as someone who loves software engineering, I really take pride in trying to implement stuff not just in a way that works, but in a way that is easy to read, change, optimize, etc
I've said it before: manage your career. Find out what you like to do and look for work that lets you do it. It's not always possible to get exactly where you want to be, but by working at it you can get close enough. And keep correcting so you stay on your chosen career path.
In your case I see the attitude that works well in safety-critical development. I am a software developer who works on medical instrumentation. Your attitude is exactly welcome in this kind of environment because we can't afford to screw up; so you tend to find a high percentage of devs who care about the quality of their work and get lots of management support with the attitude that Quality is more important than Release Date. Those who think we're too anal about getting things done right or following process tend to quit pretty soon.
Try to identify industries where software quality is of high concern and look for positions there. It can be hard to break in, but once you have that kind of experience you become much more valuable in the field.
Most computer related jobs are boring. Just as most building or dental or whatever jobs are boring
Absolutely! I'm a software developer. I love my job. I'm well paid and highly skilled, yet I have to do annoying, tedious grunt work. Why? Because it's highly skilled annoying, tedious grunt work that has to get done to produce a high quality product and it can't be automated or turned over to someone who doesn't have at least similar skills and knowledge of this specific machine.
I've learned to accept that for every fun requirement I get to implement, there are ten boring ones I really don't feel like doing, but must do because product quality is on the line, and we are dealing with people's lives here. But the better a job I do on the boring stuff, the more I get to choose which of the cool stuff is assigned to me, so it balances out in the end.
No matter how cool any job seems at first, you'll eventually get to the mind-numbingly boring stuff. Nobody wants to do the last 10% of any project!
Just couldn't let this one slide. I made it to the honors group in Westinghouse '83. Sure, I wasn't one of the final 40, but at least I made it to the previous level. I also was being raised by a single mother who didn't even have a high-school diploma, but understood that I needed education and pushed me when I needed it.
While I agree that all other things being equal, a child is better off with two loving parents than just one, your statement does a disservice to all the struggling, loving single parents out there.
The only help I got from my parents was their encouragement because they sure as hell didn't understand the work I was doing
Ditto. That made me smile. I was in the honors group in STS40 (I think??? It was in 1983) and my mom didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I got lots of encouragement.
I think that helped during interviews at least as much as it may have hurt me.
My thoughts exactly on reading the OP's dilemma. Use it to your advantage. How many applicants for an IT job can say they just spent half a year on tour? Interviewers, even -- no, especially -- HR drones (who almost by definition tend to be "people people") like talking about that stuff. I'm pretty sure that in most of my job interviews what finally got me the job was chatting about side projects and hobbies. Just about all applicants can do the job to one level of competence or another, but employers would rather have someone with a personality.
Wow!! I'm not the only one to remember this story. OK, so I remember the things he was trying to silence were called "screaming meemies", but what was the name of the book. IIRC it was the first Tom Swift book I read, age 11 or so...
There's no way to include absolutely every contingency in every operating system
No but you can get the common ones, and to use the example given, USB cameras are common enough that in an operating system with a major release in the last 2 years I expect at least basic functionality just by plugging it in. Basic functionality meaning that the system knows it's there and can take me where I need to go to set it up.
My response was to counter the assertion that users need to learn more about their computers. For the most part, they shouldn't. I tend to use myself as an example: if I can't figure it out in 5 minutes, I know the "average user" will just give up. Complex tasks I expect to have to sit down with a manual or online help and work at; connecting a USB MP3 player should be a no-brainer (and I have one on Win XP that I still can't get to work!)
But they should not be catered to.
You haven't tried to make a living at this, have you?
In my first ever full time job I had to do something I wish every budding young developer did: telephone support. Customers regularly called not having bothered to open the manuals for what were sometimes very complex products. Even the "smart" ones who read the manual often missed really obvious things like checking that they had the right parts in the first place. If I had a dime for every time I said "you just need to line up the red dots to plug the connectors together..." And our customers were mostly scientists and engineers. If these people make up a significant percentage of your user base, you have to cater to them. Otherwise you're out of business. We catered to them by trying to write better manuals that an idiot could understand (surprise! it worked!) and for the ones who couldn't be bothered to even look in the "Quick start" part of the manual, we just tried to be as patient as possible on the phone, and hope they ordered a lot of expensive stuff in the future.
People who have trouble using your product can be extremely valuable: they're usually saying "this is substandard; fix it." It's fairly rare that they are truly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, or here would be good places to start.
I don't remember the name of it, but NPR did a story last month about an Indian playwright who has written a play about this very problem. Maybe a look at www.npr.org may help.
As far as the ethics of it: salesmen try to act like their customers the time (Herb Tarlek from WKRP in Cincinnati comes to mind
My feeling about it is that it's just one more way that the business is trying to make a customer more comfortable. I personally couln't care less about a support tech's accent as long as we can communicate and she fixes my problems. However, enough people feel otherwise to make these silly activities worthwhile for many support organizations.
[Shrug]
Yeah, so? How many of those billion people have ever seen a computer? How many of those billion can educate themselves, or how many of them can the Indian government afford to educate to the level at which it becomes feasible for then to do work for US technology corporations?
If you really feel that your job could be done just as well by a poor, uneducated street dweller in India, then a career reassessment may be due!
If you feel that it takes more skill than that, then you may realize the problem isn't as severe as you paint it.
Indian salaries don't have to rise to the level of Americans' before outsourcing stops being economical. Right now, a lot of the inefficiences are being "paid for" by a huge disparity in pay levels. As the Indian programmers become better paid, then other issues become more of an issue. If you will mow my lawn for $2.00 I won't mind if I have to look at your work every 15 minutes to make sure you're not missing spots, goofing off, etc, or provide my own mower. But if you start charging me $15-$20 to do the same job, now the extra time I have to spend checking up on you, keeping my lawnmower in good condition, buying gas etc, is an additional cost to me and having you do the work starts to look less attractive.
Of course the other way to look at it is that he's running a public business and Unix/Windows principles are meaningless when measured against shareholder value.
Come on people, we're not talking about using child labor here. This is software; it's about money, not principle.
But the thing you and other posters except Jim Wicked seem to be missing is "why should they care?" And the answer is not some idealistic belief in shutting down unreasonable monopolies. The gas company in most areas is a monopoly. Ask your neighbors if they really think about that on a daily basis.
I mean, really, do you think the average person wants more speed and cornering ability out of the family car? It's certainly possible and usually not that hard. But most people see computers, like cars, as appliances. It does what they need when they take it home,and you can even add functionality to it later by installing more software in the case you need to.
The average person really has no need to be concerned about these details, and unless a compelling reason to care comes along, all this handwringing is pointless.
Business, on the other hand, does care because of the annoying and expensive (and usually unwanted) upgrade cycles. And anyone looking to reduce Microsoft's market share should concentrate their efforts on demonstrating the effectiveness of Linux to business.
I was wondering the same thing. Wouldn't it be possible to come back into thin atmosphere and decelerate slowly by essentially being a high altitude glider? At LEO speeds, you're still below escape velocity, so even if you skipped off the atmosphere a few times, you're still going to be coming back to Earth. It would take an airframe configuration that allowed controllable lift over a large envelope, but I don't see anything that makes it impossible.
The issue I see is that you need to both maintain a low enough altitude where control surfaces work but which is high (Read: thin) enough that heating isn't excessive.
Be careful trying to use what you design in the USA. Some software is classified as a medical device in the US and needs FDA approval before it can be used. Outside USA, other countries have their own approval procedures.
Well you've just answered your own question. Like it or not, Microsoft did revolutionize software: they provided a common platform and a consistent interface at a relatively low cost and so enabled businesses the world over to automate.
Whether you like the actual product/quality/lack thereof/ or not is a separate issue.
The 'real life' photos suck because they have no meaningful context for you.
:) permits, I've been making an effort to go through my old hard drives and store all the old emails in ASCII text so I can read them when I want to. It's funny how vivid a memory becomes when you read a silly joke or whatever you sent a friend seven years before.
I can see why I might like something like this. Often I remember a past incident fondly... or angrily, and I want a better visualization of the incident, or I suddenly think of someone I knew for a short time -- a few days or even a few hours: the old guy I worked with in that dusty warehouse in NYC a long time ago who had a wire in his chest; a one night stand that didn't work out, but who had amazing eyes; the old Jewish guy with a number tattooed on his arm -- and I enjoyed my time/conversations with that person and want better memory of them. Life is full of fleeting moments that seem insignificant at the time, but grow in meaning later. I remember the smile that was on the face of the woman who became my wife in the first second I saw her, but I don't remember what she was wearing: that kind of thing.
Email is often the only record I have. Sometimes people I lost contact with had emailed me pictures and I remember them that way, or I read the things we discussed in mail. There are many people from my 'earlier life' whose photos I would love to have had. I don't always think of taking a snapshot of someone or something I see every day until it's not there anymore.
Something like this would be fun. It could be a great experiment to see how many of life's boring, banal moments are worth remembering.
This occurred to me about two years ago when I was going crazy trying to find an off-the-cuff email I had sent someone I was dating because I was bored. It was just meaningless poetry composed in real time then, but as time passed, I realized there was real significance to what I said and I wanted to see exactly what I had written.
So,as time (and boredom
Vannevar Bush's Memex here we come!
Actually, the article you referenced makes exactly the point I thought of when I read your post: it's not the fact that they're jerks that attracts women, it's that they're confident and oozing testosterone.
You make a similar point in your second paragraph when you say that confidence is what makes a difference.
Most so called "sensitive guys" (no, it's not a personal attack) are whiny wimpy doomats. If I was a woman I wouldn't have any interest in them either. Be assertive, project inner strength and try to come off as someone halfway worth talking to.
Why wouldn't you? It's not like you can corner the market on 3 billion women (though it might be fun...) or whatever your MOTAS is.
Anyway, the most important things for meeting/having fun with/hooking up with for a night of fun/ the attractive sex are: (a)look clean and neatly groomed and (2) be interesting. Everything else follows. In fact, in a relationship with a woman who is only interested in getting laid and could care less how smart/dumb you are (oh I love women like that!
Now shut off the puter (or point it to a personal ad site) and go have fun.
No, truly precision devices (by that I mean measurement instrumentation) can not rely on the powerline voltage remaining within 0.1% of spec as a cheap, off the shelf voltage reference chip can.
I sure hope not. Would be pretty poor practice on the part of the engineer who designed it to not account for voltage fluctuations. The reality is that the real world outside a computer (actually the +5VDC voltage inside a computer is pretty ugly) is messy. Refrigerator or A/C compressor switches on == big dip in line voltage, lightning strike a few miles away induces big currents in the line. No engineer in his right mind would power electronics directly from the AC line without some sort of filtering/isolation.
OK, here's a dumb question. Not a troll, just a question.
Why bother streaming the data when the client can simply download the file and play it at the remote site? Music data typically isn't very big and downloads quickly (assuming a 10/100 Mbps network) and there are no issues with jitter, etc.
When a new "upscale" grocery store opened in my old neighborhood, I was pleased that they didn't have loyalty cards. Now I notice that one of the major grocery stores I shop at (Rainbow Foods in Minneapolis area) has dropped their card. The other large competing chain, Cub/Supervalu doesn't have one either. Together they probably get 80% of the grocery shoppers in the metro area.
Neither do the others: Lund's, Byerly's etc. I can't think of a single grocery chain around here that still uses loyalty cards.
Q: Is this a nationwide trend, or just specific to this area of the upper Midwest?
I suspect that the rise in numbers of people paying with credit cards makes these loyalty cards superfluous. I rarely pay for groceries in cash and I tend to get pretty well targeted register coupons when I shop. e.g., I bake a lot so the register often prints out coupons for flour, sugar, chocolate, etc...
Assuming you're not being sarcastic, this seems like an awfully complicated way to do something as simple as grocery shopping. If you don't want the junk mail, why not just give a wrong address and leave it at that?
If you're so worried about anyone knowing what you're shopping for, you're going to have to resort to wearing disguises and paying only in cash. OTOH, I have a bunch of fake noses & mustaches I can sell pretty cheap to anyone interested...
I meant to add to that post that it wasn't intended to be judgemental. Just a pet peeve of mine when I see women being referred to as "females." Never seems to happen with men.
Anyway, congratz on your upcoming marriage. We have the opposite joke: that she's pretty low maintenance.
I've said it before: manage your career. Find out what you like to do and look for work that lets you do it. It's not always possible to get exactly where you want to be, but by working at it you can get close enough. And keep correcting so you stay on your chosen career path.
In your case I see the attitude that works well in safety-critical development. I am a software developer who works on medical instrumentation. Your attitude is exactly welcome in this kind of environment because we can't afford to screw up; so you tend to find a high percentage of devs who care about the quality of their work and get lots of management support with the attitude that Quality is more important than Release Date. Those who think we're too anal about getting things done right or following process tend to quit pretty soon.
Try to identify industries where software quality is of high concern and look for positions there. It can be hard to break in, but once you have that kind of experience you become much more valuable in the field.
Or you could just find a girl/woman that doesn't require money. Trust me, there are plenty -- I've met a bunch and married one.
Start by looking for those that don't like being referred to impersonally as "females."
Absolutely! I'm a software developer. I love my job. I'm well paid and highly skilled, yet I have to do annoying, tedious grunt work. Why? Because it's highly skilled annoying, tedious grunt work that has to get done to produce a high quality product and it can't be automated or turned over to someone who doesn't have at least similar skills and knowledge of this specific machine.
I've learned to accept that for every fun requirement I get to implement, there are ten boring ones I really don't feel like doing, but must do because product quality is on the line, and we are dealing with people's lives here. But the better a job I do on the boring stuff, the more I get to choose which of the cool stuff is assigned to me, so it balances out in the end.
No matter how cool any job seems at first, you'll eventually get to the mind-numbingly boring stuff. Nobody wants to do the last 10% of any project!
Just couldn't let this one slide. I made it to the honors group in Westinghouse '83. Sure, I wasn't one of the final 40, but at least I made it to the previous level. I also was being raised by a single mother who didn't even have a high-school diploma, but understood that I needed education and pushed me when I needed it.
While I agree that all other things being equal, a child is better off with two loving parents than just one, your statement does a disservice to all the struggling, loving single parents out there.
Ditto. That made me smile. I was in the honors group in STS40 (I think??? It was in 1983) and my mom didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I got lots of encouragement.
My thoughts exactly on reading the OP's dilemma. Use it to your advantage. How many applicants for an IT job can say they just spent half a year on tour? Interviewers, even -- no, especially -- HR drones (who almost by definition tend to be "people people") like talking about that stuff. I'm pretty sure that in most of my job interviews what finally got me the job was chatting about side projects and hobbies. Just about all applicants can do the job to one level of competence or another, but employers would rather have someone with a personality.
Thanks, I'll take a look at it.
Wow!! I'm not the only one to remember this story. OK, so I remember the things he was trying to silence were called "screaming meemies", but what was the name of the book. IIRC it was the first Tom Swift book I read, age 11 or so...
No but you can get the common ones, and to use the example given, USB cameras are common enough that in an operating system with a major release in the last 2 years I expect at least basic functionality just by plugging it in. Basic functionality meaning that the system knows it's there and can take me where I need to go to set it up.
My response was to counter the assertion that users need to learn more about their computers. For the most part, they shouldn't. I tend to use myself as an example: if I can't figure it out in 5 minutes, I know the "average user" will just give up. Complex tasks I expect to have to sit down with a manual or online help and work at; connecting a USB MP3 player should be a no-brainer (and I have one on Win XP that I still can't get to work!)
You haven't tried to make a living at this, have you?
In my first ever full time job I had to do something I wish every budding young developer did: telephone support. Customers regularly called not having bothered to open the manuals for what were sometimes very complex products. Even the "smart" ones who read the manual often missed really obvious things like checking that they had the right parts in the first place. If I had a dime for every time I said "you just need to line up the red dots to plug the connectors together..." And our customers were mostly scientists and engineers. If these people make up a significant percentage of your user base, you have to cater to them. Otherwise you're out of business. We catered to them by trying to write better manuals that an idiot could understand (surprise! it worked!) and for the ones who couldn't be bothered to even look in the "Quick start" part of the manual, we just tried to be as patient as possible on the phone, and hope they ordered a lot of expensive stuff in the future.
People who have trouble using your product can be extremely valuable: they're usually saying "this is substandard; fix it." It's fairly rare that they are truly stupid.