I’m one of those guys who are known among my group of friends and family as “good at computers and stuff.” This means that I’m automatically unofficial (i.e. free) tech support for those close to me who are not very good at it.

I don’t mind this, not at all. I always want to help them if I can and I’m happy to do it. But, like most people in positions where they have to answer official or unofficial support questions, I’ve noticed that certain irritating behaviors repeat themselves over and over and over again.

So here’s a list of some things you have to think about if you want to be a very stereotypical person seeking help in the realms of computers.

Never refer to programs by any meaningful name

This is something I see more and more. For instance, my mother called the other day and told me “Adobe isn’t working” and asked me if I could help.

Now, Adobe Systems Inc. is a large company and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, so I guess that’s not the Adobe she was referring to. And if she was talking about adobe bricks she probably wouldn’t call me for help. No, of course she was talking about some particular program made by Adobe.

And since the title bar in a program window says something like “Adobe Acrobat” or “Adobe Photoshop”, then it must be ok to shorten that to just the first part, right? That could cause no confusion at all; it’s not like a company usually makes more than one piece of software…

It’s like saying “Microsoft isn’t working” (which incidentally is pretty true) if you are having trouble printing a Word document. It just doesn’t give much meaningful information.

Never, ever write down or remember what error messages say

I mean, come on, a little window pops up, says something is wrong, can’t be that important right? It’s not like one should assume that there is a reason for the error message. They are probably just there to annoy you, so no reason to try to read what they say. Especially if you’re going to ask my help about it; of course it suffices to say “It said that something went wrong.” It couldn’t possibly be helpful for me to know what went wrong if I am going to figure out why.

Assume that we know everything about the particular piece of software you are using

Nothing is more fun than when a friend calls you and says “When I plug in my camera the thing that comes up doesn’t work like it should.” It’s just such a mystery.

What is “the thing”? In what way is it not working correctly? What should "the thing" be doing? And why are you talking to me about “your thing” not working, anyway? That sounds a bit… personal.

But of course, since we “know computers” we know what particular program you have starting automatically when you plug in your camera. Never mind that I don’t use any such program at all, and there are hundreds of them out there that you could be using. Of course I know what you use when you describe it as “the thing” and of course I know how it should be working, despite the fact that I've probably never seen said program.

No, wait, I don’t know those things. But people tend to assume such things every time they ask for help.

Come up with you very own definition of the word “nothing”

A friend calls me up one day, saying that her computer doesn’t work and wants help figuring out what’s wrong. Sure, fine, I’m happy to help, so I ask her what the “symptoms” are. She tells me “When I try to turn it on, nothing happens.”

“Oh boy,” I think, that is always a tough one to troubleshoot over the phone, but I start trying. First of all I want to figure out if the computer is getting any power at all, so I ask her if she can hear the fans humming, and if the little lights at the front light up. She sounds a bit puzzled when she answers that “Sure, those things are as they normally are.”

“Ok, good,” I said, and asked her again exactly what happens when she tries to turn it on, and gets the reply “nothing”. I knew she was a windows user and not on all that friendly terms with computers, and with that in mind I set out to ask some more questions to find out what this “nothing” actually means.

I asked her if the screen is completely black the whole time, or if she sees “any of the little text that usually comes before Windows starts” before it does “nothing.” She tells me that the text is there, so I ask her what happens after the text comes up. She answers… “Nothing.” So I ask if she happens to notice if allthe usual text is there.

She answers me “Well I think so. I mean, Windows starts.”

So that’s her definition of nothing? Turns out that Windows did start, it just didn’t load the desktop; just her background and mouse pointer turned up. So when the computer starts up, does the start up procedure with checking memory, hard drives and other hardware and then proceeds to start the operating system, then it does “nothing”?

If we just could have started with her saying “Windows starts and I can see my background, but then nothing happens” things would have gone a lot quicker. Now I tried to troubleshoot a lot of other things first. Every step of my questions was sensible to me, since I didn’t understand her definition of “nothing” and there are many things that could have been wrong that would have had symptoms before windows starts.

As it turns out, allo f those things were working. It was just the GUI shell that wasn’t starting. Not that I expected her to know that in particular, but a little better description of the problem than “nothing happens” would truly have been helpful.

But apparently it isn’t really common sense to assume that your computer savvy friends need at least a little information before tackling a problem, because similar things happen to me a lot. Apparently we’re omniscient, I just haven’t noticed yet.

Refuse to read any technical documentation or help files before asking for help

There is a very common thing to say among those who are usually hired as free tech support. RTFM; Read the Fucking Manual.

It is a very common expression because people really, really don’t. They assume that they are “bad at computers” and can’t figure things out for themselves.

Even if they are intelligent, even if they have no problems understanding other things in life, they just assume that they won’t understand this particular thing just because it is connected to the world of computers.

But come on, please, my dear, dear family and friends, next time could you at least try? You might learn something. You might even learn that computers aren’t so scary after all. And maybe you would even find that you can sometimes figure some things out for yourself. Wouldn’t that feel good?