RTFM

Before retraining to be a teacher, I worked for over 10 years in IT in a variety of roles from support, programming and infrastructure. The one thing that always baffled me was the lack of training that companies provided for their staff in using the computers they were obliged to use. There were truck licenses, fork lift qualifications, etc, etc, for all sorts of other complicated equipment, but nothing for the computers. No wonder they need teams of people that spend countless hours supporting mundane, everyday tasks (printing mainly!). Teach a man to fish and all that,.

Maybe it's years of being the go-to-geek for all things technical, but what really gets my goat is the expectation for people to understand their own technology purchases at home without ever reading the manual! My response now to any technical question I deem easy to figure out is, "What does the manual say?". I still help out, just wanna make a point as it's clear that most of the time people never read them. Why not? Also these days, there are help files, videos and detailed walk-throughs of all the basics on the web. People need to realise that geeks are more than willing to help when required, but not when people can't be arsed to RTFM. (You do know that the only reason people end up in IT is that they are the ones that do RTFM?)

Ooh, that wasn't meant to be a rant, kinda evolved.....sorry :-|