Lusers and Linux

In <4mbam9$807@wapping.ecs.soton.ac.uk> bc95@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Ben Crosby) writes:
>Ok, Now I know that I was one of those people who caused no end of grief 
>to sysops at a certain solent based ISP, however here's sympathy.

Oh yes, I remember well the time that you managed to set your reply address to root@tcp.co.uk, amongst other things. Interestingly enough, some of the mail that ended up coming to me thanks to that helped start off the solent.* hierarchy. At least now you can see it from the ISP's point of view :)

>User:	Well, I dont know have you guys changed anything to stop users not
>	using your software logging in ?
>Me:	No sir, we havent <what is this guy up to ?>

A common complaint from most lusers whenever something goes wrong. It is always the providers fault.

"I've not changed anything and its not working. It must be a problem with my provider. I'll better ring them up and scream down the phone at them. After all, .net keeps on telling me how easy it is to connect to the Internet. Since it isn't like that, my provider must be doing something wrong".

If they can't read their EMail they ask us if the mail server is down. When questioned a little closer, it appears that they decided to change their password. Without telling us. They assumed that the password would magically change on our systems as well. We had to gently tell the luser that we didn't have systems like MicroSlouth Bob (tm) which are nice and friendly. So even tho the error message he[1] got back included the words "Password incorrect", he assumed that it was our fault.

Its almost as if they think that we change the setup on our systems all of the time, just for fun. Yeah, and I really love dealing with all of the calls that even minor changes to the systems can cause. The worst ones are those who are semi-clued up... but don't really understand what is going on. As a result of one of these annoying gits, I hate NT and all SMTP implementations on it.

>Me:	Well, what are you using to log in? <inspiration dawns>
>User: 	The machine name of course.
>Me:	Which - the old or the new ?
>	You guessed it. I think that Linus has a lot to answer for.....

What was the comment I saw in someone's .sig ? "Linux - Putting power where it shouldn't be". Or something similar.

>AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH. I have only been doing this for 
>a week, and I already need a holiday !!!!

You've only touched the very tip of the iceburg. Its all downhill from here. I mean, you've not had to deal with a "I'm not a computer person" yet. Just remember those three important words: "Down not Across". As for a holiday... does anyone actually know what a holiday is ? I've heard that they are these situations where there isn't any stress, no dumb luser questions and no computers. Oh, and don't forget:

 # /pub/lunch || dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mem

It wasn't surprising that of=/dev/kmem didn't work... it appears that the kernel in Solaris 2.x doesn't want to committ suicide. of=/dev/mem works quite well though :)

[1]

Why does it seem that the vast majority of the really bad lusers we have are male ? Perhaps its due to some of them mucking arround and screwing their setup (and then blaming it on us). However, I've noticed this with new customers as well. We had a little discussion at TCP Towers about this and John the Unstable came up with the idea that women actually listen to what you tell them on the phone and read all of the information that you send to them. On the other hand, men seem to be more willing to do the "I know how to do this" and skip parts of the documentation or steps you ask them to do. Normally, this is on the bits that they think are fairly minor, but are infact quite important. No comments about the sample size either; I know that most of our customers are male. However, all of the women that we've done technical support for haven't been really bad lusers. They may have tried our patience at times, but they aren't the really bad lusers.

Posted on 3rd May 1996