On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:16:18 -0500, Kyle wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Excuse me for trying to help you learn how to search for information
>> yourself so you can find what you're looking for more efficiently.
> 
> 
> The aggravation is not worth what you're being paid, is it Jim?  ;-)

If I doubled my salary for answering a question like that, well, I'd 
still be at 0.  :-)

It always amazes me that there are people who don't know how to ask for 
help in a way that gets them help as well as how to search for an answer.

I used to work in a bookstore (years and years ago).  We'd have people 
come in to get a book on Lotus 1-2-3 that told them how to do "x".  I'd 
walk them back to the section that had the Lotus 1-2-3 books were and 
they'd pull a random book off the bookshelf and start flipping through 
the Table of Contents or just browsing the book.

I'd grab a book and look at the index.  I'd also start thinking of 
alternative terms for what they were trying to do (ie, word 
association).  If the book didn't have it in the index, I'd grab the next 
book and repeat.

In the time they were looking at one book, I'd go through 4 or 5 and end 
up with a few suggestions for them.  They were usually amazed that I was 
able to make a quick recommendation like that, but it wasn't that I knew 
the books, it was just that I knew how to find what they were looking for 
quickly.

Learning how to get help isn't hard - it's when someone starts demanding 
answers without doing their homework properly that it gets annoying.  I 
don't know how many hundreds of thousands of messages I've posted on 
newsgroups and in public forums over the years - but I know it numbers in 
the hundreds of thousands.  I used to answer upwards of 1,000 messages a 
week on CompuServe back in the early 90's.

Jim

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