 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group President's Page John Drake |
Dial Help
Working with a personal computer can be a lonely business. Sometimes the frustrations and feelings of being lost are minor as when it rejects your attempt to run a program or edit a file with a cryptic message that seems to mean just nothing. Sometimes it's a great deal more serious. It will be a long time before I forget my feelings at about 10:30 one night a year or so back when my hard disk crashed and left me facing a catalogue of about 200 detached file fragments. Well I had a backup of all my data which was only about a month old (I know, I know - I was going to regret this) and all my programs on disk so I decided to reformat and load everything back on again. "Access denied" was the ominous message. So at about 11:30 I rang a knowledgeable night owl friend in the Group and by midnight I was reformatted and starting to load up my hard disk again.
This, I think, is one of the greatest gifts our club can offer its members - a network of knowledgeable and friendly computer users. I have benefited from it on many occasions and have also helped other members from time to time. I am listed on the help list for Wordstar Professional and the calls I have had for help have been a great learning experience for me as well as being occasionally of value to the people who have called me.
If you have particular knowledge of some area of computing (my Wordstar talent is more long use than profound knowledge) I would strongly recommend you to put in a period on the help list. However, there are some running problems with the help lines which I would like to go into briefly.
For instance, there is a problem of excessive expectations and deficient manners on the part of some callers. I have had mostly good experiences although one caller crossly asked me "why are you on the help list if you
can't answer a question like that"; I guess he had something there. But some other members, who are being paid precisely nothing for their services, have been roundly abused by unsatisfied callers or have been called on for help in the small hours of the morning. This sort of behaviour is quite unacceptable and is the reason we have lost some very capable people from the help list.
There are callers who are not even members or callers who are trying to get support for a pirate copy of a program which they have picked up without a manual. If I spot them I always buzz these inquirers off.
I had a caller once who, after I had given him advice on printer drivers, warned me: "there's a lot of money involved here; I hope you're ready to stand by your opinion if we get ourselves into trouble following your advice". I could hardly believe him but yes, he wanted free advice and damages if it didn't work. Another order of the buzz off was quickly conferred on him.
There is another problem that faces some of our most valuable help line advisers. They are people who earn their living in the computer business and they are valuable because they spend much of their lives dealing with computer users' problems. At the same time they have a moral problem in keeping their business interests separated from their role as no-charge, help line advisers. I think that most of them manage to keep these conflicting interests apart but they must be continuously alert to their conflicting responsibilities.
From these general remarks may I state a few basic rules on using the help line.
Helpers give advice out of goodwill towards their fellow club members and none of them is paid. So be polite to them, don't pester them, don't rush into calling for help until you have read the manual once more. And call them at civilised hours.
The help line is not a support service for users of pirate copies of programs The help line is not a service to promote any individual business.
And finally, if you have a sound knowledge of some particular area of computing, volunteer to go on the help list. It's the best way I know to learn more about your particular topic.
The Presidency
After six months in the job, I am finding the presidency involves too much hard work, too much nervous strain (a lot of it organising distributors to demonstrate software and then keeping them up to the mark), so I have asked the Committee to relieve me at its next meeting. I would like to thank all those members who have been so friendly and so supportive during my presidency.
The July meeting
0ur next meeting, at Clunies Ross House on the 3rd July, will be devoted to demonstrations of three word processing programs which run under Windows: Ami Pro, Professional Write Plus and Word Perfect for Windows. I had been considering an August meeting devoted to non-windows programs and operating systems (such as Desqview and OS/2) but nothing will have been finalised prior to my resignation at the June committee meeting.
Reprinted from the July 1991 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
