The Audacity of Hope
I know the feeling has been bothering me for a while now, but it wasn’t until today that I was finally able to really put it all together in my head:
Probably the most depressing part of my job is the surprising number of people I talk to every day with these really lofty “let’s start a web business” goals that don’t know the first thing about…well, the web for one — or business for another.
These people aren’t necessarily stupid or anything — it’s normally people trying to approach a very dot-com-bubble-era idea with an analog mentality (e.g. “I’ll promote my searchable restaurant review site with business cards!”) — but I can’t help but wince when a customer explains to me, “Well, basically I want to have a site with _____ on it and people will be able to sign up and search for ______ and do _______ with it.” I can’t just explain to these people “Well, let’s start by getting a book on MySQL and a book on working with databases in PHP, dip your toes into some Photoshop and Dreamweaver and go ahead and give us a call back in three years,” or “You would be better off investing the twelve dollars a month you spend on hosting in high-risk penny stocks.” No, I have to briefly mute my headset so they can’t hear me sigh before adjusting my position in my seat, in some futile attempt to shake off this feeling of unease, while I summon up about 90 minutes’ worth of patience before taking my headset off mute and beginning “Alright, let’s pull up your browser and go to…”
“What’s a browser?”
It never ceases to amaze me the number of people that sign up for web hosting services that don’t know the difference between Yahoo and their web browser, their web browser and their ISP, or even the difference between web addresses and email addresses. My mind reels when a simple instruction like “go to ______.com” turns into a five-minute digression from the actual problem I’m troubleshooting (I’d say at least a third of people that call in for tech support go to URLs by searching for them. I’ve dealt with hundreds of people who are literally afraid to type something in their browser’s address bar and probably just as many who don’t know where the address bar is or what it does). I don’t understand the logic that would convince somebody that they can make a living, or even money on the side, from computers without knowing the first damn thing about computers.
It breaks my heart to sit on the phone with these people until they have the beginnings of a very Web 1.0-style site (it doesn’t help that our site-building software is, in a word, shit), to hear the excitement in their voices as they slowly start to catch on to the basics of getting a page on the web, they thank me and I’m left to only imagine the disappointment when, in a year, their site isn’t in the top 995,000 on Google and their site traffic statistics reflect only their own IP, which is collected when they check their site statistics every day.
*sigh* On the other hand, I understand structural engineers make a lot of money so I think I might pick up some…I don’t know…structural engineering tools or something. Might be able to supplement my tech support income a little bit.
4 Responses to “The Audacity of Hope”
I went to ______.com and didn’t get anything either so maybe you should stop giving these people that address.
In defense of the computer illiterate everywhere, let me just remind you that yours was the first generation to have computers in the classroom, to, in essence, use computers much as others used typewriters…heck, much as others used pen and paper, dictionaries, books, and how-to-manuals. Of course, there will always be the get-rich-quick people and the just plain stupid. Oh, and the ones who think, I’ll just call tech support and have them teach me everything I need to know rather than sign up for any classes on the subject cuz, geez, how hard can it be?
And Caleb has a good point, you shouldn’t mislead people like that.
So come back to casper, I’ll get you on volunteering and then we can go test for departments together.
Chris, I told you I don’t want to be a fireman. I want to be an astronaut.
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