BootBlock.co.uk

Imagine the scene: I’m in a hall way. Nothing is happening other than me walking through a door.

Moments before I close the door behind me, someone comes up to me and, without a hint of any context, blurts out: “You know the circle with the four corners?”. Then silence. No information on which plane of reality this imaginary circle inhabits. It could be a fucking dream for all I know.

I stand there like a bird just shat in my mouth. What just happened?

Rather than – even causually – mentioning where this circle exists, they go on to trace a circle in the air with their finger and say “The circle with the corners, with lines through it”.

The bird-plop is still sitting in my mouth as I just stand there. They just came from putting their children to bed, so could it be a toy? Yeah, it might be, so I enquiringly ask “Is it… a toy?”. A somewhat annoyed look appears on their face.

Apparently not. Having established that it isn’t a toy, that means there’s now only a billion-minus-one things it could be.

“The circle thing with the four corners. Black and white corners, where is it?”.

Ohh right! Black and white corners! So it can’t be a pizza cut into quarters. Or a life preserver floaty ring thing as they’re red and white, plus they’re not quartered. What about an onion ring? Nah. So that means it now could be either one of a billion-minus-four things. We’re making progress!

Dunno about you, but I’m fairly confused. All I could muster was saying “What?” a couple of times. This circle thing could literally be anything for all I know. I finish off with a “What circle?”.

Yep, they’re annoyed now. Annoyed that I’m not a fucking mind reader, no doubt. “In Excel or whatever! The Circle!”.

Right, Excel. The spreadsheet/chart thing in Office. The speadsheet/chart thing I don’t use. But, seemingly, because I use a computer, I automatically know how every fucking application in the entire world works.

“Excel… I don’t use Excel… er, is it a pie chart?” .

Oh, now they’re really annoyed. “NO … doesn’t matter” is half-heartedly spoken as they suddenly just vacate the area.

That’s it. The whole moronic ordeal lasted about 25 seconds. It’s a little while later and I still don’t know what the damn circle was supposed to be. But all this does is merely highlight a problem that really annoys me.

I use computers all the time – it’s what I do. This does not mean I wrote every single bloody program (out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions) ever created and that I automatically know what someone is talking about when they just walk up to me and say “circle”. It’s like walking up to a random doctor in the street and saying “Fx it”. Fix what? Your spleen or your house’s damn guttering? How about you start from the beginning and say what you’re talking about and what the problem is (this includes exactly what you’re trying to do) ?

This can also be applied to bug reports. Submitting reports that say “An error appeared and I clicked OK; how do I fix it?” is entirely useless. I’ll fix the problem when you fix the buzzing.

Wait, what buzzing?

Exactly.