techrecovery | (no subject) (Reply)

I recently switched jobs because I graduated college and had to quit my on-campus job. So now I'm doing tech support for a popular graphics editing program, and have my serious doubts about the abilities of the trainers and techs.

Trainer: Apple is very good about stable system updates. You are safe installing the updates as soon as they come out.
(uh, not in my experience they're not perfect. But if the update borks a setup, it'll be Apple's problem, right? Augh.)

During call observations:

Tech: You keep getting fatal errors when trying to run [the app] in your regular accounts (even newly created admin accts). But you can always just log in as root whenever you want to run [the app].
(The tech didn't even have the user run Console to see what errors she was getting. Running Console was two steps down on the list from "install in safe mode," and before "log in as root.")

Level 2 tech: Yeah, just have [the user from above] reinstall her OS if running fix permissions on the startup disk and manually modifying permissions on the appropriate folders (through the GUI) didn't work.
(reinstall her OS? They didn't even finish walking through the troubleshooting document!)

I have always been taught to never enable root on a Mac, but here they seem to walk people through the task for any issue that stumps them. So I ask you: for what circumstance would you tell a user to enable root?

I miss my old job so much. Too bad I'm no longer a college student and therefore ineligible for employment.