techrecovery | Feb. 18th, 2004

I work doing corporate tech support for a VERY expensive provider in Toronto Canada. Usually our customer hire people who understand how to run a Web Server, but occasionally we land a customer who is challenged beyond measure.

Over the past year to one such customer we have explained things like firewalls, ftp, why they cannot send us a copy of their site on CDs to upload, how to zip logs, how to unzip logs. All this support for a customer who spends Mega Dollars for a server they are supposed to run themselves. The level of stupid questions has escalated until today we had to sit back and laugh.

Here is a theory. Do please feel free to muck around with it:

The User Ignorance Amusement Factor (UIAF)

there is an inverse relationship between the amount of knowledge a user actually has* and the amount of laughter/mockery produced in a tech support person.

*Knowledge Perception Differential is a determining factor as well. Thus, for example, the Luser might feel that they know everything there is to know about their job, but there is a gap between their perception and reality.