Technonervous and Technowawa

Some sysadmins hardlink these two usertypes, but Naldo was insistent that they be treated separately.

usertype{technonervous} =>

User gets nervous when talking about ANYTHING to do with the computer and cannot articulate basic terms such as mouse, screen, or reboot. Bypass user, go straight to computer. Do not ask follow-up questions. Figure it out yourself. Most of the time it’s something your four-year-old niece could solve.

usertype{technowawa} =>

When you (a representative of the technocrati) speak clearly about anything, even the weather, user hears technobabble and furrows brow. They understand nothing except “wa waa blah blah right-click yada wawa” because they expect to understand nothing that tech support tells them. Note: The technonervous often do understand of what you tell them, especially with visual cues, and the technowawa occasionally will state a problem clearly enough.

Plug the Damn Thing In

infinite paths cross
mystery system failure
plug the damn thing in

Example 1

A friend was having mystery trouble with a php script the other day after performing an upgrade to another application that interacted with it. He had already done quite a bit of troubleshooting before asking me if I had any ideas. Although I did have a few suggestions he hadn’t tried, none of them revealed the culprit. We were starting to get frustrated. I took a deep breath.

“It’s probably something stupid,” I said. “Go back through all the most basic things you can think of, even if you think they couldn’t have changed.”

Sure enough, it was directory permissions. The new php script wasn’t set to 755.

Example 2

User asks me to make sure her new office is ready in terms of internet connectivity. I’m very careful, have made sure the jack is active, that her current machine will pick up an address when on that subnet, etc. A week or so goes by. She hasn’t moved in yet because they haven’t transferred the phone. She calls me and tells me her email stopped working a few hours ago.

Well, you know the drill, “email” means all network connectivity. The user just hasn’t realized it. I try some basic network stuff, and the machine can’t even ping the gateway. But the ethernet cable is plugged in. There are two jacks, and it’s in the right-hand jack, which I consider for a moment as odd, because I use the left-hand jack on my subnet (we have more jacks than switch ports). But this isn’t my subnet, and this user wouldn’t have touched the cable, right? I ask her. “Oh no, I didn’t touch the cables,” she says.

So from there I assume something has gone wrong with the network settings on the computer. Fifteen minutes later I’m pretty sure the jack is dead. You probably figured out where this was going already.

“Did they transfer your phone today?” I ask.

“Oh yes, thank god. I was wondering when they would get around to it. I’m moving into the new office tomorrow.”

I get down on my knees and put the cable in the left-hand jack. I pull up a browser, which works fine.

“You’re good to go now.” I say.

She stares at me and then the lights come on. “Oh dammit. Did the phone guy do something? Is my phone an internet phone?”

“No, you don’t have an IP phone. He mistakenly unplugged the ethernet cable and then put it back in the wrong jack,” I tell her, but in a friendly way. To users, what we do, or what “phone guys” do is voodoo. That our actions might somehow overlap in the world of jacks and cables never occurs to them.

Anyway, here’s hoping that the next time you’re in a “plug the damn thing in” scenario, you realize it sooner rather than later.

Shooting the Bull

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle.
–Sun Tzu, Art of War (Giles Trans.)

You log data every millisecond of every day. All of the desktops purring under your care, servers, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, covert surveillance systems. Okay, forget I mentioned the last bit. Paranoia and a healthy sense of self preservation have led you to make sure logs are happening, and you look at them periodically. Some of them even send you daily reports. From all this data you have an idea of what is happening on your network.

Yet you are surrounded by treasure troves of data of the most interesting and unexpected kind: Inside the heads of your users. Unlike the data on hard drives, data stored in a gray matter file system (GMFS), sometimes referred to as a meat file system (MFS), cannot be reduced to source files, cannot be dumped and reviewed or rehashed, and follows no standards or rules. So how do you read, record ,and make use of this information? Naldo created three commands for reading and interpreting GMFS data: shsh, peg, and gro.

shsh -u -o polite jimbob | peg -u jimbob > yaklog

Translation: Shoot the bull with Jimbob, ostensibly to be polite. Pipe output into peg to produce enhanced generalizations about Jimbob and file the results in your yaklog. Some people have yaklogs in their gray matter, others have yadalogs, others bslogs. Use you’ve got. This should work fine with Jimbob because he appreciates the argument you added to the -o switch. Most people do, but there are quite a few users who find polite banter to be insipid and somewhat nauseating. You may be one of those people.

Take your yaklog and process it periodically. Maybe once per day.

open (YAK, "<", yaklog);
while (<YAK>){
$line = $_;
        for (@users) {
            if ($line =~ /$_/){
                push @$_, $_;
            }
        }
}

close YAK;
for (@users) {
    for (@$_) {
        gro $_ > officeGeneralizations
    }
}

Or something like that. In other words, periodically go through what you’ve gathered from all that banter and make some assumptions. Go ahead, infer, deduce, hypothesize. Guaranteed, if you do this regularly you will produce useful knowledge. Get to know your users. All of that banter is useful in other ways than simply gathering information, but I’ll discuss that later.

Explanations

you mispelled haiku
no I meant to write hacku
just think about it

I talk slowly when I have something to say. It’s just the way I am. I’m thinking through what I want to communicate, whom I’m talking to, how best to phrase things, etc. Maybe I had too many patient interlocutors as a child. Users are not patient interlocutors.

So I’ve had a steep learning curve. I’ve tried explaining things in terms non-techies should understand, with lots of mundane analogies and gestural metaphors. Most people find analogies to be either obtuse or condescending, so that has succeeded abysmally. I’ve tried using exactly the terms I use in my head. Most people don’t think like I do. So they follow what I’m saying for maybe two words.

What to do? If you need a boilerplate, here’s what I recommend: Executive summaries for everyone. Everything you say by way of explanation should be a summary. If the user tries to go for details, give them just enough to answer their question. And when you’re done, walk away. Ultimately you compliment their intelligence and save everyone some time.

This approach automatically scales to anyone you speak with, techies or non. If they ask informed questions, then your “minimal” answers, if they are correct, will come across as well-spoken.

First Post

This blog is for sysadmins, by a sysadmin. The topic is dealing with users. See the about page for what I mean by the title.

Basically, I want to give you some ideas on how to deal with people in a positive way. What better way than with counterexamples? My main counterexample is Naldo, or Reginald Millefois, rogue sysadmin. He’s a fictional character, honestly. Maybe counterexample isn’t quite the right word. Let’s just say he’s an example. Of what, I’ll let you decide. He’s not a BOFH. He’s much more nuanced, ethical, and pragmatic, and perhaps that will be his downfall.