Esoterika

I have a Couch of Requirement. This is not to say that my couch produces things I want... usually the opposite, in fact. But it is a couch upon which Mama cat requires me to be. Loudly, vociferously, insistently, and unyieldingly, I am summoned to sit upon the damn couch. Not in the office. Not at the table. On. The. Couch. Along with Mama's blanky, her stuffed peep, her fuzzy ball, her robot hamster, and her other objects of fixation.

I'm telling you: cats have Asperger's.

The level of writing ability in the news these days... sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Oregon’s oceanic shoreline is one of the most dramatic and dynamic places on the planet, along with its infamy for pristine, unspoiled beauty."

Yeah, we like to live in infamy, too.

"Calin Chi Wong is charged with making written threats to kill or do bodily injury via the computer."

Oh, those dangerous computers. Put the monitor down!

While most of us are pretty good at research and probably know most of this (though I did learn at least one new tip from the comments), I think this is an excellent article to show to beginning researchers (especially since increasingly these days, the internet is the ONLY place people do their research, sigh).

This totally parallels my experiences working at a retail help desk, where we do a lot of very diverse problem-solving (that beef jerky thing, for instance): when people approach a source of information, the problem is that they very often ask for what they think is the solution, rather than asking what would achieve the desired result. So if a customer comes up and says, "Do you have product x," and we respond, "No," and delve no further, they go away unsatisfied. But if we probe a bit into what they want to DO with product x, we can very likely suggest another brand, or another solution that involves products or methods they didn't even know existed. (We may also find out that they aren't even using the right term for what they want, because they don't know enough about the subject--like when people ask for "lacquer", most of the time they do not in fact mean a coating based on insect or tree resin. Similarly, I might go to a hardware store and ask for a certain type of fastener, because it's the only one I know by name, when there might be another kind that would work much better.) Trouble is, some people don't stick around long enough for that.

A related problem for the reference person is that the more you know about a subject, often the more ambiguous the answer becomes, and so the harder it is to respond decisively. To take a recent example, when someone asks for "bond paper"--the more you know about paper, the harder it is to say what this actually means, because the term has historically been used so variously and broadly as to be essentially meaningless. It means what you want it to mean. The question is, what did the source want it to mean? Which brings us back to context--what do you want to use it for? (Which customers don't always want to go into, and I can understand that, given the types of projects I'm often engaged in: "Uh, so I can replicate dead people's underwear...")

Today at work:

customer: "Do you have any more of these Bic mechanical pencils?"
me: "Which ones do you mean?" (we have, oh, about 30 kinds of Bic mechanical pencils.)
customer: "The ones you're out of."
(insert sound of headdesk here)


Adding that to the list of fav customer questions, along with (all actual questions asked in complete seriousness by actual customers!):

"Is this the color I'm thinking of?"

"Is this the color of my walls at home?"

"What's so magic about a Magic Rub eraser?"

(looking at supply list that calls for a bone folder) "How do you fold a bone?"

"Why would prices go up?"

"Why would the price of gas affect the price of paper?"

and my all time favorite....

"What kind of glue should I use to bezel-set some beef jerky?"