Tech Support Motivations

There are very few interpersonal problems which cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives.

Rich and I frequently get into "discussions" with people who provide technical support for the various applications we run (this includes mailing lists, forums, and the "official" tech support addresses). The cause of the "discussions" is a fundamental difference in motivation.

Many people who provide technical support appear to be motivated to get the user back to work as quickly as possible.

Rich and I have another motivation. Ours appears related on the surface but is crucially different underneath - we want to solve the problem.

Rich and I care about Process and Quality and Bugs. We care about Solving Problems and providing Long-term Solutions. This can be very difficult to explain to people whose primary interest is getting the user back to work (and out of the request queue). I can't count the number of times I have written back to Tech Support to explain "I'm not asking you to give me a workaround. I'm trying to file a bug report."

Today I discovered that one of the windows in one of my "always-up" applications (specifically the contact list in my IM "chat" program) had disappeared. I tried various approaches to figure out where it had gone; nothing worked.

So I wandered off to the support forum for the IM program. What ho, another user had had the same problem, just yesterday in fact. Perhaps a solution had been found...

Just re-download....
... If worse comes to worst, dump the Application Support folder.

Those aren't solutions... those are initial debugging aids.

Well, the original poster tried the re-install (which didn't work) and then:

I dumped the application support folder, and it worked!

Uh huh.

For those who don't know, the "Application Support" folder is where all of the configuration information is stored for many Mac OS X applications. "Dumping" the application folder is like wiping the slate clean for that application.

Just for chuckles, I moved my Application Support folder out of the way (I did not "dump" it) and relaunched the IM application... Yep. There's the contact list. in the default theme. It's empty. I have no contacts. I also have no configuration settings; all of my preferences are gone. The "problem" is "gone", but I haven't actually solved anything.

I put the Applications Support folder back and responded on the support forum. I pointed out that "dumping" the Application Support folder did indeed make the problem go away but it was a very poor solution.

I was informed by another "helpful" forum moderator that "dump" was meant to convey "move temporarily put of the way onto the desktop" rather than to trash the folder and this was merely a first step in solving the problem. I was also told that if I wasn't going to follow the advice I was given, I shouldn't ask questions.

I responded that I wasn't the one who had asked the original question and that no one seemed in the least interested so far in taking any further steps.

I was then told publicly that as I obviously understood how to move a folder temporarily and I was simply being a PITA I could just please go away (or words to that effect). I was also asked why I was making a "big issue of this" when the original poster's problem had been "solved".

I'm making an issue of this because the problem hasn't been solved. I'm making an issue of this because the original poster was given bad advice.

Just because I won't actually trash my Applications Support folder doesn't mean that someone else won't (especially when the advice is phrased as "dump" it). I believe that people like the original poster need to be protected from careless and inappropriate advice:

If worse comes to worst, dump the Application Support folder.

I also made an issue of this because I believe that someone has to take a stand for Finding the Solution and Fixing the Problem.

We still don't know why the contact list vanished. We still don't know how to get it back. We only know that, in wiping out all of the configuration information and files, we coincidentally wipe out whatever is causing the problem.

This isn't a solution. You don't cure a cold by shooting the patient.

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By the way, you won't find any of this conversation on the forum even if I told you the name of the application. After our "discussion" (during which the moderator locked the thread and I reproved him by telling him he was only hurting other people), the moderator decided to rewrite history by erasing everything that followed the original poster's naively pleased "It worked!".

If you are a forum moderator, I hope you are confident enough to accept criticism and not attempt to rewrite history when others' opinions don't match your own.