/journal

First off all I want to apologize to Susan.  She was the one who is the victim of my shortcoming and I sympathize with her when it would have been better than what I did.

Susan was having problems with her computer.  I don’t know if it was her or the people she shares her computer with but somehow she get a virus on her computer.  This was not the first time and I got pretty frustrated.  Installing Windows XP is not how I want to spend weekends.  I told her I was going to make her run Ubuntu.

Susan like to play backgammon and poker online.  The clients for her favorite sites won’t run on Linux so Ubuntu was out of the picture.  After some thought I determined the best path was to have Susan’s computer run Ubuntu with a VirtualBox virtual Windows XP for Susan.

Thursday I inform Susan that I will start on Friday night and she needs to save all her files.  When Friday rolls around I copy her “My Documents” to a USB drive and ask her if there is anything else.  She says no so I continue.  This morning, when all is done, she looks at her e-mail and asks: “Where are my contacts?”  She didn’t save her contacts so she lost them.

In large part it is my fault.  Sometimes I forget that Susan is a computer neophyte.  My explanation of what I was going to do might as well be in greek.  Spanish?  French?  Martian!  Susan’s a linguist and can speak more languages than I can code.  Anyway, her contacts are long gone and it is largely my fault.

I need to improve how I explain computer things to people.  My problem boils down to three things:

1. I don’t do a lot of end user stuff at my day job so talking to n00bs isn’t something I do very often.
2. I work on computers all day, every day.  Coming home to fix a computer isn’t really something I’m eager to do.
3. Associative terminology.  I need to find more layman’s terms to describe things to people.  That will help in the clarity of things.

My next post will be about the setup Susan’s computer now runs.  It is a pretty sweet setup that I’m glad I took the time to do.  Even if the cost was a large contact database.