Technical Support Evolves
I went to a New Statesman organised event with Bruce Sterling in a pub in Belgravia last night (the pub was called the Grouse and Claret, could it be anywhere but Belgravia?). As is customary for such nu medja events it has been blogged and podcast already.
There was much in what he said that was entertaining and thought-provoking. But the observation that stuck is a bit of trivia that is not original to Bruce but hits my funny bone. It goes like this…
Back in the bad old days of shrink-wrapped software and no internet if you asked for technical support the response from the guardians of sacred tech knowledge would be RTFM. This stands for Read The Flipping Manual in my family-rated blog version of said acronym.
With progress to the wonderful world of the interweb manuals are often never produced for software at all. And the first-line response from technical support has evolved into GFE. What a kind soul is telling you with this is Google Flipping Exists meaning ‘go find it yourself’ or ‘why not engage in some networked participation-type activity’ if you are feeling more generous.
An unrelated Google observation I picked up in another meeting recently can be dropped in here. This is that two of the most common searches on Google are for ‘amazon.com’ and ‘ebay.com’. Maybe people are taking GFE just a bit too far.
You may refer to them as the bad old days but, as someone who had a nice career writing TFMs, at least I had a job back then. Now technical authors like me are the technological equivalents of thatchers and blacksmiths. Gisajob!
Actually being a blacksmith or a thatcher is a good choice. All those rich people with horses and quaint cottages.
I’m a big Sterling fan (Hacker Crackdown, Viridian, Tomorrow Now etc) so had to be there. Apart from GFE the one thing I took away was about Sketchup, implications of which still yet fully to be thought through…
Tsk tsk. RTFM in fact stands for “Read The Manual, Sir”.
Also, I’ve typed “amazon.com” (or other actual web addresses) into google before. Not intentionally, but because google is my homepage and the cursor can sometimes slip down into the search bar from the address bar without my express say so. Whether this accounts for a significant proportion of the searches done, however, I could not say.