[ubuntu-uk] Why do you need a manual, was Chkdsk for NTFS partition

[Alan Pope]

Hi Michael,

2009/1/14 Michael Holloway <michael at thedarkwinter.com>:
> Also, am I missing something? Why do you need a manual for a USB hard
> drive :)
>

You've reminded me of an occasion when I had similar thoughts, about
10 years ago. I used to work in IT for a large company in London. We
had lots of users with many different types of machines spread all
over London. We were almost constantly upgrading machines for people,
and that included providing new large screens for some of the
Partners.

One day we had a call on the helpdesk from a "very important" guy who
wanted help with his new screen. I got to his office and was
immediately quizzed about the location of the manual for his monitor.
He was annoyed that the guys who installed his monitor had thrown away
the manual and proceeded to take it out on me. I attempted to calm him
down initially by explaining that we throw them away because we have
hundreds of monitors to deploy and there's no point keeping every
single manual. To say he was incandescent with rage was putting it
mildly. I've never (before or since) had someone be so utterly rude to
me in the workplace. Like a good contractor I kept my cool and let him
blow off some steam for a few minutes.

Eventually once he reached white-hot, he asked for the name of my boss
and proceeded to call him up to see why the manual wasn't available. I
have no idea what my boss had said over the phone, but it was
sufficient to calm the guy down from initially shouting down the phone
to finally talking calmly and finally putting it down normally.

He turned to me and said "John tells me you can explain all the
functions of the monitor to me". "Sure, no problem" and I proceeded to
explain the five or so buttons on the front of the screen. When I'd
finished the guy was perfectly polite, thanking me for my time and
telling me how valuable I was to the company - stopping short of
apologising for ripping into me.

Moral of this story? Let them have their manuals - they can choose
what they do with them :)

Cheers,
Al.