Sunday, January 29, 2006

The worst tech help request ever

Several days ago I received the following request for help:
For some time we have not had a subject line on our Outlook Express. This drives me crazy since in order to change the address I have to keep going Back to where I googled it in or whatever.
I am withholding the identity of the person who wrote this to protect the guilty. That's right: I'm not protecting the innocent here, I'm protecting the absolutely guilty, guilty of requesting help in the most obtuse, inspecific way possible. It has been said that I have no compassion, but you can take this as a clear counterexample to that assertion, because I am actually protecting the guilty.

1. Outlook Express is an e-mail client. The "subject line" in an e-mail client is the text box preceded by the word "Subject." It has disappeared, right? That's the problem here?

2. Wrong! It turns out that this is a problem about changing the address. So the problem is that the address line, the text box preceded by the word "To," has disappeared, right? That's the problem here?

3. Wrong! It turns out that this problem can be circumvented by clicking Back and using Google. Since Back would be of no use if one were writing an e-mail, we must not be talking about Outlook Express. Interesting, seeing as how this problem was ostensibly about Outlook Express.

As it turns out, the problem was that the address bar, the place where you type the URL that you want to go to, was gone, in Internet Explorer. Who would have guessed!?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Uh yeah, that's really annoying. I would not want to be on the receving end of this help request. No, not at all...