On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 09:08:27AM -0600, Ben Lutgens wrote: [snip] > I just got turned off of this by too many bad experiences. I helped a > person who wanted to use linux get a piece of hardware setup and do some > other things for two hours. I tried to teach the individual what I was > doing and so-forth, after a while I noticed that glazed in their eye that > said "I'm not really interested, you're boring me" now the person is asking > me all sorts of question and shows no will to learn what-so-ever (this has > happened to me alot lately) and I ask myself two questions: > > 1.) Why does this person feel the need to use linux? > 2.) Why did I waste my time helping? > > And now I have a half-dozen or so people who need so much help I can rarely > concentrate on my own stuff without answering very basic questions. I also get this feeling a lot, I help run #linux on EFNet so we get plenty of people unwilling to RTFM. I've also got a roommate who's going to KRS to learn how to be a solaris administrator (he must have seen the 'make big money in the IT field' commercials). I made him agree before I started helping him with his linux system that he would attempt two things before coming to me for help: 1. Reading the documentation 2. Search google for help I informed him before hand that I would absolutely ignore him until he had tried both of the above and it seems to be working out pretty well, he does attempt to understand the documentation, and a quick tutorial on using google went a long way with him (perhaps this would be a good presentation). He is currently using linux for everything except a few windows games, I even got some of his games working in linux (rtcw, Quake3..), he loves Tux Racer, Chromium and the rest of the games that came with Red Hat 7.2, and he has been using gnumeric and AbiWord for his more productive computer time. > Ben Lutgens http://people.sistina.com/~blutgens/ > Sistina Software Inc. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://techmonkeys.org/~poptix GPG public key 0x01938203