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Back in my days of working at IBM there was this crotchety mainframe programmer, smarter and wiser than anyone, Don Touso.

His bark was definitely worse than his bite and once you learned to ignore the bark, he was a pleasure to hang around.

I was the supervisor of the mainframe tech support section at the time and you can only imagine what type of calls we’d get.

But whenever I ran into a sticky problem and turned to Don he’d scream “Steve, did you RTFM?” And 90% of the time he was right, I should have followed his advice and RTFM because the answer was right there.

For those that have never heard the expression RTFM, it stands for Read The Fucking Manual.

Us guys seem to never want to ask directions or read the manuals. It must be something in our jeans. (Genes, I know, it’s a joke.) But if I can pass on any advice that does make a difference, it is to RTFM when you run into a problem.

Rather than run to Google for a solution and have to surf loads of pages, just take a look in the help part of the program or pull out the manual and take a look for the answer first. Google is great but learning how to master RTFM will serve you well.

And, relying on the RTFM philosophy will also help you cut down those annoying tech support calls from friends, co-workers and family. Nothing more frustrating to me than a “What’s a mouse” call from someone you care about. They don’t call me anymore because they know I’m going to tell them to RTFM. Bonus!

As a side effect of dealing with some really smart idiots at IBM I also learned to always read the quick start guides that come with hardware or software. The 30 seconds it takes to glance at it will save loads of time latter. It just does.

Some Tech Support Winners From My IBM Days

  • Guy had been working on a presentation for a couple of months. He called and said he was having problems accessing his files on his floppy. “Do you have a copy of the floppy?”, I asked. “Why would I do that”, he said.
  • “I took some work home on a floppy and now I can’t access it.” The solution, don’t stick your floppies to your refrigerator with a magnet.
  • Call from 60 year old woman, “Steve, if someone was to look for porn on the web, where would they look?”
  • “What’s your userid?” She said “B-E-A-V-E-R-S”. “Beavers?”, I said. “Of course not. No! It is Beaver-S” (Of course it is.)



When You Need to Read the Manual


Hey Dumb Ass, Look On The Shelf Behind You

Photo by ecoli




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