for Beckibeads

denise -- try me, same name, at yahoo.com

Becki "In between the moon and you, the angels have a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right." -- Counting Crows

The e-mail I sent you got returned

my aunt has been having the same problems trying to email family on AOL and she is on webtv

I understand it's partly due to that virus that is going around - and AOL had some heavy duty filtering going on -- plus system overload due to some of the problems it caused... it should clear up on it's own --

Cheryl last semester of lawschool! yipee! DRAGON BEADS Flameworked beads and glass

I'm on aol as well, and I've found that they are putting other domain mail directly into the spam folder. I changed my settings so that the spam mail doesn't go directly into the folder for now, and the other domain mail is getting through. I called aol yesterday to complain about his and they said, "you are the only one out of 38 million subscribers who called to complain that you are not getting your other domain mail." Sure, buddy. Patti

Patti -- does that mean that you are the one fing it up for the rest of us, then? LMAO LMAO LMAO. AOL -- gotta love it.

Becki "In between the moon and you, the angels have a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right." -- Counting Crows

Becki, Apparently so. I swear, I'm an intelligent woman and can usually carry on a conversation with almost anyone, but those tech guys make me feel like SUCH an idiot, they must have special guest lectures by Jehovah's witnesses or something, lol. Patti

On Mon, 10 May 2004 9:20:24 -0400, Beadseeker wrote (in message ):

It's a wall. I've worked tech for so many years that I see it a mile away. These young guys are partially bragging about the stuff they do know, and partially afraid that you'll find out the stuff they don't know. (And with the quality of your basic IT hire, there is a _lot_ of stuff they don't know). Their defense is to throw out a bunch of meaningless jargon in the hopes that you'll (a) be intimidated and go away, (b) be intimidated and bow to their superior knowledge or (c) be intimated and find someone else.

I see it all the time these days in computer stores. Back in the day when I worked, I'd start hearing jargon and raise an eyebrow. The offender would stop immediately and speak like a semi-normal person (considering that some jargon is necessary to describe the job). In computer stores, some A/V club geek will start trying to tell me "what I need."

Usually, I let them ramble on until my patience runs out. (they can talk longer than I care to listen) Then I look the offender straight in the eye and say, "I want X, Y and Z. Are they in stock? It's none of your business why I want these things, and I am not going to get into a discussion with you over the relative merits of broadband vs. DSL vs.a shared T1 line. Everyone knows a _dedicated_ T1 or even better a T3 line would be perfection itself, but since we pay our own bills, we settle for less :-) "

Usually, this causes the pimply faced boy behind the counter to blanch, then run and do my bidding. If not, I look him straight in the eye and say "I know what I want, and your job is to fetch it for me. Please do so."

They back right down. After I leave, I'm sure I get called a thousand things behind my back, but I really don't care.

In the case of an employer's IT staff, I would say; "Your job is to make it possible for me to do my job. If I don't get my job done because of your failure, your life will become very unpleasant. Don't tell me about your hardships, give me a time and date when my computer will be completely functional, so I can report it to my superiors. Then the people up the food chain can decide if I should wait that long before I can become productive again."

If I didn't know the jargon, and I had to actually get information from one of these guys, I'd say "I need to know this to do my job. Your job is to tell me. Pretend I dropped onto the planet yesterday, and use teeny little words. If I don't understand you, I'll keep coming back, over and over, every hour until you explain it to me in some way I can understand. I'll also have to tell my superiors that I cannot perform my job because I cannot communicate with you, because I don't speak computerese."

Amazingly enough, the guys liked me, and I got away with this confrontational style every single time. They'd even anticipate my wants and upgrade my stuff when others (usually marketing and salespeople) were begging for the smallest repairs to their laptops.

Kathy N-V

I think they are allowed to read what comes up on the computer screen in response to your question, and that is all. Or, in the case of "live" tech support, canned responses. Choose from a,b,c or d and those are all they can answer. The reason I think this is because I spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone and in the live support area trying to get my AOL to work (before I completely reinstalled it several weeks ago) and got no help at all, LOL. IN fact, sometimes the responses didn't even address the problem.

It is NOT just you, sweet pea. I was teasing, LOL

Becki "In between the moon and you, the angels have a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right." -- Counting Crows