is bind needed at all?

Barry Margolin barmar at genuity.net
Thu Sep 6 16:41:37 UTC 2001


In article <9n85ju$50c at pub3.rc.vix.com>,
Bill Manning  <bmanning at ISI.EDU> wrote:
>	e.g.  be literal. take peoples word.  if they try and 
>	hid information, don't bother to reply, its a waste of
>	your time and theirs.

My approach is:

be helpful.  figure out what they mean.  if they hide important
information, ask them to supply it, it's the easiest way to solve the
problem and doesn't make you look silly.

I do customer technical support for a living, so I don't have the luxury of
ignoring poorly phrased questions.  I suppose I could adopt that approach
in this volunteer environment, but I prefer to be helpful; and occasionally
I've been known to post a sarcastic reply.  But I also try to include as
good a response as possible along with the sarcasm; I don't like to boast,
but I think my reputation speaks well for my approach.

Maybe those of you who take the "be literal" approach think that this will
serve as a warning to other posters, who might make the same mistake.  The
problem with that theory is that it presumes that future posters have read
your silly response.  Considering the frequency that the same questions
keep coming up, I think we can reasonably assume that most newbies have not
read past posts, not even the most recent week's.

I think there's an aphorism that goes something like: Don't try to teach a
mule to dance.  It wastes your time and annoys the mule.

If you don't like to answer poorly-worded questions, go ahead and ignore
them; someone like me will probably take a stab at it.  But don't waste
everyone's time by posting "You don't own mydomain.com" responses when you
know full well that this was not the domain he really meant.  You come off
as either an idiot (because you couldn't tell that it was just a
placeholder) or an asshole (because you *pretended* that you couldn't
tell).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.


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