"Brads" and the spit take
An appearance in The Old New Thing caught the attention of a few friends so here's the rest of the story.
Phil Wilson (MVP), Raymond, Sarah (shell PM), and I were eating at the MVP dinner and Raymond made a joke about the responsability of being an expert.
I had hypothesized that because Raymond was so prolific with mail, he must feel good about all the bugs he fixes remotely. Raymond said not really because it’s never that simple. The context was the types of emails that Raymond ends up answering. The example question: “what’s the best nails for balsa wood?”.
Raymond was using it as an example of the types of shell questions he gets and that most of his time is resetting folks from their crazy ideas. In this example, let’s say someone wanted to build a deck out of balsa wood and was trying to figure out how to do it. They’d send a question to the general support alias and ask “what’s the best nails for balsa wood?”.
Often when Raymond gets these questions, he has to stop folks and “ask why are you doing that?” Sadly, a good number of folks will insist “just answer my question?” and though Raymond can give them the answer, he resists and presses for why. Life would be much easier if Raymond just answered the questions but then folks would run around and blindly follow his answers, defending them with “because Raymond told me to”. It would be nice to just give them the short answer but then someone would go build a deck out of balsa wood and expect it work because Raymond gave them an answer.
Next time someone asks me “what’s the best nails for balsa wood?”, I’ll just tell them “Brads. Brads are the best nails for balsa wood” and they’d go off and build their balso wood deck none the wiser.
As I recall somewhere around here I laughed hard enough to qualify as “spit take”. It’s the same circumstance I find myself in with setup questions. Yes, it would be so much easier but then the world would be filled with broken balsa and folks angry at me for answering their question “Brads”.
