Once upon a time I was a tech support wizard, for simpler tasks.
All love to the people who take Microsoft certifications for network administration, they really do hard stuff. While I never went that far with it, dealing with problems on a computer is something I used to be very good at. Most of the time you need to read the instructions.
Those instructions may lead to other instructions and so forth.
After enough reading of things, a little trial and error and you can learn how computer stuff works.
Today I encountered an error message and spent a whole lot of time staring at things confused.
Until I re-read the error message and saw what I had done wrong.
In order to transfer files into Dropbox you need storage space on your computer
The error message was telling me to delete 6 GB worth of data off my computer.
I proceeded to open up Dropbox like a dummy looking at the 800 Gigs of free space I have confused. I restarted my laptop and the error message popped up. I was very determined to prove to Dropbox that I was right and I had space available.
Inevitably I opened up the file explorer and saw I had no space left on my hard drive.
Then I deleted files and made space and voila, Dropbox accepted my files.
You need to understand I was ready to open a support case and rage.
Then it turned out I hadn’t read the error message correctly.
I promise you, a lot of tech issues we used to face stemmed from not following instructions, some were definitely bad design though.
Computer jargon is overwhelming until you realize tech support is just learning computer jargon
Thankfully we live in a world of YouTube tutorials, ChatGPT and Reddit.
Now when you run into a problem, you can just Google any error message or problem you are having. There are tons of people competing for attention by solving them. You can even just post on Quora and see who shows up to solve the problem.
When you are left in the trenches alone, all you need to do is Google what things mean.
Maybe the instructions reference an “audio channel”. Just look up what an audio channel is.Take time to figure out what it is, then the other instructions will make more sense.
When you encounter new unfamiliar words, figure out what they mean. It’s time consuming and boring. Once you get into it, it’s pretty easy though.
Unfortunately tech support uses its own language developed in tandem with software engineers.
That being said, everything is usually made with logical flows in mind. .
Once you know what the words mean you can make more sense of what’s happening when something goes wrong.
The problem with supporting tech is that there are so many random variables we never think of
Now my problem here was easy to solve with good error message reading,
Meanwhile Google Maps refuses to load on my phone normally. If I clear its cache and locally stored data, it launches one time. I tried Googling it and no one else seems to be having this problem.
None of the solutions I tried worked.
I am left here without a functioning Google Maps and have learned to live without it.
It’s important to point out that sometimes the answer isn’t going to be easy. In my defense my phone is just freezing, there’s no error message. If there was, I bet I’d already have a solution in place.
Anyway always read what you can in error message land.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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