Nine Types of Users
By Sam Jones
[email protected]
This is my own, though the style is a blatant copy of Matt
Groening. Scon is short for Student Consultant. Scons are people
hired to help users learn and work with the university's
machinery. A pod is a UNM term for a place where such machinery is
made available.
1. El Explicito
"I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now it
doesn't, ya know?"
* Advantages: Provides interesting communication challenges.
* Disadvantages: So do chimps.
* Symptoms: Complete inability to use proper nouns.
* Real Case: One user walked up to a certain Armenian pod manager
and said, "I can't get what I want!" The pod manager
leaned back, put his hands on his belt-buckle, and
said, "Well, ma'am, you've come to the right place."
2. Mad Bomber
"Well, I hit ALT-f6, shift-f8, CNTRL-f10, f4, and f9, and now it
looks all weird."
* Advantages: Will try to find own solution to problems.
* Disadvantages: User might have translated document to Navajo
without meaning to.
* Symptoms: More than six stopped jobs in Unix, a 2:1
code-to-letter ratio in WordPerfect.
* Real Case: One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect
document was underlined. When I used reveal codes on
it, I found that he'd set and unset underline more
than fifty times in his document.
3. Frying Pan/Fire Tactician
"It didn't work with the data set we had, so I fed in my aunt's
recipe for key lime pie."
* Advantages: Will usually fix error.
* Disadvantages: "Fix" is defined very loosely here.
* Symptoms: A tendency to delete lines that get errors instead of
fixing them.
* Real Case: One user complained that his program executed, but
didn't do anything. The scon looked at it for twenty
minutes before realizing that he'd commented out
every line. The user said, "Well, that was the only
way I could get it to compile."
4. Shaman
"Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and
formahaut was above the horizon, I typed f77, and lo, it did
compile."
* Advantages: Gives insight into primitive mythology.
* Disadvantages: Few scons are anthropology majors.
* Symptoms: Frequent questions about irrelevant objects.
* Real Case: One user complained that all information on one of
his disks got erased. (As Norton Utilities showed
nothing but empty sectors, I suspect nothing had
ever been on it.) Reasoning that the deleted
information went somewhere, he wouldn't shut up
until the scon checked four different disks for the
missing information.
5. X User
"Will you look at those... um, that resolution, quite impressive,
really."
* Advantages: Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology.
* Disadvantages: Has little or no idea how to use the
cutting-edge in graphics technology.
* Symptoms: Fuzzy hands, blindness.
* Real Case: When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of
me at DECstation 5000/200s that systems was
reconfiguring. I suppressed my laughter while, for
twenty minutes, they sat down and did their best to
act like they were doing exactly what they wanted to
do, even though they couldn't log in.
6. Miracle Worker
"But I read a file from it yesterday!"
"Sir, at a guess, this disk has been swallowed and regurgitated."
"But I did that a month ago, and I read a file from it yesterday!"
* Advantages: Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren't around.
* Disadvantages: People complain when scons actually use the word
"horse-puckey."
* Symptoms: Loses all ability to do the impossible when you're
around. Must be the kryptonite in your pocket.
* Real Case: At least three users have claimed that they've
loaded IBM WordPerfect from Macintosh disks.
7. Taskmaster
"Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload it
to MUSIC, transfer it over to Unix from there, download it onto an
IBM, convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?"
* Advantages: Bold new challenges.
* Disadvantages: Makes one wish to be a garbage collector.
* Symptoms: An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendencies to make
machines do things they don't want to do.
* Real Case: One user tried to get a scon to find out what
another person's e-mail address was even though the user didn't
know his target's home system, account name, or real name.
8. Maestro
"Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this,
and after that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I
edited my file, like this, and after that I went to this line here,
like this, and after that I picked my nose, like this..."
* Advantages: Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an
error.
* Disadvantages: For as long as five or six hours.
* Symptoms: Selective deafness to phrases like "Right, right,
okay, but what was the error?" and a strong fondness
for the phrase "Well, I'm getting to that."
* Real Case: I once had to spend half an hour looking over a
user's shoulder while they continuously retrieved a
document into itself and denied that they did
it. (The user was complaining that their document
was 87 copies of the same thing.)
9. Princess
Unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males.
"I need a Mac, and someone's got the one I like reserved, so would
you please garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?"
* Advantages: Flatters you with his high standards for your
service.
* Disadvantages: Impresses you with his obliviousness to other
people on this planet.
* Symptoms: Inability to communicate except by complaining.
* Real Case: One asked a scon to remove the message of the day
because he (the user) didn't like it.
