Most people are used to interacting with first-level troubleshooters, and they expect that everyone should waste time explaining simple things. At the supermarket, every staff member is helpful and polite, even for the most banal requests. Ring your phone company and the front-line people say 'sir'. The tech support at your ISP are always patient. Mail a newsgroup and someone tells you to go to hell in an innovative way - what?

You can't just wander in and talk to the manager of a supermarket though. Good luck finding a linesman to ask them if you can have a different colour phone. And we know what normally happens if you ask a network engineer how to change the colours on your desktop.

Usually the price of service is built into the cost of the product. People just think that the advice they get is free because they aren't reaching in to their wallet while asking their question. Then they wander onto the internet and chew out a saint at Perlmonks for not being as nice as the shelf-packer at the local grocery store.

So let the monks and scribes answer the easy ones with long explanations about why everyone should "use CGI;". Perhaps you could just browse the lower half of SOPW, looking for those tricky questions that other people haven't handled as well as you could? That way you don't get bored typing banal answers, but the people who need it can still get the benefit of your high-level wisdom.

This is analagous to many other situations (even in real monasteries) where the expert is kept away from distractions by those who are learning from him.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

In reply to Re: Help Yourself Or Help Others? by jepri
in thread Help Yourself Or Help Others? by Anonymous Monk

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