Look, I am a patient guy. About as patient with non-geeks as a geek could be. So at the school where we installed the wireless network these past few weeks I generally enjoyed a pleasant rapport with the resident non-geeks.

Where I AM having problems though is with those who are better equipped than most to work with computers and networking, but who just don’t care to implement sensible practices or take responsibility for their property. In this case that would be the network we installed.

There are many errors that geeks use to refer to incompetent users: ID10T, PEBKAC and so on. I have coined two new ones, STU and the NINNYVIRUS.

STU – Slow Typing User has really nothing to do with attitude, but is usually a case of the NINNIES, which is a result of being infected with the NINNYVIRUS.

At the school we have a few users who are STU cases. One in particular is causing a few headaches – he simply enters the username and password too slowly to authenticate on the wireless network. This in itself would not be too much of a problem, but he also suffers from the NINNIES.

NINNYVIRUS – This is a condition where a user is so terrified of taking ownership of a new piece of equipment that we (tech support) are called time and again to verbally reasssure the NINNY that everything is in fact fine, and no things aren’t “broke.”

In the STU case mentioned above, I frequently receive calls from the user saying “…we cannot connect to the network…” with a pregnant pause as the caller expects me to drive the 300km to site in order to help him authenticate. Having sat next to the user as he tried to authenticate his WinXP computer on an access point I know that I will go there, open his notebook and authenticate within a matter of seconds.

Ninnies are best left to their own devices once the work is done. I promised a user that I would mail him a step by step instruction (the same one he wrote down) to help him get WinVista computers on the network. In the end I decided not to. Sure enough after a few hours of not answering his calls I called back to get the triumphant report that he “…managed to get VISTA on the network…!”

Great, if I mailed the HOWTO I bet my left -uh- arm that I would have received the same amount of calls to walk him through written instructions, a waste of my and his time in the end.

So, a quick rant on user incompetence. I help where I can – I am no BOFH, but I can smell a user that is just plain unwilling to learn how to sort a basic thing out, and have also learnt that leaving them to their own devices empowers them a lot if they get it right.

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