You know, every time I sysadmins and power users talking about how stupid users I have to wonder how many of them would attempt open heart surgery or to rebuild a car engine.
Personally I want someone who is operating on me or fixing my car to know what the hell they are doing and not be an amateur who went to Tom's Heartware site to bone up on the latest techniques and tools.
Just like starting your car, which most of you probably have a vague idea of how it works, most computer users just want to boot and go to the internet. It is not their fault that you geniuses can't design OS's that work, or hardware that's compatible or come up with virus proof systems. Frankly heart surgeons and mechanics have a success rate that most of you only wish computer systems had.
The next time somebody starts slinging around medical terminology or the like and you haven't a clue, just remember they are doing to you what you do to everyone else who doesn't understand the minutia of your trade.
They aren't stupid just because they don't what goes on under the hood of the computer that they want to buy any more than you are for not understanding how a petrochemical plant works when you want to buy a bag of fertilizer.
In my youth I used to think all users were idiots. I've come to realize that while some are idiots, equal percentages of the technical people are also idiots. The difference is that the technical people are paid to know this stuff, and are failing their responsibilities. The users aren't explicitly paid to know this stuff, and most look like idiots because the people whose job is to educate them are idiots.
Its rare for me to find genuinely idiotic users that can't learn. I have far more patience with users who want to learn, but simply do not have the context to pick things up quickly and need time to absorb it all, than I have for know-it-all techs that think they know everything, then blame the laws of physics for not generating the result they know is supposed to happen when they type the wrong command for the fifth time.
In fact, I would much rather work with users that know nothing, than technical types that know a lot, but more than half of which is wrong. Many supposed tech people slinging stupid user jokes are actually themselves net negative in useful knowledge.
Not that I don't think its funny when users do weird or unexpected things: I'm only human (as far as anyone knows). But while I will laugh at someone that slips on a banana peel and falls, I will also extend a hand and help them up and help them pick up their stuff. I may laugh at "stupid users" but I will also spend hours teaching them, no matter how long it takes, as long as they are willing to learn.
If you can't teach it, you don't really know it. The same was true for City of Heroes. Easy to laugh at the newbees, but for every newbee that didn't know what we knew, there were other players laughing at all the things we didn't know or knew incorrectly.
By "we" not me specifically of course, but you know: other we. And even I spent much of my first day playing trying to figure out why the train refused to take me anywhere when I walked through the door and onto the train.
