XPost: alt.comp.software.firefox, alt.comp.os.windows-11   
   From: lars@beagle-ears.com   
      
   ["Followup-To:" header set to alt.unix.geeks]   
      
   On 2025-12-20, rbowman  wrote:   
   >>   I've been in (technical) customer support for most of my professional   
   >> life, where I often had to explain technical matters to non-techincal   
   >> people, who were often experts in *their* field of work, just like you   
   >> and me in this case. So bridging worlds has become somewhat of a second   
   >> nature and apparently I've not (yet? ) lost my touch.   
      
   On 19 Dec 2025 20:09:04 GMT, Frank Slootweg wrote:   
   > That bridge is extremely important. Ask a geek and you get TMI. From all   
   > our client sites there were only three or four people I interacted with   
   > directly. All the others went through support and I would only intervene   
   > if support couldn't handle the problem.   
      
   For complex systems where there is very little shared background   
   knowledge in the subject area, it is especially difficult.   
   While I am an old geek, my wife is a retired surgical nurse, and   
   aspiring visual artist, previously married to a restaurant cook.   
   So naturally, I am the IT support department in our house. When   
   something glitches in the domestic tech area, she asks me to fix it,   
   and then asks me what was wrong, and as I start explaining, she   
   shuts me down, telling me that is too much information and I am making   
   her feel stupid.   
      
   Every day when I come home from work, she will ask me how my day was,   
   and as I tell her what I have been working on, the same thing happens.   
      
   My ex-wife, who is still a good friend, was very different. She has   
   an intense curiosity of the world.After high school, she enrolled at   
   UCSC with the idea of maybe becoming a diplomat, so she studied Russian,   
   and dropped out to become an au pair to an American Diplomat in Moscow.   
   She fell in love with a young Russian artist, an university trained icon   
   painter/restorer, and was baptized Russian Orthodox to please his   
   father, who was an orthodox parish priest, so they could be married.   
   She brought him - and his parents and siblings - back to Los Angeles.   
   The husband found work restoring collectible icons for Hollywood   
   celebrities, but the Father was complaining that the Russian Orthodox   
   Church in America did not find a parish for him to serve. The marriage   
   fell apart. As she looked for work, her mother - who was an accountant -   
   introduced her to a minicomputer sales rep for Burroughs. After an   
   aptitude test, they hired her and gave her a computer and a stack of   
   manuals and told her to write an inventory control system for an auto   
   parts store. The did that, and was hooked on computers. After that she   
   wrote a fundraising management system for United Way in Orange County;   
   when she delivered it, United Way in Santa Barbara asked her to come up   
   and make one for them. She liked Santa Barbara, and was hired by our   
   engineering company to work with their accounting group to set up an ERP   
   system. That's when  I met her. When I married her 6 years later, she   
   went part time to raise our child, and became unix system manager for 35   
   enginners. She then took over religious education for our Unitarian   
   congregation and that program swelled and grew the congregation.   
   After that she went to nursing school, then spent 10 years as a cancer   
   nurse. She divorced me to become a Buddhist nun, and turned her alimony   
   into a Masters degree in Divinity, with a focus on Hspice Chaplaincy.   
   After her clinical internship, she managed a hospice house in Iowa with   
   a staff of 12. She is now retired.   
      
   She thought I was a boring man. I was sad to lose her.   
   But I picked a nurse as my next partner, having learned that most nurses   
   had a head and a heart.   
      
   Along the way, I have seen many bad technical communicators, and a few   
   very good ones. A good one can be the heart of a small company. For a   
   number of years, the "free magazines" for computer topics we staffed   
   with "journalists" who seemed to regugitate company press releases   
   without understanding them. Eventually, that improved.   
      
   --   
   Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)