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Comment by gatonegro | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.

Couldn't agree more. My first step when troubleshooting anything for someone else is to extract as much information as possible to understand what I'm dealing with. Having that information from the start would save me a lot of time.

>I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone.

True, the quote alone is not necessarily dismissive or arrogant, and your interpretation could very well be correct. I'm assuming it was dismissive because the author seems troubled by his own response, which he interprets as "I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing". That's where my interpretation comes from.

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Haha, agreed on both points :)

A bit off-topic but I've actually got an inverse problem... Before contacting support I'm trying to collect as much diagnostics as possible, so my first message tends to be a long detailed list of what's the problem, what I did, and what possibly useful (to best of my awareness) supplementary diagnostics I've already performed. This frequently confuses first-tier support folks who're used to people reaching out with mere "nothing works pls help!!1one" and going through checklists.

Yup, I do the same thing. I guess I'm lucky because I rarely have issues with my own gear and the services I use, so contacting support is not something I've needed to do frequently. But when I do, I spend a good amount of time doing research and making sure the issue actually merits bothering someone else and isn't something I can eventually fix on my own. Tier-1 support people are invariably caught by surprise :p

I try to avoid doing that now. It's like going to the doctor and spending 1/2 hour explaining anything that could possibly be related to the issue for which you came. I've found that it is much more helpful to give a concise summary, and be ready to answer very specific questions as they go through their logical process to figure out what actually is the problem. In some cases they need clues but don't know which ones, and then you need to tell everything (e.g. rare diseases, or bugs that happen once in a blue moon at 10:53 when the wind comes from the North). But then, they ask for it explicitly.

I've also had humbling experiences, particularly one with me going through what I thought was relevant and a very nice tech support lady telling me the equivalent of "but did you make sure you turned it on?", and she was right.

Overloading tier-1 techs with too much information rarely does any good, from my experience.

Very true

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