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Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel tells a story about two frogs who jump into a milk bucket and can’t get out. One frog sees how hopeless the situation is, quits paddling around, and drowns. The other is too stupid to quit and keeps paddling. Pretty soon, he’s got an island of butter in the middle of the cream, where he floats until the milkmaid comes and throws him out.
Persistence can be one of the hallmarks of an unstoppable frog or a really good network troubleshooter! Even when you think you’re beaten, that “one more try” can beat the thorniest of problems.
As I discussed in the last hour, it’s important to “get a consultation” when things seem hopeless. It’s easy, fast, and doesn’t cost much. What’s more, with someone else’s perspective in the picture, you can sometimes collect observations or facts that you’ve missed. Even better, when you explain the problem to someone else, you may be forced into diagramming the flow of the problem, reemphasizing important points, and so on—which usually leads to you getting a better grasp on the problem yourself.
Wouldn’t it be great to quickly and easily get a consultation from an expert? Better yet, wouldn’t it be great to get a consultation from an expert for free? You can! Most manufacturers will allow you to search through thousands and thousands of pieces of detailed documentation from technical support personnel. In effect, you end up scanning the knowledge of the smartest technical support gurus in the world. Searching a knowledge base or technical information database can be one of the best ways to avoid reinventing the wheel, particularly with interaction problems (where one piece of software or hardware affects another) or problems caused by poorly worded documentation.
It almost seems too good to be true. Why do the manufacturers do this? Well, to run a good technical support shop, tech managers need good databases that include the problem and resolution of every technical support call, no matter how trivial or tremendous it might be. This allows them to avoid reinventing the wheel, as well as saves them tremendous time (and, therefore, tremendous amounts of money). Because support is one of the services that keeps customers coming back, it pays for manufacturers to expend the small amount of effort to make these knowledge bases public. The availability of these knowledge bases also allows software companies to curtail the amount of free phone support they give—they can always point users to the Web database for free yet charge for phone support.
Make sure you don’t perform a search from a company’s home page. Searches that occur at the main home page typically search the entire company site, including nontechnical information such as press releases. Most companies have a technical support home page that offers a tech-only search.Just as a company’s home page is usually found at www.company.com, most companies’ support pages are found at
support.company.com or www.company.com/support
Although it seems you would get the best search results by entering as many words as possible, sometimes this gives you “search clutter.” For example, if you search for network card error 78E8, you’ll get hits on the word network, which will match an insane number of documents. Same thing with card and error. You’re best off, in this case, to try a search on 78E8.If the site offers a more sophisticated search engine, this approach isn’t necessary. Sophisticated sites should allow searches for the following:
network card error +78E8 or “network card error” AND “78E8”Both of these mean “don’t show me a match unless it definitely has 78E8 in it.”
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