From productivity site The Cranking Widgets Blog comes “How to Talk to a Programmer” (via Lifehack.org), an excellent how-to for communicating with the “computer people” at work. The article educates you on approaching programmers by giving you a little bit of insight into how we think, without getting into technical details. Here’s a key portion of the article:

“… I promise you, Fred is going to ask you what you tried to do to fix it when you walk over to visit him (and your answer will directly affect the degree to which he helps you). If all you can say is “Fred, the TPS report generator is broken”, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot.”

This is right on target. Having plenty of experience in IT support, I cannot stress enough how useless the phrase “x is broken” can be. It’s as vague as can be, gives no context to the situation, and no clue as to what is going on.

How to Report a Problem to I.T.

Before your IT staff goes to work, they’ll likely ask you a series of exploratory questions in order to come up with a potential diagnosis for your technical issues. If you use some kind of software to submit and track trouble tickets, the system will probably ask you some of these questions.

If you’re able to provide helpful information right off the bat, your situation can be resolved much quicker. This includes things like…

• What the error message said (if there was one), or what happened to make you think something’s wrong.
• What you were doing immediately before the problem occurred.

By simply offering a little bit of information to your “computer people”, you’re helping them help you. Even more importantly , you’re subtly showing a sense of respect for their role as your colleague (as opposed to some magical wizard who’s expected to read minds and automatically fix everything right away).

Examples

Practically Useless: “My computer won’t work.”

Mediocre: “I can’t get online.”

Good: “Firefox keeps saying ‘Server Not Found’”

Excellent: “I tried to use my laptop over in the conference room, but when I visit a website I get ‘Server Not Found’ in Firefox.”

Error Messages

Error messages are usually cryptic, but they’re still a tool for solving problems. Including error messages in trouble tickets is a great way to make friends in I.T. You can usually copy & paste them, but if that doesn’t work just write it down or take a screenshot.