Don't waste my time

[This was written in December 2003; it is meant to be a standard response to friends asking me to fix their broken Windows boxen, and in case you have any doubt it's damn serious]

I'm a computer programmer, not an evangelist. I don't have time to waste explaining to you why GNU/Linux is better than Windows, or why I won't even look at your broken Windows XP installation, or why your email account information is gone forever now that you had to reinstall your system from scratch after all the Microsoft and vendor supplied recovery tools failed miserably without an apparent reason. You trust me when I answer your technical questions correctly and thoroughly, now go the extra step and trust me when I tell you to throw your Microsoft CDs away, install GNU/Linux (or let me do it for you), spend a little time learning about your new system and live happier and safer from now on. And stop telling me that I am a technocrat with the utter disregard for people that don't have my technical skills, because I know already. If I tried to do your job without proper training, I would end up in jail within days and hurt someone in the process. If I came to you for advice on how to do your job, you would tell me that I have to get the proper degree before I can even think about it, and if I insisted that you just explain me the basics and then let me handle it on my own, you would throw at me all the curse words in your seemingly unending repertoire, dismiss me as insane and stop calling me your friend forever. In short, either you learn how to use a computer properly, or you stop using it while complaining all the time that computers are hard to use. That's how it goes.

Now please shut up and let me have a look at that broken PC without asking me what I'm doing every 30 seconds, because 1) I can't do it right if you keep interrupting me, and 2) I don't know what I'm going to do either. I'm just hacking it, and that's part of the training.