From: jwgh at earthweb.com (Jacob Haller)
Subject: Re: Proposed: Sysadmin Theme song
Date: 22 Jan 1998
Message-ID: <jwgh-ya02408000R2201981653430001@news.earthweb.com>
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Mr Stuart Lamble wrote in message <69ve59$uh9$1@towncrier.cc.monash.edu.au>...

Juhana Siren (jsiren at rak131.oulu.fi) wrote:

[2] By now I'm pretty much convinced that one doesn't have to read in order to be able to study at a university.

It took you how long to reach this conclusion?

You come to it pretty quickly when you can put a notice on the door, saying "THIS LAB IS CLOSED" in huge letters on flourescent A3 paper, and lock it. One specimen tried the door FOUR times before I flung it open and yelled "STUPID !!! CAN'T YOU READ ?"

At a certain university I used to work at, there was an office where the student technical support folk worked at. Also in the office was a stapler. The stapler was kept on the case of one of the tech support machines.

Eventually someone decided that it was a bad idea to keep the stapler there as lusers would frequently simply insert their papers into it and smack the top of the stapler; it was felt that allowing people to hit the case of a tech support machine was probably unwise. So the stapler was moved to a table which, if you were a luser looking at where the stapler used to be, was directly behind you.

This of course led to hundreds if not thousands of repetitions of the following:

[Luser walks in, walks up to desk, looks at top of CPU where stapler used to be.]

Luser: Where's the stapler?
Bob: The stapler is behind you.

Finally, one of the bobs got sick of this and taped a brightly-colored sign to the case of the computer where the stapler used to be. The sign said, simply,

"THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU."

Now whenever anyone wanted the stapler, the following would happen:

[Luser walks in, walks up to desk, looks directly at the sign saying "THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU".]

Luser: Where's the stapler?
Bob: The stapler is behind you. [Or point to the sign.]

This little dialogue appeared to happen every bit as often as it did before the sign. Pretty much the best you could hope for was the following:

[Luser walks in, walks up to desk, looks directly at the sign saying "THE STAPLER IS BEHIND YOU".]

Luser: Where's the stapler?
Bob: The stapler is behind you.

[Something registers with the luser and he/she glances back down at the sign.]

Luser: D'oh!

At some point I proposed "The stapler is behind you" as the official SCP (="Student Consulting Program") motto.

The 'stapler experiment' continued for some time. At some point someone made an appropriately-labeled masking-tape trail from the door of the office to the stapler. This was somewhat effective, but it was felt by management to be insulting to the lusers and was eventually removed.

My analysis of this was that it made total sense. When a luser enters the consulting office to use the stapler, he or she is there to look for the stapler, he or she isn't there to read a sign.

In these situations, the best you can do is realize that no luser will look at a place expecting to see a stapler and bother to see something else instead, even if the stapler is absent.

It was interesting to see the mental reset that occured when a luser was referred to a sign HE OR SHE HAD BEEN STARING DIRECTLY AT to answer the question he or she had asked.

I'd propose "The stapler is behind you" for another official asr motto, but it's probably more appropriate for atsr.

-jwgh

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