Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
I can't tell if you're on "my side" of this debate or not, because you sure sound like it. :-)I'm on "my side" and always on the side of the serious and earnest end user. I live in a sparsely populated rural area. Most of the locals can't afford to pay for computer help. I have told several of them that I am willing to give free classes as long as somebody volunteers to do the announcements and all that. Problem is that nobody is interested enough to give some of their own time. I mean I am even willing to do this at my own facilities and throw in free coffee. I would cover topics like protecting their wintel boxes from virus and other threats and FOSS for win32. The local school district offers paid continuing education classes that focus on things that most of these people can't afford like MS-Office. I would love the opportunity to show more win users things like openoffice and firefox.
So I am willing to give one evening a week to help others but that's not good enough. They want to be able to call me anytime of day for free advice. Same thing applies to some of the people seeking help on lists like this. I think it is reasonable to expect people to RTFM before they start asking for help. The only exception I make is for pay or for a good cause.
I should mention that I did two infected PC cleanups for locals last week. I don't even try to find them but somehow they find me. Both were so badly hosed that I just pulled the hard drive and mounted it on a linux box to make a copy of everything, then reinstalled win XP from scratch. I only charged $120 for this. Both customers would have benefited from a free class in how not to get the PC infected. Neither of them are the type that would be willing to do anything like posting flyers in order to make such a free class happen. No guilt here.
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