[CS-FSLUG] Perils of Helping

[Ed Hurst]

I wonder how many of us remember the old self-help text, _The Games
People Play_ ? The book was an examination of human interaction based on
the Transactional Analysis model of human behavior. There was plenty in
that model to pick at, but it tends to accurately describe the
interaction between people with a long-term relationship of some sort.

The thesis is we find ourselves falling into ruts dealing with these
people. There's nothing wrong with a succesful routine, but these are
ruts of bad habit, neurotic patterns. One of the games identified in the
book was "Yes, But..." The point was so many people get all their
gratification from whining, and have no interest at all in resolution of
problems. Today I got a haunting echo of that:

------ quote begins ------
Go to almost any meeting with non technical business people and listen
to the pre-meeting chatter. Chances are pretty good you'll hear some
group exchanging stories about problems with their computers -- Tom
can't get his video camera to download pictures to his PC, Dick has a
dual boot that keeps coming up F1, and Mary can't get her SPAM detector
to quit trashing legitimate mail. The actual topics don't matter: what's
going on is that these people are assuring each other of their mutual
harmlessness.

Want to commit a real social faux pas? intervene with an offer to fix --
the problems they're so concerned about will get downplayed and you'll
find yourself gracefully edged out of the group: then they'll resume
right where you interrupted.

It's a social phenomenon, one of many and not important by itself -- but
also one the Linux and open source community needs to come to grips
with: nothing to do with the realities of technology that works, but the
reality of unmet expectations somehow transmogrified into the social
glue of mutually acceptable deception.
------- quote ends -------

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=467

Sometimes, those of us called to help others find ourselves bumping into
this. In my own helps ministry, I often find people willing to discuss
their troubles, but completely uninterested in fixing them. The market
for what I do is far smaller than one might think, given what we all
hear every day.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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Bible Application - http://ed.asisaid.com/bible/index.html
Plain & Simple Computer Help - http://ed.asisaid.com/
Plain Package blog - http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/