Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-08-21 08:16:31 - Graham Ellis
If I was a farmer, driving my tractor down the busy A350 one day, and I came across a chap in a car who had pulled off onto a soft verge and got stuck, what would I do? Stop and help, I hope, if I had a rope with me and I could pull him our of the mire quickly and if I wasn't in a desparate rush.
It's on the same basis that if I happen to see a post on a forum to which I'm a visitor, I'll chip in with a suggestion or answer that may be helpful. There are, I confess, times that I look at the proverbial car stuck in the mud and, wondering just what I might be getting myself into, just drive on by - shall we call it personal defence / safety, and I've see so many of these questions that I can usually recognise the ones that are likely to turn nasty on me, as if I was the one who drove them off the road in the first place. With our own Opentalk forum, each visitor who wants to post a question has to register, and most are customers. Only VERY rarely will I decline to offer suggestions there
"What's in it for you, Graham?". So ask some of the more thoughful people about my approach. Well - there's a great deal of good vibes felt from helping someone - seeing how a few minutes of work gets someone happily off on their holiday - isn't there? But there's more to it than that. If it was just the pleasure of seeing people on their way, then I might get bored and jaded and give up. There is a business reason too. Having answered a question on a forum, the posts / responses end up - at the least - on line for a few weeks, allowing others with the same questions to access the answers; a minority of those might even be interested in our other services, so I can put the whole thing down to marketing; in a relatively small community (open source developers, UK), the name of Well House Consultants is getting rather better known than it was a few years ago - and what better reputation for a training company to have than being a helpful guide to those who need a quick pointer in the right direction?
Just occasionally, this farmer does get it wrong and regret stopping to help a motorist. I stopped to help some guy from Bournemouth who had a piece of PHP that was broken, and he was off to the side of the road in the soft verge of the Semington bypass. Even at a first quick tinker with his problem, it was obvious that he didn't understand at all how to drive his PHPmobile, and having given him a couple of pointers I also suggested that he take it into a garage or to an instructor as soon as he could, so that he could complete his journey home to the south coast. But apparently, he didn't really want any sort of help that would actually cost him anything, even if he was going to put anyone who helped him to a great deal of trouble and their expense. What he really wanted was for someone to come along with a free tow truck, put him on the back and drive all the 50 miles to his home and drop him off. Oh - no "thank you" at all to me, of course - just a snide comment after my first response and nothing after some further advise which offered him some excellent directions.
I visited the forum (NOT ours) where this guy posted just a few minutes ago to see if any other farmer has stopped to help him. No - they haven't (and after the reaction I got, I'm not surprised). The guy himself has walked away from his vehicle to another road, where he's thumbing a lift asking for a free ride to Bournemouth ... "I have a job for someone to write this code for me". Indications are that he's offering (if anything) peanuts, so I suspect that all he'll get answering will be monkies. Very rarely do I get any satisfaction in seeing someone in trouble, but I'm allowing myself an exception in this case. And I'm taking a reminder from it to remember my "please" and "thank you"s and to not request unreasonable help from people myself.