It's Always May
During much of my time in the medical transcription industry, I've been a technical troubleshooter. I've always been a technology wonk, all the way back to the days of the original Color Computer from Radio Shack, which competed against the Commodore 64 back in the early 1980s. The "CoCo," as it was known, had a whopping 64 KB--yes, KB, not MB--of RAM with a maximum clock speed of 1.79 MHz. A few years later I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I got my hands on a genuine "Big Blue" IBM AT PC which had a 20 MB--yes, MB, not GB--hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, and a processor that ran at the blistering speed of 6 MHz. Of course, all of that paled in comparison to the wonders of the Internet which I began to discover in the late 80s....
Anyway, my fascination with technology over the years has of necessity compelled me to learn how to get under the hood and see what makes stuff tick. Because the one thing you can always count on with technology is that eventually it's going to stop working the way it's supposed to. As I slowly developed a niche business offering technical consulting services to small MT operators and independent contractors, a large portion of my time was spent on technical support. Since most of my clients have been female, naturally I've had opportunity over the years to observe some interesting differences between men and women when it comes to troubleshooting technology. As always, of course, these are generalities, and your mileage may vary.
To begin with, most women I know aren't all that enamored of technology in the first place. My wife Carol, for example, hates most things electronic with a passion, starting with her computer. When something isn't working right on her PC, she hollers for me to come fix it, and then has a fit when what I do to correct the problem is the exact same thing she swears she was doing. She just seems to have that effect on technology. I sometimes wonder if she has some kind of anti-technological force field surrounding her, because even I have to admit she's had some weird experiences with electronic equipment.
Not only do women in general seem less fascinated than men with electronic equipment of various kinds, in my experience most women don't really want to know HOW the technology does what it does either. It either works or it doesn't; WHY it works or doesn't work is irrelevant! This lack of enthusiasm for the inner workings of technology can present a challenge when it comes to women and technical troubleshooting.
When something goes haywire and my women customers call for help, usually the call or e-mail consists of one sentence: "The (fill in the blank) isn't working." This is one time when the typical tendencies of men and women are reversed. Whereas we men tend to be bottom-line types--you know, cut the chit-chat and get to the point--for women a conversational journey is at least as important as the destination itself (if there even IS a destination!) But when it comes to trouble in technology land, women get right to the heart of the matter: "The thing-a-ma-jigger is NOT WORKING! I need you to MAKE IT WORK!"
If the truth be told, I think the process of figuring out how to fix technology is to a man what the process of figuring out how to fix people is to a woman--a long and winding road with a number of stops and side trips along the way.
(Just for the record, in case there are any women who are still reading, the number one most useful thing you can do to help troubleshoot a technological problem is to describe the SYMPTOMS of the problem, such as error messages, etc., rather than the RESULT: "It's not working.")
Oh, and about the title of this blog post. The other day I was helping a female colleague troubleshoot a technological issue, serving as the intermediary between her and the IT fellow who had his hands in the innards of the problem system. I told my colleague that the IT guy has made some changes that he thinks "may" solve the problem. Her response to me by instant messenger was an all-caps "MAY??" It was then that I gently reminded her that when it comes to technology, it's never April, and it's never June....it's always May!