Unrealistic Expectations

The long-held belief in sports is that great players never make great coaches because they expect every player to be able to do the same things they could do back when they were playing. When Magic Johnson took over as coach of the Lakers he was telling players to make passes that he could do in his sleep, never quite realizing that for mere mortals those passes are nearly impossible to pull off. Like a lot of things in sports, this premise easily translates to the rest of life. Many experts have a hard time passing their knowledge on to another person because they think they can skip wide swath of information they had no problems comprehending and can't imagine why someone would need something explained to them a second time. No where is this lack of realization more extreme than in the world of technology. There used to be a "Saturday Night Live" skit where Jimmy Fallon would act as a condescending IT guy who just didn't have time to explain what he was doing to fix the person's computer. Like the majority of SNL skits, it was really funny because it something a lot of people had experienced in their own lives. I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy, but even now there are some things I just can't figure out and most of IT doesn't feel like explaining it to me.

On a couple previous occasions I have written about how frustrated I get with McAfee Virus Scan software. For those of you who missed those posts, allow me to sum up: the software is supposed to block the things which cause my computer to freeze, but the only time my computer ever freezes is when McAfee is doing its thing. Ironic, no? What I've discovered the problem to be is that my computer is a few years old, which means that by today's technology standards it may as well need a crank to get started. So, as these McAfee technicians update their program to guard against new viruses, they are also adding to the amount of memory the program needs to run. Memory that, frankly, I just don't have to spare. That is why the second my computer doesn't act the way it is supposed to I immediately know to look down to the corner and will invariably see the tell-tale circle, letting me know that McAfee is either scanning or installing something. (This wouldn't bother me nearly as much if it resulted in my computer actually being safer, but the last couple of times I've gotten a virus, McAfee has waited until it was installed to attack it, which in my mind defeats the purpose.) At that point I basically can't do anything more than wait for it to finish what it is doing.

This type of problem arises from the same level of obliviousness out of these programmers that you would see from a star player trying to transition into being a star coach: "What do you mean you don't have a computer with all the latest hardware and enough memory to run every program known to man? Doesn't everyone have that kind of technology at their fingertips?" Actually no, we don't. Most of us are working with computers that are a few years old and a hard drive which is now overflowing with pictures featuring people we don't remember and music files from bands we don't particularly enjoy anymore. I'd love to be able to increase my computer's operating speed as rapidly as technology seems to dictate that it should, but that doesn't appear to be in the cards anytime soon. These unreasonable expectations are what happens when you spend all your time around people who program computers for a living and are constantly upgrading their hardware because it is their job - you begin to lose touch with what the non-professionals (a.k.a. your consumers) are working with. At some point McAfee should bring in a couple of regular computer users to bring these guys back to reality. Let's see how often they expect me to update my software when they are working with a 100 gigabyte limit.

Obviously this kind of narrow thinking is not just a problem within the technology sector - there are plenty of industries who would be well served to take a step back and think about their consumers for a second before they go around making the thing they just put out a month ago obsolete. Golf club makers are notorious for making you feel that if your clubs are more than 2 years old you may as well stay home from the course because you are just going to embarrass yourself, totally forgetting that their products are an expensive investment and we all can't run out to buy brand new gear every few months. But I think the tech guys are the only ones capable of messing with you in your home just because you haven't upgraded your toys in a while. I appreciate what McAfee is doing in trying to keep my computer safe from viruses, but there comes a point where if you are going to cause my computer to crash every time you install something, I'd frankly you not bother with the effort. I know that the safest way to keep my computer virus-free is to just never turn it on, but that method seems kind of extreme.