The rise of the lazy

[rubber_jonnie]

[rant mode]

As many of you know, I like to help people who have retro computer problems, it's just who I am. And especially people who have tried and hit a brick wall.

However I'm starting to feel the fatigue of people who just want answers spoon fed to them without a single ounce of self help coming from their end. I'm not talking about people on here BTW, but in other online places.

People just can't be bothered, or don't know how to use search engines, there is a wealth of info at your fingertips, yet they expect people to do their Googling for them.

I do sometimes despair of what people seem to have become of late, and not just in the retro world either, people are just so entitled and selfish, it blows my mind, not to mention the lack of kindness these days.

Ho Hum

[/rant mode off]

[exxos]

Totally agree. Ranted about it many times myself. People are generally in the "do it for me age". I generally only bother to help people if it looks like they are putting in some effort themselves to start with.

My girlfriend is currently correcting about 90+% of mailing addresses, in particular for USA people. Every time I try and circumvent them screwing it up they managed to make it worse. I even threatened a £10 Charge if they screw it up (never actually done that yet) but they don't seem to be reading or taking any extra care.

Actually starting thinking of doing a surcharge for USA people now Because of all the extra processing involved in working out what their address actually is. It is just become totally ridiculous that people expect us to correct their addresses every single time :pullhair: :headbang: Some people just give some cryptic hints to what their addresses and have the attitude of " well they will fix it for me" so I don't need to bother checking it. If I actually sold enough goods and was a larger company, I would have to actually employ somebody to do all this work. People just have no consideration or qualms about creating unnecessary work for us :(

Similar thing why I don't reply to emails and ask people to open topics on the forum. Otherwise all my time and help goes to that one person and then is "lost". Exactly the same with Facebook etc as well. Then next week I end up repeating myself again and again. It does not help anyone else and I cannot reply to every single person every single time either. There is just not enough hours in the day. Everything is on the forum means it is searchable and you can build up a list of problems or queries relating to anything.That is the whole point of the forum to have a "one-stop shop" of information.

A few years back I think I said there was a run of people who would constantly ask for install guides. Aside from information being sent in the emails and information links in the store.. Some of them seem to get in a grump when I just sent them a link to the install page. I they are offended I have not spent 20 hours firstly explaining it all to them. Some people seem to be scared of clicking links or just outright cannot be bothered like I have found with some people in the past.

I look at it this way, if people cannot be bothered to sign up with this forum to help the community as a whole then I cannot be bothered to help them either. Asking questions on Facebook is really just totally selfish (As well as lazy) as it only helps them and nobody else. I sometimes wonder if people running those Atari Facebook groups would be contributing more to the community by just deleting the groups. Imagine if I took my entire website and posted the entire lot on Facebook. How long will that information stay relevant and be found for..

It's like I will see general posts of like how do people open up their machines or get into the keyboard.. My site has had those guides for this for God knows how many years now. All they have to do is spend a little time looking. But they never seem to do.

Overall we are all trying to help people, but people have to give a little as well sometimes. Sadly this is on a rapid decline of late :( If people want to be genuinely helped then "they come to us" not the other way around.It really is not much of an ask considering the wealth of information and support they can get for basically doing almost nothing by signing up.

[rubber_jonnie]

Totally agree. Ranted about it many times myself. People are generally in the "do it for me age". I generally only bother to help people if it looks like they are putting in some effort themselves to start with.

My girlfriend is currently correcting about 90+% of mailing addresses, in particular for USA people. Every time I try and circumvent them screwing it up they managed to make it worse. I even threatened a £10 Charge if they screw it up (never actually done that yet) but they don't seem to be reading or taking any extra care.

Actually starting thinking of doing a surcharge for USA people now Because of all the extra processing involved in working out what their address actually is. It is just become totally ridiculous that people expect us to correct their addresses every single time :pullhair: :headbang: Some people just give some cryptic hints to what their addresses and have the attitude of " well they will fix it for me" so I don't need to bother checking it. If I actually sold enough goods and was a larger company, I would have to actually employ somebody to do all this work. People just have no consideration or qualms about creating unnecessary work for us :(

I don't actually blame you, her time is just as valuable as anybody elses, and why should she be correcting other people's mistakes?

Similar thing why I don't reply to emails and ask people to open topics on the forum. Otherwise all my time and help goes to that one person and then is "lost". Exactly the same with Facebook etc as well. Then next week I end up repeating myself again and again. It does not help anyone else and I cannot reply to every single person every single time either. There is just not enough hours in the day. Everything is on the forum means it is searchable and you can build up a list of problems or queries relating to anything.That is the whole point of the forum to have a "one-stop shop" of information.

Yep, with you there, it is far too easy to go down a rabbit hole and spend hours with somebody who doesn't respect your time, and often expects answers when it is convenient for them, not you.

A few years back I think I said there was a run of people who would constantly ask for install guides. Aside from information being sent in the emails and information links in the store.. Some of them seem to get in a grump when I just sent them a link to the install page. I they are offended I have not spent 20 hours firstly explaining it all to them. Some people seem to be scared of clicking links or just outright cannot be bothered like I have found with some people in the past.

I think there are a lot of folks who simply want their hands held throughout the whole process and expect tech support like you'd get from a big tech company.

I look at it this way, if people cannot be bothered to sign up with this forum to help the community as a whole then I cannot be bothered to help them either. Asking questions on Facebook is really just totally selfish (As well as lazy) as it only helps them and nobody else. I sometimes wonder if people running those Atari Facebook groups would be contributing more to the community by just deleting the groups. Imagine if I took my entire website and posted the entire lot on Facebook. How long will that information stay relevant and be found for..

I'm starting to feel that I'm just going to recommend the forum rather than offering direct help, it's just too frustrating.

It's like I will see general posts of like how do people open up their machines or get into the keyboard.. My site has had those guides for this for God knows how many years now. All they have to do is spend a little time looking. But they never seem to do.

I mean that just highlights that folks can't be bothered to help themselves.

Overall we are all trying to help people, but people have to give a little as well sometimes. Sadly this is on a rapid decline of late :( If people want to be genuinely helped then "they come to us" not the other way around.It really is not much of an ask considering the wealth of information and support they can get for basically doing almost nothing by signing up.

Indeed.

[exxos]

Yep, with you there, it is far too easy to go down a rabbit hole and spend hours with somebody who doesn't respect your time, and often expects answers when it is convenient for them, not you.

Yeah, and even more frustrating when they give up after a few emails which could take me hours to actually write.

I think there are a lot of folks who simply want their hands held throughout the whole process and expect tech support like you'd get from a big tech company.

Absolutely. People forget I am only one person. But also people on this forum have day jobs and lives etc their time is also valuable.

"back in the day" I did not even have the Internet. It literally took months to get a WD1772 Datasheet. I killed a couple of machines developing my floppy upgrade. But today people just want things to work without any effort or trial and error or any chance of failure. If people screw something up then they should try and fix it all start again and plough loads of their own time and money into it all. That is what I had to do.

I basically had nobody to ask for help with anything. A lot of projects simply got abandoned because I did not have the knowledge or the skill back then to finish them. What help there was was via writing physical letters and sending them through the post. Lucky to get a reply, and even more fortunate if somebody actually helped with something. That could go on for days weeks or months.

I'm starting to feel that I'm just going to recommend the forum rather than offering direct help, it's just too frustrating.

My suggestion is whatever questions they are answering, in particular if they are repetitive, just do a post on the forum about it. Then post a link on Facebook. Then when the next person asked exactly the same question, just post them the same link. There is no point replying to people on Facebook IMHO.

It's like I will see general posts of like how do people open up their machines or get into the keyboard.. My site has had those guides for this for God knows how many years now. All they have to do is spend a little time looking. But they never seem to do.

I mean that just highlights that folks can't be bothered to help themselves.

Yep. I had to figure out how to dismantle the keyboard myself. I had no guides or help on how to do it. If I broke said keyboard then "tough sh*t". I would have to find another one and start again. Which was generally problematic to do in the late 90s era.

[Steve]

Reminds me of recently somebody decided he wanted to try different types of MiNT and had some questions about the configuration (which weren't simple things to answer) he asked the same question on 1. Facebook, 2. Atari forum 3. Discord. When someone confronted him on asking the same thing in three different places his answer was 'just trying to get some traction here', like it's the communities fault for not talking to him fast enough.

Then he did the same for getting emails on Atari. I try to help him but he's asking for people to actually provide a mail server for him. Doesn't seem to understand the basics of email at all. The silly thing is even if he finally gets it working, like I said, html emails make it absolutely pointless and he wouldn't even want to use his Atari for emails after all the pain and suffering of setting it up.

It's funny how sometimes a single person can be so loud and demand the attention of so many people for something that should be 'do your own research', all the information is out there, just need to look.

[exxos]

I think another problem is as I have said sort of previously. A lot of us have been around "since the beginning". There is not many of us really left any more who knows about this stuff. Getting help with anything is only going to get worse for people. Of course then it creates even more work for people like us, which we simply cannot do. Again this is why it is important just to have stuff documented.

People sometimes ask me about software and other things. I really have no clue. Majority of my software days was just using STOS. I used MiNT once which came with my Falcon. I even remember now thinking why the hell would anyone want to multitask because everything just runs 10 times slower and I can only do one thing at a time anyway :lol: . So I never used it again. Similar with alternative desktops, some of them looked really nice but considering I mostly just wanted to boot STOS anyway.. And STOS did not play nice with the alternative desktops anyway so I could not use them.Overall I simply have never had time to look into the software side of things.

I can say for one thing I have a similar problem with Verilog. I would love to learn all about it but I just never going to have time. Even if I did, I cannot type enough to write a lot of software anyway. So I tend to end up pestering @Badwolf For helping just getting things done. But this is a problem that, how many people out there know how to do assembly or Verilog who are willing to help. It's pretty much near zero. I would love to dabble in assembler and some other stuff but then same problem of lack of time.

So I think anyone who is helping people on Facebook, please just write a guide or documented on the forum instead. If us few remaining people don't document this stuff then such information will simply get lost. I think we all should be focusing on preservation these days more then anything.

Look at how many times we have had the post of people wanting to put TOS206 in a STFM.. I don't think there is actually any page documenting all this. Even though it is obvious for us, it is not obvious for other people. So we need millions of pages documenting all this relatively stupid and simple stuff.

Again as I have said before. There is just a inherent "split" going on with various communities. Do people today even know what a forum is ? is really quite unsettling when you think about it all. We are people here generally wanting to help, generally want to learn, and generally know about stuff and can give proper advice. Then we get communities like on Facebook, where it is the blind leading the blind. Then they will take to youtube doing videos on all things not to do and then that information will become standard.. And around in circles we'll go again.....

[rubber_jonnie]

Yeah, and even more frustrating when they give up after a few emails which could take me hours to actually write.

100%

Absolutely. People forget I am only one person. But also people on this forum have day jobs and lives etc their time is also valuable.

Again, 100%, Although I am lucky enough to work from home, and can keep an eye on things pretty easily, it's not a given, especially if I get really busy at work.

"back in the day" I did not even have the Internet. It literally took months to get a WD1772 Datasheet. I killed a couple of machines developing my floppy upgrade. But today people just want things to work without any effort or trial and error or any chance of failure. If people screw something up then they should try and fix it all start again and plough loads of their own time and money into it all. That is what I had to do.

I basically had nobody to ask for help with anything. A lot of projects simply got abandoned because I did not have the knowledge or the skill back then to finish them. What help there was was via writing physical letters and sending them through the post. Lucky to get a reply, and even more fortunate if somebody actually helped with something. That could go on for days weeks or months.

Yeah, info was super scarce back in the days before internet, and even now some of it is sketchy and in need of a pinch of salt to be useful.

My suggestion is whatever questions they are answering, in particular if they are repetitive, just do a post on the forum about it. Then post a link on Facebook. Then when the next person asked exactly the same question, just post them the same link. There is no point replying to people on Facebook IMHO.

I do try to do that a lot more of late. There are a lot of useful posts on here and I do direct folks over. Trouble is, some just don't want to be bothered reading and understanding and expect everything to be like a modern PC.

Yep. I had to figure out how to dismantle the keyboard myself. I had no guides or help on how to do it. If I broke said keyboard then "tough sh*t". I would have to find another one and start again. Which was generally problematic to do in the late 90s era.

Yeah, many times I've had to take stuff apart to figure it out with no help over the years. Mostly cars at that point TBH, as I didn't want to break my computers, and I couldn't always afford a Haynes manual, or id didn't cover what I needed to do.

[rubber_jonnie]

Reminds me of recently somebody decided he wanted to try different types of MiNT and had some questions about the configuration (which weren't simple things to answer) he asked the same question on 1. Facebook, 2. Atari forum 3. Discord. When someone confronted him on asking the same thing in three different places his answer was 'just trying to get some traction here', like it's the communities fault for not talking to him fast enough.

Then he did the same for getting emails on Atari. I try to help him but he's asking for people to actually provide a mail server for him. Doesn't seem to understand the basics of email at all. The silly thing is even if he finally gets it working, like I said, html emails make it absolutely pointless and he wouldn't even want to use his Atari for emails after all the pain and suffering of setting it up.

It's funny how sometimes a single person can be so loud and demand the attention of so many people for something that should be 'do your own research', all the information is out there, just need to look.

Yeah, I've run into that on quite a few occasions. A post on every FB group they can that seems like it fits the bill in the hope that one will yield an answer. I confess, I have done it myself, but usually not as a first port of call, as I've usually done everything I can before I post.

The other issue is, you try to help, give an answer, and the person you're trying to help doesn't like the answer!!!

WTF, you asked a question, I gave you a good answer based on my pretty wide experience in the retro field, and suddenly, because you don't like the answer, you poo poo it and go off rudely searching for an answer that you DO like.

I mean, really?

[exxos]

Trouble is, some just don't want to be bothered reading and understanding and expect everything to be like a modern PC.

Absolutely. I can understand the point where sometimes you just need to get things done. But for me I am always doing 50 things at once so I really cannot afford to get hung up on silly little things all the time. I do feel a little bad putting problems onto other people but sometimes you just have to ask for help.

But in terms of people in general, why are they getting a Atari in the first place if they really cannot be bothered to figure something out for how to maintain or fix it. They are just simply in the wrong hobby to start with. If all they are doing it wanting to play games, then get a emulator.

I have been always interested in electronics. I took electronics at school, did a two-year intensive technical training course. Worked for a company for free for a year for work experience. Then gained over 10 years full-time electronics fault finding and repair experience. During all this I constantly designed and repaired Atari machines over the years. How many people today would actually do that ?

So then becomes slightly frustrating and impossible to educate someone into fault finding a machine coming from a background where they know basically nothing and do not even have basic test equipment or knowledge. You cannot teach people years of experience in a few emails or a YouTube video.

From the perspective of most people, I would imagine it is like, "my machine does not boot, which chip do I need to change". It is just a near impossible question to answer. As you know, from that STE repair.. even something relatively simple can take many many hours. Even for people that have experience doing the work.

I think pretty much I am the only one who has looked into a lot of these screwy faults with these machines. Look at the chaos trying to figure out these Falcon RAM problems. look at all the time I spent on the clock patch investigation (again) is basically nobody gives a stuff about anyway. I have enough knowledge and experience to diagnose these problems but even I am starting to struggle with figuring this stuff out. Plus my motivation for doing this work went out the window some years ago anyway. So realistically what chance does anyone else have these days of solving these problems.

[rubber_jonnie]

Absolutely. I can understand the point where sometimes you just need to get things done. But for me I am always doing 50 things at once so I really cannot afford to get hung up on silly little things all the time. I do feel a little bad putting problems onto other people but sometimes you just have to ask for help.

If you're busy, what else can you do? And sometimes people expect that you are free to talk for hours and hours, and when you remind them politely you're not, they take offense.

But in terms of people in general, why are they getting a Atari in the first place if they really cannot be bothered to figure something out for how to maintain or fix it. They are just simply in the wrong hobby to start with. If all they are doing it wanting to play games, then get a emulator.

Indeed, I've said before, that I think lockdown is responsible for more people trying to get into retro computers, they just don't have a clue about what they're getting into. I've had people asking about how you install apps onto the desktop of an ST. Simple answer, unless you have a hard drive, you're not, but people see a GUI and instantly think it's like Windows or Mac etc.

I have been always interested in electronics. I took electronics at school, did a two-year intensive technical training course. Worked for a company for free for a year for work experience. Then gained over 10 years full-time electronics fault finding and repair experience. During all this I constantly designed and repaired Atari machines over the years. How many people today would actually do that ?

These days? not many people. I have always had an interest in electronics, but until about 15 years ago, probably didn't have the skills or abilities to do much, and started with some light modding and it spiralled from there. Do I know enough to design add ons etc? Nope, but I have taught myself the skills to repair things and built up a good knowledge base. These folks don't appreciate the time taken to learn this stuff.

So then becomes slightly frustrating and impossible to educate someone into fault finding a machine coming from a background where they know basically nothing and do not even have basic test equipment or knowledge. You cannot teach people years of experience in a few emails or a YouTube video.

Indeed.

From the perspective of most people, I would imagine it is like, "my machine does not boot, which chip do I need to change". It is just a near impossible question to answer. As you know, from that STE repair.. even something relatively simple can take many many hours. Even for people that have experience doing the work.

Agree 100%

I think pretty much I am the only one who has looked into a lot of these screwy faults with these machines. Look at the chaos trying to figure out these Falcon RAM problems. look at all the time I spent on the clock patch investigation (again) is basically nobody gives a stuff about anyway. I have enough knowledge and experience to diagnose these problems but even I am starting to struggle with figuring this stuff out. Plus my motivation for doing this work went out the window some years ago anyway. So realistically what chance does anyone else have these days of solving these problems.

Quite. And when the level of graciousness and thanks is so low from a lot of people, then is it no wonder people like yourself are losing all motivation to carry on.