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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The bad kernel caper

I was curious as to why I was having a heck of a time doing anything with Blogger today. So I went to their status page and read, "We're currently in the process of rolling back a bad kernel upgrade that has significantly impacted the service."

I hate that when that happens. But that certainly clears things up for me.

Note to IT people: Attempt to communicate to the lowest common denominator (that would be me) and assume your audience doesn't have your level of technical expertise.

A bad kernel to me is something I find in the bottom of a popcorn bag.

If I had written the status report, it would have read, "Thank you for being a loyal Blogger user. We have noted some problems with you being able to blog about what you had for breakfast this morning. We wish to reassure you that we are well aware of the problem and are frantically consulting technical blogs on other sites to pinpoint the problem. We suggest you come back later in time to blog about what you ate for dinner. "

Isn't that much better than telling us about your nasty "bad kernel" problem? That's why I'm a marketing professional.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shandi sent me. (Said I'd get a discount if I mentioned her name). Looks like a nice blog. Think I'll look around a bit.
btw The really sad part is that tech guys think they have dumbed it down for us poor benighted souls. Oh well, if they understood people they wouldn't have gone into that line of work.
But have you considered that the problem may actually have been connected to popcorn somehow?

Anonymous said...

Back from the five cent tour. (Only paid 3 1/2, thanks Shandi.) Had a great time. Laughed several times and grinned throughout. Always appreciate someone with talent sharing for free. Good stuff. I'll be back. Thanks.
Oh yeah. The sea monkey thing. They got me too.

Time said...

Well, thank you for the kind words. Any friend of Shandi is a friend of mine. You are more than welcome back anytime.

Anonymous said...

In my opinion the technical description is necessary. Otherwise blogger.com will get millions of emails from IT and IT wannabes saying "so what really went wrong here let me tell you" or a variant thereof.

On top of that it goes back to the reality of sharing information in a medium where duplication is so cheap: With about the same number of keystrokes necessary to write a blog entry one could find a useful working definition of "kernel" by using a search engine. No trip to the library required.

R.