No good deed...

[summers_place]

Hypothetical for the hivemind:

You go to someone (we'll call her "Tillie") and ask to interrupt her for a moment because there's something you can't figure out but you think perhaps she can. Tillie agrees to help, and pauses in her task to assist you with yours. You explain, "I can't find [item] on [electronic device]. It's gone missing. I've looked

Comments

[bkwrrm_tx]

Ugh - I used to hate when that happened. I'd be annoyed about the time she started explaining the stuff you already knew.

[summers_place]

I think you missed the point. I'm "Tillie" in this example, and someone came to me asking for help. I tried to help, never explained anything the other person already knew, and got yelled at for trying to help.

[bkwrrm_tx]

Oh. Yup, completely missed it. So sorry... :-(

In that case? /goes back to reread the post/

So you helped them, and gave them pointers so this wouldn't happen again, and still got yelled at? Big time not right.

And now I'm going to go see if I can shoe-horn my foot out of my mouth. I'll be over here in the corner, if anyone needs me.

[starcat_jewel]

Did you ever find the missing item? Because I can see how, if I was looking for a specific thing and didn't either find it or get an explanation as to why it was gone for good, explanations of the "locking the barn door after the horse is stolen" variety might be irritating.

[summers_place]

This person has a history of losing electronic files and not taking precautions to prevent this from happening. I am frequently called upon to assist, and this is why I always emphasize to him the importance of backups and good organization of storage space.

In this instance, the missing item was a folder of photos from his niece's college graduation. One piece of advice I gave him as part of the "walking through additional search steps" was to go to his laptop and look through the backups he'd taken from his phone most recently and see if the photos were there. He eventually did, and they were.

I politely refrained from pointing out that this is WHY backups are important, because I think he gets it now.