Re: EMERGENCY 911

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Thanks, folks, though I wasn’t offended. This is a very common situation for web help forums – sometimes a person really is “just being lazy,” but more often, they’ve honestly been trying and cannot solve the problem on their own. The real issue is that they may be expecting to be “attacked” or ridiculed, and so are defensive before even reading responses – and it’s easy to misinterpret the “tone” of plain text. Combine that with the fact that a person may already be quite frustrated with a problem they can’t solve on their own, and it’s not surprising that anything that is “not a solution” is interpreted as “what an *******, I’m asking for help, not to feel stupid.”

Not saying that that’s the *correct* attitude/interpretation, of course, but it takes experience and patience to successfully ask for and accept help in an online forum.