n00b frustration

I just got a new laptop! Yay! It is small and shiny and cute, and I can't wait to bust it out while I'm traveling instead of my heavy, clunky, slow old laptop that ran hot enough to cook food on the keyboard (OK, that's an exaggeration). But I have to say, that old clunky laptop was a faithful computer - never got a virus, never crashed or lost data, ran MATLAB surprisingly well. It hasn't reached the end of its useful life, so I am passing it on to someone who will love and care for it as I have over the past four years. But before I do, I'm wiping the hard drive because nothing puts a cramp in my style like identity theft.

This is where I ran into a little problem today. It's a pet peeve and has more to do with me not being a computer expert, but I have a request to all you tech guys, hackers and whoever else works with computers, software and the like: Please learn how to use plain english. Please meditate on the meaning of "user friendly". You should do this because you are not the only ones who own computers that might resell and thus wipe the hard drive of one day. Being borderline computer illiterate doesn't seem to be an impediment to owning a laptop anymore. Does it annoy you when these people pester you to fix their computer because they used IE instead of firefox and got a virus? Do you grind your teeth reflexively when they ask you tech questions that have simple answers? You can help yourself. You can make this happen less.

Let me explain: My significant other is one of your folk. I asked him today if he could recommend some software that would completely wipe my hard drive. He provided a link. The concept was simple enough. This thing goes on a usb stick somehow. You boot the computer in question from the usb drive and poof! squeaky clean hard drive. OK, but how do you boot your computer from a usb drive? I'm sure this seems like a simple question to you, but would you believe I've never done that before? It's true, the last computer I got rid of, I smashed the hard drive with a hammer (it was scavenged from my high school and worthless anyway) and the next computer I got was the one I am now trying to wipe. So my man says, just look at the directions. Ah, directions. Instructions. Those would be nice, wouldn't they? Except there aren't any. There is a FAQ on the website. I found my answer there, but let me tell you something: Someone who doesn't know much about computers isn't going to know what question to ask, much less what vaguely-named category of question to look in. There is also a readme, in which each actual, simple step is followed, surrounded by or hidden in by two paragraphs of troubleshooting instructions.

Lesson: Steps, instructions, directions should be separate. Troubleshooting is for FAQs. Us simpletons don't know what question to ask before something has even gone wrong. We have to go through the normal steps first.

Is this just toooo muuuuuch wooork for you tech people? In this case, it would have taken just a few lines of plain english. As my man said:
"Click to download the zip file.
Double click to unzip.
Double click on the iso file to burn to a CD"
Which would then be followed by:
"Hit esc-del-F1 when turning on computer to be wiped.
Choose to boot from cd or usb.
Proceed to boot"

That's all. It's very simple. Is that little chunk of instructions anywhere on the website or the readme? No.

This seems like a very small issue to get worked up about, I know. But it says something about the tech industry: you are frustrating everyone around you and they are going to annoy you right back until you make the smallest effort to simplify things that didn't need to be that complicated in the first place.