You can't complain about your computer in public without some jerk telling you that all of your problems will be solved by switching to a different platform. This weekend I was at a Christmas party, and of course at some point during the evening, the conversation shifted toward computers. It seems a few Mac people convinced one of the partygoers to buy a Mac after repeated insistence that OS X is the perfect platform, and that Apple hardware was so perfect that he'd never have to worry about computer problems again. As it turns out, things only got worse post-Mac.
"Everyone I knew had a Mac, they loved Macs," he said to me over beer and hors d'oeuvres. This is not true; I know him, I do not have a Mac, and I would not recommend one to a PC user under any circumstances. Anyway, the story continued. "So I bought a Mac, and I really didn't like it. I told the Mac people I knew that I really didn't like my Mac, and they told me I just needed to get used to it. Well, I'm used to it and I still don't like the interface, I still have trouble getting software to work correctly, and it locks up so much I can hardly use it." His wife filled in some of the details, describing what amounts to the Beach Ball Of Death.
I am no evangelist, so aside from saying that I hate Macs, I won't try to convince people not to use them, or to use Linux or BSD, or to stay away from Vista. I've learned over the years that if I make a heavy recommendation to switch platforms, the people who listen to me will then depend on me for all of their migration troubles. Also, I've found that arguing about computer operating systems is boring, pointless, and does not change anyone's mind about anything. It's easier to let people make their own mistakes and learn from them the hard way. Let the platform speak for itself. So I said to this guy, "It sounds like you have a software problem. I'd save all my data to a DVD or external hard drive and reinstall the operating system."
Ah, but they'd considered that. They'd been in to the Apple store and asked "Geniuses" (or whatever Apple calls their technicians) about the problem and they said it was probably a bad hard drive. So I explained to this couple what the symptoms of a bad hard drive were, including the fact that hard drives usually fail over time and can be difficult to detect at first. But the guy replied that he'd already been on the phone with Apple support and ran a bunch of diagnostic tests that convinced the support person that it was not a bad hard drive.
"So I called up my Mac friends and asked if they could come over and help me fix this problem, and they said that I shouldn't be having any problems because I'm using a Mac," he said, frustrated. "Yes," I replied, "It seems that a lot of evangelists, especially Apple evangelists, have trouble addressing reality. But if they convinced you to buy this computer, the least they could do is make an effort to help you with this." He agreed, but they won't help him -- they won't even accept the fact that the computer is malfunctioning.
Evangelism of any kind is a selfish, destructive thing. Evangelists work so passionately to get people to switch to a different way of thinking, behaving, or buying, but then they slip into the shadows when things get difficult. If you want to switch to a new computing environment, don't listen to the people who rave about it. Instead, find a good support forum or mailing list and evaluate its level of knowledge and friendliness. Discover what the most common problems with this technology are, and determine whether or not you are willing and able to handle them. It's that support community that will be there for you in your time of need, not the jerk at the office who convinced you that life would be more enjoyable if you and he shared the same technological preferences.
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