I’m not referring to the Crown-Royal Drinking Chupacabra, although he is lurking under your desk, and he is hungry.
No, I’m referring to the big boxy thing under your desk. Probably is either white, grey, or black, and has “Dell,” “HP,” or “Gateway” written on it somewhere. You know. That thing.
The hard drive.
No – I know that it’s not called a hard drive; I know that it’s not really the CPU either – it’s the computer, and hard drives and CPUs are simply components. I know that, in the eternal words of Moss, “Memory is RAM!” and though I may joke, it is not powered by magic smoke.
But if you ask non-technical people what the thingamajig is called, many times they’ll say it’s the “hard drive.” This phenomenon was bemoaned in a blogpost on IT Wire by David M. Williams.
Sure, you could blame ignorance; but when the radio doesn’t work in a car, users aren’t likely to say “the engine died.” This problem seems related to technology alone.
I think there may be a number of factors; much of which is simply that bad information is passed down – I remember taking more than one quiz in the high-school mandated computer course where I was marked down for putting down the more technically correct “The CPU resides in a socket on the motherboard” instead of “The CPU is the box.” Even so, “CPU” is probably –less completely wrong- than “hard drive.” Then again, why not just call it “The box?”
If you think this is only a problem affecting desktops, think again. When applications perform poorly, what does the end-user blame?
(If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you should already know the answer.)
For the other 99.999% of the world: “The Network” gets blamed. This means that the issue ends up going to the network team first, even though the problem could be with the server, the application, or, heck, with the desktop. This wastes time and money.
It’s why you can’t rely on calls to the help desk being your first notification of problems; because end-users aren’t always technically aware, they may not have the information you need to solve problems quickly, and when they do have information, it might be wrong.
Meantime, I don’t want to know how many people went out and bought a brand new computer because their geek friend told them that their “hard drive needed to be defragmented.”
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