"Your doctor/lawyer/reporter comparison is stupid."
After reading these posts, it seems to me a lot of people don't like their doctors. For one thing, many people argued, doctors do treat their patients like idiots. And no doubt some do. The distinction is in the way they do it: It's not publicly acceptable for a doctor to belittle a patient. The link from the original essay gives an example of a doctor threatened with losing his license by the New Hampshire Board of Medicine. Whether mandated or sincere, it's the respect for the people they serve that makes medical mockery unacceptable.

Moreover, a lot of people confuse a poor bedside manner with the type of abuse I'm referring to. One is implied, the other overt; it's a much different matter to treat someone like an idiot than to call them an idiot. Some folks in IT, through the examples I cited (including several from professional journals), think nothing of publicly slandering their users. It's almost a matter of pride.

"Your car analogy is stupid."
The common complaint here...well, I'm not sure what the complaint was. But the analogy bears repeating: If you build something that's poorly designed - like a car that randomly changes pedal functions - you can't blame the operator for any problems that result. I'll say more about this in the next section.

"But users ARE stupid!"
Obviously I disagree. The examples given in posts were all very similar: The user calls IT because the printer doesn't work. The printer's out of ink. The user never bothers to check. Damned user is either too lazy to check for himself, or too stupid to know what to check. It's easy to get angry about something like this.

What's difficult is asking: What can we do to make it more obvious that the printer is out of ink? And no, declaring a stalemate is not an option; you can't just give up and say "no matter what I do they won't pay attention." After all, IT people are very good at solving problems - consider every user error a problem waiting to be solved, instead of yet another sign that the situation is hopeless.

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