Technology Expectations

IT DOESN’T WORK! I get this call/email all the time. Technology can be a fickle beast.

Most of the people I meet day-to-day have their expectations of technology out of line with where it should be. Sometimes their expectations are in line and the product itself was designed bad causing the product to be frustrating.

The biggest falsely held expectation I see is that technology products should never break. I get calls/emails all the time about how their 5 year old computers hard drive (Mac or PC) has died and they lost all their data. Hard Drives Fail. Always have a 2 backups

Another expectation is that WordPress Themes work Exactly like you want out of the box. This is SO not the case. A lot of calls I get go like so:

I bought this theme. It doesn’t work. It’s broken. It sucks. YADA, YADA, YADA

Is this the fault of the theme, sometimes. Is  this the fault of the user, sometimes. But the likely answer is that you expected it to look just like the demo with no work required on your part.

Final words:

Courtesy David Chartier - Flickr

You do not need to lower your expectation but you need to learn that technology always requires input from you for it to do what you expect it to do.