This is an excerpt from the blog of
Meyer Fire on 4/29/2020 and is re-shared here with permission, please give their site a visit:
Earlier this week I read a very basic question on a sprinkler design
forum. Some say there are no bad questions. Those hypothetical people
may never have been in a Facebook Group.
The question clearly showed the lack of understanding on the part of the person asking the question.
You
can imagine what happened next – the keyboard warriors went to battle.
They had fun blasting the novice into the internet oblivion.
And this happens
all the time.
It
doesn’t have to be Facebook. It happens on Facebook for Businesses
(also known as LinkedIn), email forums, Reddit, and other online
technical forums.
It is also not limited to the digisphere. A bad
question in a conference room or in the field gets chided at best or
embarrassingly criticized at worst.
Did we all not start somewhere with nothing?
I’m
not a second generation Fire Protection Engineer, but my guess is those
that are third and fourth generation practitioners don’t come out of
the womb spelling
escutcheon correctly.
I'm still not 100% convinced I spelled it right just now.
We
all started knowing literally nothing. We each are on our own journey
learning piece by piece and at different paces that never really ends.
The best experts that have spent three decades in the industry are still
always trying to improve.
Is there harm in asking a dumb
question? Yes, but it’s not the embarrassment in the moment or the
obvious display of misunderstanding. It’s the discouragement to ask the
next question.
When Average Jim (I have to use
Average Jim because
Average Joe hits a little too close to home for me) actually seeks an
answer to a basic question and gets lambasted – you know what he’s not
going to do? He’s not going to ask the next five questions that he also
needs answers on.
On the very first morning of my very
first internship, I asked a bad one. I was maybe 15 minutes into that
first day when the site project manager asked me to make copies of a
handful of documents. I asked if the staples had to come out before
making copies.
Dumb question? Yeah. Do commercial copiers
appreciate hard metal through their sensitive little feeder claws? No.
And had I ever used a commercial copier before? No.
If I hadn’t asked, would I have been the dufus that destroyed a commercial copier 15 minutes into his first internship?
Yeah brah, that would have been moi. I heard so much crap about asking that question, but I was glad I did. I also never had to ask it again.
Eventually my questions got slightly more sophisticated and a little better, but I did start at nothing.
I’m not going to change human behavior. I can’t help people act online like they would in a face to face conversation.
What I can do is provide a better avenue for those people who
don’t want to be vilified but
do need answers to their question.
With
nearly a couple decades of internet usage we know now that it isn’t
Vegas - what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet. Like
forever.
It’s getting more and more difficult to ask a question
that isn’t tagged to your name, your company, or your reputation. Your
forum question you wrote in 2007 when you didn’t know anything on
pre-action systems? Yeah it’s probably still searchable.
Goodness
knows I’d rather not have my kids go post-by-post from what I put on
Facebook during high school. Same would go for a client seeing questions
I would have had early in my career.
So what can I do about
it now? Create a quality avenue for the question - any question -
whether it’s expert-level or at square one - and
not tie a personal reputation to it.
If you haven’t checked it out, the
Daily Forum is a place for a single, filtered,
anonymous question
each day. There are experts there from a wide variety of backgrounds
and locations that have far more knowledge than I could hope to gain.
Experts
from across the globe, from AHJs to Designers to Researches to
Installers to Engineers. Last I checked we were approaching nearly 3,000
subscribers just to those questions.
If you have a "dumb"
question, if you don’t want to ask your boss, if you need an outside
opinion, and you don’t want your identity tied to something it? Send us
your question
here. Also consider bookmarking the page so you can send in that question the next time you're stumped.
The link toward the bottom of this email “Have a fire protection question?” is always there for exactly that same reason.
Chances
are, if you have an interest or can’t find an answer, someone else is
looking for it too. When you ask, we all learn. And that’s exactly what
this site is all about.
