One evening during the last week, my wife and I were out with a friend at a seaside cafe. It was a pleasant evening with a gentle breeze and a mild drizzle. Just the sort of evening to enjoy a cuppa. At some point the conversation drifted to work. This friend is a support executive at a call center in India, catering to AOL customers based in the UK. She recounted a recent conversation with a caller:

I thought my friend was kidding, but she wasn’t.

At the time we all laughed. Sometime later however, I thought about that incident in a more serious frame of mind. I’ve been in the technology arena for a while now and I occasionally speak, write, etc. Its always nice to present to an audience who are part of the IT community. They know where I am coming from (more or less), understand the challenges (even if its conceptually, as in the case of unfamiliar domains) and therefore are able to appreciate the information I’m sharing. Addressing a newbie is different.

I’m glad that I’ve never shied away from catering to the absolute or the relative newcomer. In fact I think that there’s an altogether different kind of satisfaction in seeing the “aha” happening as some little wonder of technology is suddenly made visible to the audience.

I’ve been lazy, but I think that I will search out a couple of my old newbie articles and put them up here soon…

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