It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.

But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
Which is kinda what you said.

To be fair, techs don’t usually talk to the people who can read, so they’re only ever going to see idiots. There are competent people in the world, they’ll just never need your help, so you don’t see them.

Last time I called tech support, it was for a Dell, and I interrupted their speech to tell them I already looked up the diagnostic. They asked which numbers were lit on the error panel to confirm I had the right diagnostic, and passed me directly to who I needed to talk to. I only called tech support because the cpu socket died and I was putting in a warranty claim, otherwise they would have never even heard from me because I could just install a new motherboard myself.

edit: speeling

At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn’t work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn’t get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I’m giving them preferential treatment.

Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.

I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.

but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.

I had a problem with my car. It felt strange while driving. Made some unusual noise. Then a bit later the motor warning light came on.

I went to the garage, told them about the warning light and what I noticed the time before, what I suspected and such. A short while after the mechanic came to me and asked for a few details, as my description “wasn’t helpful” and the repair would be much faster with more details that told them where to look etc. Turns out the guy who checked in my car only noted “a warning light is on” and nothing else of my ramblings.

So sometimes it’s also paying attention to what might be important and relaying information.

They’ll refuse to attempt to understand the problem then get mad when they get ripped off.

Wasn’t it just one turtle down there?

Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).

And FTFM. Find the fucking manual.

And perhaps TTFM. Translate the fucking manual either from broken chinese-english or the tech-lingo + missing context information which is almost every manpage on Linux, making it nearly useless for the average user unless you got hours and hours of time to understand all the adjacent concepts and commands.

Becoming increasingly rare and we are speaking on different things. You are talking about a manual that explains how to make your washing machine wash. That is important, yes, but I am talking about a manual that explains how an appliance works.

the days of a manual explaining anything like an error code are basically dead. Name one appliance manufacturer that lists anything beyond the most basic of troubleshooting (“turn it off and back on”)

Like go back and look at an appliance manual from the 70s/80s/maybe 90s and you will see a more robust explanation of what to do when things go wrong. The further back you go the more likely you will see parts numbers, circuit diagrams, or be able to order a service manual that has such information.

We expect this shit level of documentation because we live in a throwaway culture that has tolerated this pisspoor level of documentation for decades. “Oh the washer isn’t working? It’s showing an E-05 error? Guess we better just go buy a new washer” or pay the manufacturer $120 for a “service charge” to find out that code means the latch sensor died and it’s a $30 part that is a simple 5 minute job except you can’t get the part because they won’t sell it to you

You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.

is the fact that people can with effort and error figure out how to do something a reason not to make it easier for them to do?

I mean

you can in theory write multi-threaded bug-free C code – just read the docs and the specs and the source of your libs and never ever do something that seems to work but is subtly fatally incorrect

and yet we still have golang and rust and many other options to do things more safely and easily

if someone wants to use Linux but doesn’t want to memorize the Hundred Mandatory Commands and Thousand Flags lest they accidentally cat > /dev/sda, why shouldn’t there be a system for them?