Or, translated, "At least ATTEMPT to look it up yourself before pestering someone else about it, eh?"
I don't know about anyone else out there, but I find it incredibly annoying when some cretin bugs me with a stupid question. Before I sound like an arrogant asshole, let me clarify my meaning here.
We all learn things, and I certainly have brought my share of new or otherwise unlearned people up to speed. In fact, I like teaching people. Problem is, I have little patience for people who can't be bothered to remember something, and view other people as just being there to remember things for them.
These people are the origin of RTFM. The things people ask, it's not like I made them up myself. I didn't write UNIX, nor X, nor C++. I just read the damn textbooks and man pages. Nowadays, the web falls under this umbrella as well. If, after looking around in a good faith effort to find what I needed, I couldn't, I would ask someone.
For everyone out there wondering what a good faith effort ought to be, let me relate this information: there was a study done (and when I can find it, I will reference it here :) about something called flow. Flow is the state of mind you get into when you are cranking something out. Be it C++ code or the chapter of your latest novel, once you have gotten into the flow, the words and code flow like water. Hence the name.
Now anyone that knows me knows that I hate the telephone. Before I worked at home, I used to forward it to voice mail and unplug it. I just felt the need to. Once I heard of flow, I understood why.
You see, once you are interrupted when you are in the flow of things, it takes 15 minutes to get back into it. Minimum. This means that if you are going to interrupt someone to ask what the option is for the ls command that shows the little '/' after the directory name, you aren't only taking up one minute of their time. You are taking up sixteen minutes of their time. If they're lucky.
Now if you think about it, a workday, in theory, is only eight hours long. This means that only 32 interruptions wastes your entire day. And that's if you're good at getting into the flow. If it takes you 20 minutes to get into flow, only 24 interruptions wastes the entire day. And don't forget that the interruptions will take time as well.
So next time you go to ask someone a question, think about if you have really spent long enough looking for the answer, or if you are just asking because you don't want to spend the time looking yourself.
Sometime later I'll put in some info on searching for answers.
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