Helping other people use technology requires humility: you have to want to help them realize *their* goals, which may be totally unlike your own. You have to listen carefully and take care not to make assumptions about how they "should" use tech. You may be a tech expert, but *they* are experts on *themselves*.

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This is a balancing act, because it's possible to be *too* deferential to someone else's needs. As much as other people know about how they want technology to *work*, if you're their guide, you have to help them understand how technology will *fail*.

For example, using the same memorable, short password for all your services *works* well, but it fails *horribly*.

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When one of those passwords leak, identity thieves can take over all of your friend's accounts. They may think, "Oh, no one would bother with my account, I've got nothing of value," so you have to help them understand how opportunistic attacks work.

Yes, they might never be individually targeted, but they might be targeted *collectively*, say, to have their social media accounts hijacked to spread malware to their contacts.

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Paying attention to how things work without thinking about how they fail is a recipe for disaster. It's the reasoning that has people plow their savings into speculative assets that are going up and up, without any theory of when that bubble might pop and leave them ruined.

It's hard to learn about failure without experiencing it, so those of us who have lived through failures have a duty to help the people we care about understand those calamities without living through them themselves.

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That's why, for two decades, I've always bought my hardware with an eye to how it *fails* every bit as much as how it *works*. Back when I was a Mac user - and supporting hundreds of other Mac users - I bought two Powerbooks at a time.

I knew from hard experience that Applecare service depots were completely unpredictable and that once you mailed off your computer for service, it might disappear into the organization's bowels for weeks or even (in one memorable case), months.

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I knew that I would eventually break my laptop, and so I kept a second one in sync with it through regular system-to-system transfers. When my primary system died, I'd wipe it (if I could!) and return it to Apple and switch to the backup and hope the main system came back to me before I broke the backup system.

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This wasn't just expensive - it was very technologically challenging. The proliferation of DRM and other "anti-piracy" measures on the Mac increasingly caused key processes to fail if you simply copied a dead system's drive into a good one.

Then, in 2006, I switched operating systems to Ubuntu, a user-centric, easy-to-use flavor of GNU/Linux.

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Ubuntu was originally developed with the idea that its users would include Sub-Saharan African classrooms, where network access was spotty and where technical experts might be far from users.

To fulfill this design requirement, the Ubuntu team focused themselves on working well, but also failing gracefully, with the idea that users might have to troubleshoot their own technological problems.

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One advantage of Ubuntu: it would run on lots of different hardware, including IBM's Thinkpads. Thinkpads were rugged, but even more importantly, Thinkpad owners could opt into a far more reliable service regime that Applecare.

For about $150/year, IBM offered a next-day, on-site, worldwide hardware replacement warranty. That meant that if your laptop broke, IBM would dispatch a technician with parts to wherever you were, anywhere in the world, and fix your computer, within a day or so.

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