When I was growing up in central Indiana, children were commonly advised "Play nice" and "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
This folk wisdom is worth heeding even as adults and even when computers are involved. If something is not working right with your computer, generally the quickest way to find a fix is to try to figure out why the problem exists or to ask for help politely from people who can do something about it. That approach is more likely to work than jumping to conclusions involving blame of other people and beginning interactions with other people in anger and aggressiveness.
Thus, suppose that you expect to see your own web page at some address, but instead see a page that says that it's a test page, and that if "you've seen this page instead of the page you expected, you should send [your website tech people an] e-mail." There are lots of useful things to do in the spirit of the childhood advice that's been noted. One could do some research to find out more about pages like what one was seeing. Or one might ask the people who are supposed to run the website to investigate and fix it. Politely, of course: "I was trying to check out our city's website, but I saw a page like this instead. Could you please find out why and fix it so we see what we expect?"
Some people, though, seem to prefer to do things the hard way. Recently, a city employee saw such a page instead of the city's web page he expected. He ignored the options noted, and he fired off an e-mail to the people who made the software running his city's web pages. His very first words were
Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it??? Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!
That's more than a little belligerent for the first two sentences to put in any first communication to anyone. Certainly the triple question marks and double exclamation marks don't help it sound like "playing nice," nor does the "or else" attitude look like trying honey before vinegar.
The rest of the story involves many more displays of hot-headedness on the city employee's part. More exclamation marks, and more angry accusations and threats. The target of his misdirected quarrelsomeness was surprisingly patient despite the abuse, and ended up getting the city employee pointed in the right direction. Unfortunately, the city employee apparently took that helpfulness as vindication of his "attack first, ask why later" approach, telling his city's paper that
[he] did not regret threatening [his correspondent, Hughes,] with FBI action, since he believes that was what prompted Hughes to start treating him seriously. “After that, he called me Mr. Taylor,” he said, “And he got me the information I needed.”
Getting help despite quarrelsomeness and threats is not the same as getting help because of them. When one has problems with something related to computers, the same advice we got for other problems when we were young (which for some of us was when computers still used magnetic doughnuts on teensy thread-like crossed wires ) still applies: stick to the facts, don't jump to conclusions, be polite, ask for help, and try honey before vinegar. Technology can be frustrating; but just because there's a computer involved doesn't mean that people skills aren't still important.
