What is a DIYer?
05/2006
It is a fact (in my mind
anyway) that great DIYers have certain characteristics...
MY audience is, and will remain..
Computer literate with email skills. Best DIYers are Farmers, Ranchers, MEs, and
EEs. There are also folks that were usually in trouble at age of 5 or so, they
could never leave stuff alone, always taking it apart to look inside, some of
these guys might work an office job, but they were born with the DIYer gene.
Strange as it may seem, there are a good many Medical Doctors in the DIYer
group... why is that?
As you may have heard elsewhere, there is also a theory that left handed people
suffer from some form of brain damage, they sometimes have other traits often
referred to as ADD, ADHD, etc. I suspect that there is a far higher than normal
number of these people in our DIYer group.
It is my belief that >anyone< with the curiosity of a true DIYer can NOT ignore
the internet and the information that it provides.
For those that I overlook and ignore, my apologies, but life is too short, and I
am already old and slow and running low on energy. I will attempt to identify
folks that will take phone calls and questions, but I no longer have the time to
answer every email when it gets busy.
At 5:16 AM this morning my phone rang, it was a Virginia Farmer wanting info on
Listers, the answering machine took it after 5 rings. I tried to return the call
after 9:00am.. ring no answer.. no answering machine! Probably a nice guy, but
quite possibly never has been out of his time zone.
One more example, guy calls here and I see where the conversation takes us, 30
minutes later, he's still asking the basics, I explain that there is a good deal
of info on the utterpower.com WEBsite.. he says he'll ask his neighbor to print it
all out so he can read it.
This experience reminds me of my previous life at the phone company, about 10 or
more years ago? I was once asked to put together a training program for folks on
binary logic. Two days later I presented an excellent package providing some of
the best training I could imagine! Forrest Mims is one of the people I admire
most, and I compare all electronic training I see to his excellent books. (Bill
Rogers is in the same league) Yes! This was as good, and that's really saying
something. It was a page of links to well developed mostly .edu primer courses found free on the
internet; all in sequence; from simple gates all the way through Boolean
Algebra, and it was excellent!
The Department Head (VP) asked, "are you kidding????" you want our people
venturing out onto the World Wide Web? It was my expectation that you would
develop this course material and make it available inside the corporate
network".
Had I been more mature, or more desperate to continue my career long term, I
could have contacted these .edu sites, and attempted to buy the rights to use them
(in house).
From that very second, my whole life focus changed, I realized just how nuts
this planet is, and today I fully understand that chaos is the normal state of
business and government. A plan? Maybe, but I doubt it covers more than what
happens next week.
Back on topic (Yikes!)
Ignore non DIYers, and you will in deed miss sales, but what will it take for
you to support Non-DIYers once you sell to them? All the technical info and support is
on the WEB, or on the CD.
My focus is the DIYer described
above, I wish I had more life's energy, but I don't. Got a friend with no
computer skills, no email? Don't tell him about us.
All the best,
George B.
