Stephen Robbins here.

Welcome to Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

A technology author wrote in,

How do I handle incompetent people?

They ask simple questions they could answer themselves.

I get calls and emails from coworkers and readers.

I want to be polite, but telling someone how to

click the mouse on an okay button is a waste of my time. I answer one question, and they bombard me

with more. Is this just the price of fame, or is there something I can do? Signed, don't want to be

a cranky tech author. Hey, cranky, oh gosh, I've had this problem, too.

At my first job out of college, I was the most junior person at the company, though I was

apparently the only one who could read. People would drop by my office and ask,

how do I print a file? Rolling my eyes and sticking out my tongue would not have been good

for my career, so I had to answer.

Again and again and again.

Finally, I hit on a solution.

People would come into my office and ask the question, I'd pretend to be so busy I couldn't even turn around.

I'd just say over my shoulder, grab that yellow book on the shelf.

No, no, not that one, the other one. That's right. Now, open it to the back. There's an index there.

Have you found it? Great. Can you look up print for me? You found it? Great. There should be a page

number. Go to that page. Are you there? Great. Read that page. If you done that?

Great. What did it say? They would tell me what it said. I would then smile, turn around, look at them deeply in the eyes, and say, that sounds like a swell idea. Why not try that? I would do this as the

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