Moronic questions -- Was: Take this engineer and shove it

["Scudder, Beth" <beth -dot- scudder -at- retek -dot- com>]

	John Posada [jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com] wrote:

	Only morons ask moronic question. Nothing takes the place of
	asking well thought-out questions

	> sometimes asking a moronic question and getting a somewhat 
	> decent answer is
	> what it takes to move forward on a project.  And that allows

	To which I respond:

	Oh, come on. No matter how smart a TW you are, you're probably
occasionally going to have to ask your SME a question to which they think
the answer is obvious. (It may not be obvious to anyone but an SME, which is
presumably why you're asking it, and passing the relevant information on to
the user.) And no matter how well-thought-out your question is, because of
the fact that the SME thinks it's obvious, said SME might just think of it
as a moronic question.

	Any of us who's worth their salt will research an issue before
asking the SME about it. Still, we sometimes have to ask these questions. I
usually am aware that the SME thinks the answer is obvious when I go to ask
the question. To forestall the SME telling me that my question is dumb
(moronic, whatever), I frequently preface my question with "I know the
answer to this is probably obvious to you, and the question might seem dumb,
but I've looked and can't find the relevant information...."

	Yes, research first. Don't pester your SME with questions you can
resolve in other ways. But personally, I prefer the thought, "There are no
stupid questions, only stupid answers." 

	Feeling testy today,

	--Beth Scudder