>Unlikely - you underestimate the power of stupidity.

And the inability to grok.

To most people, even those who are fairly competent in very narrow areas of computing, computers as a whole are scary and intimidating, and they're afraid of making a mistake. Then there's people who don't know nearly as much as they think they do, who are even worse. I'd rather have to deal with timidity due to ignorance rather than brazenness formed from idiocy any day.

For example, my sister is reasonably computer-literate in a few narrow areas. She can do far more with MS Excel and Word than I've ever bothered to learn, and she can navigate the web reasonably well, and can find how to access a program so long as it's either in the start menu or on her desktop. But she was scared sh!tless to try to install additional RAM in her laptop, even when I offered to talk her through it over the phone, and insisted that I do it when I came down. (Took me ten seconds.) Forget trying to troubleshoot i-net problems over the phone, or talking her through configuring a dialer. So I wind up just doing things the easier way (i.e., spend fifteen minutes in front of her laptop whenever I'm in town to fix any problems she might or might not be aware of).

Then there's my grandfather, who's a WPI alumnus and worked as an electrical engineer for about fifty years. He was on the team that installed and ran the first computer ever in Wappingers Falls, NY. But modern computers are so different from what he knew that he has problems even connecting to get his email. (I had a promise forcibly extracted by my uncle that after I move to GSO, at my earliest convenience I'd drive down to my grandfather's house near Charlotte and make his life easier.)

So there'll always be a spot for tech support, and as computers get more complicated, there'll be more room.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog