To us, the hunt is on for people who earn some income, (it can be very much a sideline,) by answering our questions about anything, but particularly about looking after our health and technology. With modern technology, such people can be anywhere in the world. Do any of our readers know of any?
We are SO annoyed and SO frustrated that we don’t really know of many or any. Our work and personal lives could be so much better if we did. So often we feel held back by not knowing answers to questions we have that such people could provide, almost certainly, so easily.
One of the things that interests us is that with a lot of our questions, the people we may ask can hardly believe that we don’t already know the answer ourselves, to them it’s so obvious. Peter Drucker the famous management writer used to say that the things we know best we think everyone knows – in other words Don Bradman thought everyone knew how to bat, couldn’t believe that they didn’t! And this makes anyone who is like that not very good at answering questions. To be able to answer questions well, people being asked questions have to be able to fully empathise with people, to fully see things from the point of view of those asking the questions.
Our idea is that such people have an ordinary email address which we can use to seek answers to our questions, and that when we do, we get an answer to our first question and details of their charge for providing it, which we don’t have to pay, but if and when we seek an answer to a second question, we have to pay for the first question before they answer the second.
On the face of it, JustAnswer.com may meet any needs we might have for such people, but there seem to be two problems with them – although to be fair, we haven’t tried to use them for some time. Some of our readers may have different ideas.
Firstly, as a first step to getting any answers from JustAnswer, we have to pay five dollars up front, and it seems that the only way you can pay this five dollars is with a credit card, and stories abound on the internet of them using any credit card details that have been provided to take money to which they’re not entitled, and once they’ve taken money in this way, there’s no way to get it back.
Secondly, when we seek an answer, there’s no way in which we can choose the person who answers it, JustAnswer decides that for us. Whereas, if we’ve used JustAnswer to find a person for us in the past, we may want to use them again or we may want to not use them again, but, as we understand it, with JustAnswer we’ve got no control over this.
To us, it’s incredibly easy for anyone who has an area of expertise to start off – (1) they probably need a small blog or a website that describes their area of expertise and perhaps provide the bits and pieces of information for which they would have to choose a name, (2) would certainly have to have an ordinary email address, both of which school children can set up these days, and which cost virtually cost nothing to set up and maintain – and they’re in business, waiting for people to ask questions, which may or may not happen.
(We’ve recently become aware of Nameboy.com, which is supposed to help in finding the best name or names for blogs and websites – we haven’t tried it ourselves.)
To us, the extent to which such people exist, the world will become a very different place.
To, it’s ironical that the best people and almost the only people we know of like this are the people at Tiger Technologies – and answering peoples’ questions is not even their business, it’s hosting blogs and website and so on. One of our readers says that whenever he has a technology question the first thing he does is use their support email to ask it – not that they can always answers his questions, but recently he got an answer from them which enabled him to solve a problem in 2 minutes which hadn’t been solved in 25 minutes with one of the geniuses??? at an Apple Genius Bar, which he says is typical. And, of course, as someone who uses them for hosting, getting answers from them costs him nothing.
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