Randy Yates wrote:
Laurence Payne writes:

A good shopkeeper listens politely to what the customer WANTS, then
tries to discover what he NEEDS. I wouldn't complain about getting
good service :-)

In this case you failed to discover what this customer needed, so was
it indeed good service? David's comment was appropriate, in my
opinion.

There are indeed those of us who are more-or-less clueless, but there
are also those who are not. Part of the expertise in responding on
usenet is making this determination. I have also had the unpleasant
experience of wading through or attempting to answer responses that
provided a solution I wasn't looking for...

Yet we've all had the opposite experience; where the OP proposes a solution
without properly explaining the problem, or fixates on a solution which will
not work, or fixates on a solution which 'might' work...given information
which he has not yet provided.

Numerous wasted posts down the line, we discover the problem was totally
different than the OP presumed.

jak