FizzBin – The Secret Handshake

I’ve just read Scott Hanselman’s post suggesting we have a ‘secret handshake’ for Tech Support; we just need to say the magic word “FizzBin” when trying to get any kind of technical support and that identifies us as knowing what we’re on about so they don’t make us jump through the hoops of “have you plugged it in?”

I’d like to throw my support behind this, I simply can’t count the number of times I’ve been trying to get some help from someone and had to battle my way through their preliminary speeches. Now I’m not saying I’m some kind of superhuman IT guru (I make mistakes and forget some blindingly obvious steps sometimes), but if I have network related problems one of the 1st things I’m gonna try is checking my IP, checking that I can ping my loopback IP, my router a web page etc, I don’t need to be hand held through opening a Command Prompt.

I suspect that anyone who’s had to deal with tech support will be behind this as well; the question is how does this become so well accepted that when I say “FizzBin” the person on the other end actually understands what’s going on and will work with me.