Over-thinking and the lack of Internet help

[plonq]

I had a very simple task that I wanted to achieve this morning; I needed to set up Syncsort to filter records based on a packed decimal value. Having spent the past 90 minutes surfing various Q&A sites, and reading documentation on the vendor's site, and trying one solution after another, I finally decided to try something obvious:

"INCLUDE COND=(85,4,PD,EQ,4905752)"

None of the help sites suggested because it didn't involve converting the value to ASCII or HEX or EBCDIC before seeing if it was the value I wanted. All the solutions waxed on about signed digits, and hex conversion, and leading zeros and the like. All they really needed to say was, "Ensure you set the value type to PD for Packed Decimal, and don't put the filter value in quotes because it's a number, not text."

The Internet is a great resource, and it is often a great help in my work, but it can be frustrating at times to see that it is full of people who over-think this stuff as badly as I do.

Comments

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

The second most frustrating part is when you go searching for a trick or an answer to a coding issue, and you find a post that describes, in its title, EXACTLY the question you're looking for, and every answer is answering a completely different question or part of the question...

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Yes! I run up against that one all the time as well. Another one is when the question is exactly what I need to know, but the answer is so un-related that it sounds like the poster didn't even read the question.

Worse is when the first person replies with something like, "Thanks! That worked perfectly."

Sometimes I wonder if those folks are just messing with us.