Further to our previous post on this subject.
One of our hobby horses is that there seems to be a shortage of people who have the ability to answer our questions really helpfully on anything, but especially on health and welfare matters. (Or perhaps there are not the incentives for them to do it – about which more later.)
As an example, (away from the world of health and welfare,) we’ve always been Apple people, and, hopefully to help us we’ve been subscribing to daily updates from an organisation called OS X Daily, which claims to provide “News and Tips for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Everything Apple,” for at least 3 years. As, when we get them, we just file them away, we would have at least a thousand of them. Yet when we have an Apple problem, we don’t find this thousand to be of any help, as when one arises, we wouldn’t have the slightest idea which one of these thousand would provide us with the answer.
To us, it’s so obvious that there’s a need for people to whom we could email any Apple questions we have, which would result in us getting helpful answers – such people needn’t be Apple experts themselves, they could start with the information from OS X Daily. But it’s just not happening.
We would so love to always be able to get answers to our Apple questions, as well as getting help to add to our Apple skills from time to time.
Of course there are the Apple Genius bars, which have the advantage that they don’t charge anything, and they are obviously meeting a need – the one nearest to us is reputed to get more than 400 visitors a day – but to us there is a need to be able to get answers over the internet.
Even Apple doesn’t appear to have such people. Even OS X Daily doesn’t appear to have such people.
Obviously such people, if they were working independently, would need to make a living doing this i.e they would have to charge fees for thei services. Perhaps that’s the problem – perhaps they can’t.
(A word on Just Answer – www.justanswer.com – which seems to purport to provide the sort of help we’re taking about.
There seem to be at least two main problems with it.
Firstly, when you ask a question, your are referred to a so called expert – but you can send the same question ten times and be referred to 10 different “experts.” What you need to be able to do is locate experts you can get to know and trust – something which doesn’t appear to be possible through Just Answer.
Secondly, when you ask a question, you are asked to provide a deposit, and while the amount of this deposit is quite nominal, say, $5, stories abound on the internet of the details being provided in paying this deposit being used by Just Answer to get all sorts of monies to which they are not entitled.)
If any of our readers know of people like the people we’re talking about, please please please let us know about them. And if any readers decide to go into the business we’re talking about, we promise to give them any publicity and help we can.
A comment or a question? Email us at info@questionsmisc.info.