Is saying "I dont know" acceptable?

[korifugi]

The first rule of Edugeek... You do not talk about Edugeek. To mere mortals this place cannot be known to exist.

 

The second rule of Edugeek is you DO NOT TA..... wait a minute....

 

The second rule of Edugeek is No Smoking.

[sted]

I think - though I could be wrong - what the OP might mean is "Is it OK for 'I don't know' to be both your first and last answer?"

 

It's often my first, but not always my last. Sometimes it's both though.

 

its more the looks/vibe some staff give when you say this (or same phrase approximating it) its as if they are about to say well what use are you then. Again id rather honestly say I don't know and ask/google it and try and find out but it seems more and more people don't like/ cant accept this as an answer. the other side is I got a confusing email (someone used the term forward relating to email and apparently that wasnt what they meant) and I sent a brief explanation saying clutter (office 365 quasi spam filter) generally puts things there people have repeatedly not read/deleted and what I got back was a request to try again with bullet points

[Ephelyon]

Ah, I get you.

 

Yes, I'm very familiar with that one. I think mainly it's a user education thing. The medicine analogy proves its worth yet again here - no doctor knows everything. The GPs are generalists who know a little about a lot of things (though they often have a specialist area too) along with - I'd almost say most importantly - who and where to refer to for more specialist help. Specialists, on the other hand, have a deep knowledge of one or more areas but wouldn't typically engage in others.

 

I understand the dilemma for our colleagues too. All they really know is that if they have a problem with X they go to Person/Team Y; they sort it and the world is once again warm and fuzzy... so when X is broken, they don't know and you don't know, they themselves are at a loss and so you get "that look". It's logical that their frustration would be directed at you, albeit not very convenient...

 

Then again, the model that a lot of schools use for tech support is arguably broken. Either they unwittingly assemble a small team of generalists, who can cover a lot of areas to a basic degree but would struggle when things reach a certain complexity, or they take in people who would consider themselves specialists in professional terms (hence my earlier rant about "I'm a sysadmin for $deity's sake") and then expect them to know about other areas too - or, of course, there's just the one poor s*d who has to do the lot, which is even worse.

 

Yes, this can happen in other organisations too, but if I'm brutally honest, at literally every other kind of workplace I've been into for contract work lately (and that's been mounting up lately) I can explain the whole generalist/specialist thing through the medicine analogy and they'll get it, whereas in schools it's far more likely that I'll get a blank look.

 

But we soldier on. Build up a good set of analogies and use them if you're challenged or things go further to SLT level. If the going gets tougher at that level, I'd say most of us would probably be in a position to justify it based on a lack of training too...

[Andrew_C]

personally id rather say I don't know than bluff it (depending on exactly what it is) id also rather say no to a request being possible look it up and be proved wrong than say yes and be proved wrong

I'd much rather be told that you don't know, rather than the ubiquitous "turn it off and on again" or the rather more irritating "we'll take it away and fix it" which translated to "flatten and re-build; putting about 1/2 the software back on, and trashing your profile in the process. Oh, were there two disks in there? I wonder which one the OS is on..."

[witch]

"Give me the details and I will look into that for you"

 

That's what I say. And if I cannot sort out the answer, I will go back to the person and say that I have feelers out there (edugeek, etc) and am waiting for some sort of answer but that it is proving a difficult thing to sort out.

 

I will eventually admit that I cannot fix the issue but I always make it clear that I am still looking for a solution

[mthomas08]

as an aside to the Is using Google a failure thread

 

personally id rather say I don't know than bluff it (depending on exactly what it is) id also rather say no to a request being possible look it up and be proved wrong than say yes and be proved wrong

 

Being afraid of saying "I don't know" is similar to fear of making mistakes and possibly covering up?

 

I'm not afraid at telling anyone I don't know, just as much as I am not afraid of admitting my mistakes. You are not an adult if you can't admit to making mistakes or admitting that you don't know everything. I like to be honest to those above, they see that and know they will get honesty out of me. I will openly tell them the pro's of things I don't like and not just the con's.

 

At the end of the day, "A man who hasn't made any mistakes, hasn't made much of anything". It's impossible to know everything especially in our jobs where technology is changing and new technology is being released all the time.

[witch]

I'm not afraid to say it but for the fact that some teachers would view that as a failure on my part. Also, I like them to know that I am not giving up and shrugging their problem off with an "I don't know".

[gshaw]

There's no way anyone could ever know every single product and possible usage scenario so a "don't know" moment is inevitable. Even more so with the rapid rate of change that comes in with cloud services these days. As said above it's how you handle the situation and follow-up with the query (and finding a solution) that's important.

 

Back in the early days of my career I did try and bluff a question on an interview and soon got shot down Fortunately the rest of the questions went well and I still got offered the job but made a mental note for the future to be honest and hold my hands up in the future in a similar scenario. If your other skills are good then the people who matter will appreciate your honesty, that's my take on it anyway.