Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

The OLPC Support Gang gets tons of abuse. We’re the people who answer all of the emails that come into help@laptop. We’re all unpaid, and just want to help people. When we can’t solve a person’s problem, or if the XO doesn’t go to all of their Flash websites, or isn’t able to do everything that a $2000 Dell can, we get flak for it.

There are tons of examples of angry customers (which I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t can’t post). But I think that this message to a customer from one of the Support Gang is exactly what G1G1 recipients should understand, something they never understood, or decided to ignore:

Always remember rule number one of the XO. You are not the customer. The
XO is great fun, and stretching it’s capabilities towards our first
world tasks can be entertaining (believe me, I’ve gone further than
most), but when it comes down to it, it just won’t be happy trying to do
a lot of things that you’d think that it should be able to do with no
problems. If in the end, you are disappointed that it can’t do this,
that, or the other thing that a more ‘normal’ box can, remember, it does
a lot of things for its real audience that nothing else can. And that’s
what it’s about.

Disclosure: I don’t answer tickets nearly as much as 95% of the group. When I say We, I’m not nearly as cool as some.

That’s a very valid question. Where did your Give One half of the G1G1 go?

I’m part of a volunteer group at OLPC called the Support-Gang. We answer the great majority of user support questions that are sent to Help@laptop.org, Support@laptop.org, the OLPC Forum and on the IRC channel. Because of this I sometimes get some juicy information. This bit, I get to share :)

Walter Bender, president of OLPC had this to say:

Subject: Re: Cambodia & Haiti
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:10:21 -0500
From: Walter Bender <XXXXX@laptop.org>

We are going to be hashing this out to a large degree on Monday. But I
do know that we are already preparing 10K machines for Mongolia, 1K each
for Haiti, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Cambodia at the factory
now. The initial machines in all cases, as far as I know, are directed
to programs with government involvement, but not necessarily government
run.

-walter

(Did you hear the news that Canada shipments are starting up finally!!)

This is great news!

Also confirmed in above email is that XO Shipments to Canada are on their way!!!

Lastly, if you would be interested in joining the Support Team it’s really not that hard, and we provide a little bit of training to get you started. At last count there are about 50! of us and the number is steadily growing. These are a great bunch of people so far (Kate, the Yale mathematician, is flat out amazing). If you’re interested in helping out, drop a line to Adam Holt (holt at laptop dot org) and he will ask for a short phone conversation.