Java is Down...

My wife and I both work in IT oriented fields... We tend to field many 'help' calls from our customers and co-workers. It amazes me how much people have come to rely on internet technology and how much we have learned as a culture about IT tech and lingo.

Case in point: My wife calls and asks for some help drafting an email response to a question she has received from someone. The person asking for help claims that they can't connect to 'Java' and wants to know if 'Java' is down?

At first we both chuckled at this.. But the more I thought of it, the more it occurred to me that the person asking the question was pretty savvy for a non-techie. They knew their browser was looking for a 'Java' resource but couldn't find/load it. Since everything tends to be 'connected' to the internet these days, their first step in diagnosing their problem was to determine if the resource on the internet was down...

Humorous, yes. But at least they were tryin'. That's not too bad in my opinion.