, then approved or refused. You must be able to communicate your technical ideas to people who may not have a technical back- ground. Failure to accomplish this may result in a denial of your change request. Change control helps you find mistakes before they occur Change control is designed SO that any mistakes in the thought process or con- figuration process can be discovered before they are made. Usually, it only takes a couple of times of someone else finding your mistakes before you learn to be more careful. Chapter 38: Avoiding Frustration The biggest advantage of change control is that it can help you look good. If you make some change on the fly, and it causes hours or days of downtime and possibly lost revenue, what do you suppose the upper echelon of your company will think of you? Do you think you'll be the first on their list for promotion or a raise? Probably not. Now, think how management will view you if you have a reputation for always following change-control procedures, always presenting well-documented change- control requests, and always performing successful change controls. Change control is about protecting the company's interests. Like it or not, the com- pany's interests are more important to the company than your disinclination to follow change-control processes. The long and short of all this is that you should learn to love change control. If you accept it as a learning experience, and under- stand that all successful large-scale businesses employ some version of change control, you'll be happier in the long run. How Not to Be a Computer Jerk The computer industry is known for attracting a certain type of individual: the arche- typal "computer guy" who thinks he's smarter than everyone around him, and talks to people like they're idiots because they don't know what the fuser does in a laser printer. To be fair, most people in the industry are not like this-and not all of the ones who are this way are guys! What is it that makes these people the way they are, and why are they attracted 