That is the Right Question!

The internet is a fantastic tool, if used wisely and carefully. Where else can you have access to thousands if not millions of sources for millions of topics? Type any question on Google and you're right there with responses from all around the world for whatever question you might have. For example, I typed "question mark" in Google and it came back with 90 million responses to that simple question, "question mark". I've used Google and the internet faithfully now for years. It seems like every day I'm on Google looking up information on car wash topics, camping, trucks, cars, auctions, mechanical solutions, religious topics, you name it. Every single day. What a tremendous, and free, source for our daily lives.

I do, at times, run in to a problem. With the internet, as with most situations, I don't know the right question to ask for a particular problem. You remember the movie IRobot? Remember in one of those scenes where the head actor, don't know the name, maybe I ought to Google it, asks the dead scientist some questions through some sort of hologram thingy? The dead scientist talks back but then the head actor asks another question and the response from the dead guy is something like "that's not the right question", or something like that. In other words, he wasn't asking the right question for the problems that they were facing. Later on in the movie the dead scientist responds to another question with "that is the right question".

That problem of asking Google the right question seems to flare up with me at times when I'm trying to find those answers. For example, just today I was wondering about a certain noise that a truck was making while stopped at a stop light. It seems that this truck makes this noise some times when I stop and then start again. It's kind of a clunky, thumpy, rumpy noise and the feel is about the same. So how do you ask Google that question? Do you type "hey, I was sitting at the light the other day and when I started up again...? That's a tough question and how do you describe it in five or ten words and get the responses you want? It would take some time to sort through 90 million reponses to get to the meat of the matter.

Well, after putting in some combination of words into Google I finally came up with what I was looking for. What were the words? Well I typed "duramax, thump, stopped, start". With those words came back several reponses that explained the problem. Come to find out Chevrolet has a recal on that truck because of that particular thumping noise coming from the drive line. Google gave me forums and reponses and answers where all they talked about was people describing exactly what I was facing with my truck. The answers were right there and the solution really is quite simple.

I had to ask the right question. And coming up with that question is what took the time.