[patio11]

My customers also remain committed to the "blue Googles."

There are blue Googles and green Googles. The blue Googles and green Googles can't talk to each other. This is why you need to use only your school website number to sign into BCC when you're on the blue Googles but you should use your AOL website number to sign in when you're on the green Googles.

Technical support in non-technical markets often involves very interesting forensic reconstruction of customer mental models.

[pavel_lishin]

Blue Googles? http://www.amazon.com/Webkinz-HM333-Blue-Googles/dp/B0022BFV...

Seriously though, "forensic reconstruction of customer mental models" sounds like a blog post I'd love reading, especially if it were an ongoing series.

[nailer]

Could you elaborate? are these googles browsers, or something else? what cant they talk to each other? Thanks.

[patio11]

A Google is an Internet. There are multiple, physically distinct Internets, because if one uses search as the only navigation, the blue Google (IE on work PC, hone page Bing) does not let you see all the sites on the green Google (home PC, home page google.com). This makes sense because clearly work made it so you could only pick the educational Googles.

There is a BCC site on both Googles, but because Googles are physically separate, they must be copies of each other, like how Word at home is a copy of Word at school. If you save docs in one, they don't show up at the other. So you need one login for the blue Google BCC and one for the green Google BCC. Duh. You use your website number as a login name. It is like a telephone number: it lets you contact people, except instead of ringing their phone your message shows up on their website.

[tomjen3]

A guess (until Patric comes back): the blue Googles is the internet explorer icon, which is used to start Google (really go Googles website). The green Googles is what ever the hell people use to sign into AOL with, they can't talk to each other because the computers are behind different nats.

I am hoping that the "website number" is not the http adresse, but the number they have to dial to connect to the internet (yes dial like it was 1995 and you could still go on a plane with a bottle of water) because it would be disturbing if the teachers called "www.bingocardcreater.com" a "website number".

[rmc]

I would guess "website number" does mean the web address. My 50 year old landlady gave me her "email number".

I'd also saw Patrick is talking about 2 different browsers on the same computer. "don't talk to each other" probably means they don't share cookies. If the user logs into one website with one browser, then the other browser doesn't become aware of each other. Clearly the 2 browsers don't talk to each other.

[chc]

I think "website number" must be a username or password of some kind. You wouldn't use a different address to get to BCC depending on your ISP.