> Another piece of reality is that sometimes people don't know how/what to look for in search engines, or they're so overwhelmed with work they don't have the time/patience to look for it, and they need the solution to be placed in front of them.
A lot of these are failures of workplaces/managers/whatever, in my opinion. Hell, a bunch of them are specifically that we've decided everybody has to be their own secretary, because computers, but nobody gives much thought to empowering workers with better tools and training that really focus on their needs for that specific role we've decided they must fulfill in addition to their actual job.
A whole lot of the ones I've heard could be rephrased as "I wish my company had a secretary for every five or ten of us, to do these couple of tasks that we all hate, find distracting, and are kinda bad at since it's only a small part of our jobs, all of which leads to actual problems X, Y and Z, wasting time & materials and pissing me off besides, all of which would go away if we had a secretary who could focus on this stuff".
> Those scenarios you mention could be venting off in their free time when they have the time to ruminate and think about their pains.
Oh, I hope I didn't give the impression I get, like, mad when this happens. I mostly just think it's funny, and illustrative of how very much one must take that kind of input with a large grain of salt. It is sometimes kinda sad, mostly for the reasons above.