>Often times they try to convert their need into computer talk and tell us what they think we should do, instead of telling us the problem and letting us come up with the solution.

I actually have a client where I have sort of the opposite problem right now. I'm working on an application that talks to some electronics hardware and one of the guys I'm dealing with keeps telling me that to solve a problem, I need to send this sequence of commands to the unit. But that isn't really helpful because more often, what I actually need to do is read the data that's already been returned from the unit and stored in tables, not send new commands. I don't think I've gotten through to him yet. (And it's really funny because communicating with the hardware is slow, so he's constantly trying to find ways to have less communication with the thing.)

Tamar