Getting to the point of a question

 Does anyone know if Parsloes Park has a ranger? This is the question that has triggered this post.

We can make some assumptions and remove some 'layers'.

OK, so of course someone knows is Parsloes Park has a ranger, or not, so the answer is yes. I think, though, that if the answer were given as yes, the reader might take it to be the answer to the implied question: Does Parsloes Park have a ranger? Coincidentally, this is the next layer down nearer to the hidden question.

Superficially, the answer to this question would seem to be either yes or no, but beneath the surface there could be more detail. Perhaps the asker wants to know if Parsloes Park has its own dedicated ranger. This seems likely has the question implies that the asker knows that there are park rangers which makes me wonder whether they think these rangers ranging includes Parsloes Park, and why they would think it might not.

Anyway, perhaps the answer is 'yes' but it it seems very likely there's a follow up question. Something like 'I need contact details for the ranger covering Parsloes Park'. This is the level at which I answered, giving a phone number and email address for the park rangers team. They would be able to answer the original question and the first level decoded question.

I seems most likely that the asker, though, wants to find out something about Parsloes Park, or report a problem, but they have abstracted this into the first question.

In the days when I worked for BT I remember a phone call in which I was asked 'is that the London Telephone Exchange?' It has exercised me ever since. Perhaps the caller really thought London had only one telephone exchange, or perhaps in her mind the structure/organisation of BT was expressible in terms of telephone exchanges. Either way she wasn't asking the question she actually wanted the answer to. [I could go off on  tangent here about telephone salutations, what they mean, if anything, and whether anyone listens to them]. I don't remember what her question was, but it wasn't related to my location at the time of answering the call.

I once put up a web page about my local railway station with information that wasn't anywhere else, or wasn't assembled in any other convenient place. Someone messaged me via it to ask about train tickets. This relates to the persistent idea that you buy train tickets from a railway station, in particular the one the train departs from, plus assuming a web page about a railway station must be the work of the railway station (despite the independence statement).

[A friend of mine doesn't like buying rail tickets on line, and was heading off to Paddington to buy one. I asked her why she didn't just go to the nearest station and he asked whether they would be able to sell the ticket she wanted. I pointed out that she could (theoretically) buy the ticket she wanted on her phone there and then: Ticket office staff would have at least as much access.]

What I'm getting at here is that people make an association between a service/question/department and a location. Despite large organisations having call centres, where the staff are there to answer questions, its as if some people work on the basis that if you want to ask a question about a, say, a swimming pool, you contact the swimming pool department and ask them. The information you want to find out then gets displaced by questions related to contacting the swimming pool department, even though the call centre may know the answer to your query (and they are there to stop calls about going through to service departments that could be answered by a general purpose info department).

Nowadays of course there's another issue, insofar as people in 'call centres' are very likely to be working remotely. So questions like 'is Fred there?' become problematic based on what 'there' refers to. Answers like 'no he isn't' (this is my house) or 'I don't know where Fred is' are not likely to be taken well, which is a pity because they are not primary questions anyway. What were you going to ask Fred if you were to speak to him and can you ask me instead? [or simply 'can I help?].

With internet searching there's less much less phoning up for information going on, but it still does. My 'trigger question' was asked on the internet.