Janet, I wasn't trying to be sarcastic or hurtful to anyone. You seem to be projecting all kinds of assumptions about what Kari really wants without, to my knowledge, any facts to back it up. I have personally spent hundreds of hours answering questions on these forums and on Internet newsgroups for complete strangers. This sometimes includes my having to do additional research to answer the question, for which I have received many personal e-mails thanking me.(posted 8293 days ago)But I do not think it is legitimate for a complete novice (not really sure if this applies to Kari) to ask open-ended questions like "tell me how you do film processing" unless they have done at least some research themselves. And I would expect that a student (who unlike me, has presumably grown up with computers) would know how to do a simple search on the Internet. When I typed in "B&W film development" at www.google.com (yahoo would also work) I got back hundreds of sites that had detailed explanations on how to develop film, some with photographs. Almost all of these sites were 10 times better than the Kodak site. And there is something called a library that just might contain information for beginners. Not to mention the archive section of this forum. It is absolutely true that there are no “stupid” questions, but there are some lazy ones. Possibly the most important thing that Kari can learn from this "encounter", is not how to develop film, but how to do research.
Janet, if you have a "dumb" question (but not a completely open-ended one), many of us would be glad to help you out, because we all know that many things in photography can be very confusing and subject to matters of opinion, about which reasonable people can disagree.