Describe what happens, not that it is broken

The quality of the help you get depends enormously on the quality of the description you give.

The word broken carries no information. It tells whoever is listening that you are unhappy, which they had already gathered, and nothing about what is actually occurring. What helps instead is boringly concrete: what you were doing, what you expected, what happened instead, whether it happens every time or occasionally, when it started, and whether anything changed around the time it started. That is a description any competent person can work with, and it is entirely within reach of someone with no technical knowledge.

Timing and repeatability are the two most valuable things you can offer. A problem that occurs every single time is a very different creature to one that appears once a fortnight, and they are chased in completely different ways. Likewise, if the trouble began the week after the machine was dropped, or after a spill, or after a storm, that is not embarrassing detail to be minimised. It is the most useful sentence in the conversation and it may save hours.

It is worth writing this down before you make contact, because memory reorganises itself under stress and you will otherwise reconstruct the story from your frustration rather than from the events. A short written account also lets you notice patterns you had not seen: that it always happens when the machine has been on for a while, or only when something particular is running. Owners often solve their own mystery in the act of writing it out.