OS is up to his keister in projects with deadlines, bills to pay, and hoping that next week's schedule doesn't get blown to Kingdom Come by another volcanic outburst, cuz' he's expecting someone from London to get some work done that he spent weeks getting scheduled. He also just had a conversation with an apologetic FedEx agent who explained that service to the UK is still intermittent, and no he can't say when tomorrow's package of documents will actually arrive in England's Green And Pleasant Land.
Can't control volcanoes, so nothing to do but keep a sense of humor and think of Plan B.
Other stuff, humans do control. Great parts of the past two days have been spent with various Apple products, supposedly the Latest and Greatest, that simply will not function as advertised. Everything is very elegant, stylish, 'cool', etc. It just that, upon following all the instructions, not much works well.
He's an old middle-aged guy, admittedly, but he has one thing to say before trying to actually get some work done: Computers and software are tools. Think of hammers, screwdrivers, picks, shovels.
Tools.
We use tools to get stuff done. We don't care how elegant they are. All we care about is 'Hammer drives nail straight into beam.', 'Pick moves dirt, to be removed by shovel.' When the tool works, then it does what we paid for it to do. When it doesn't, we're not in the mood to be told by a 22-year-old kid with tats and piercings that 'We just don't get it'.
On the contrary, we do get 'it'. This hammer won't drive the nail, and we paid for both.
These things are tools. Before adding elegance, think function. Hammers drive nails.
Please.
No comments:
Post a Comment