County Meeting

Whatchoo said,
Matt Alexander <m@netpro.to>:

> I think that the county (and most businesses) would be more open to Linux
> and Free Software if they were confident in their employees' abilities
> with such software. But so many people focus on just Microsoft products
> because that's the dominant platform, which of course perpetuates more
> reliance on Microsoft (see the above problem with IE).


That's what I've been thinking about since yesterday.

I'm my previous life as a lowly temp (ask me why I left Kansas . . .) I worked with lots of everday desktop users who would never press a button they hadn't been told to press, and lived in fear of someone rearranging their desktop icons. Really. I'm not kidding. During lunch one day, I had to fill in for a receptionist who had about thirty icons scattered all over her desktop. I rearranged them (thinking that I was helping), and after lunch, she called the network admin and asked frantically if he had a "program" that would fix her desktop.

I thought, "Hey, she's a receptionist -- give her a break," but I had the same experience when I had to fill in for a gal who created customized owners manuals for pneumatic equipment using AutoCAD, Pagemaker, etc. I moved her icons (they were also a huge mess), and she told the admin that she was sure the custodian had been getting on her computer at night and messing it up. Her supervisor, who has worked for that company in varying capacities for thirty years, freaked when I had to use his computer to burn presentation CD's for a sales meeting, and when he tried to log in, my username was already in the box. He had to ask for help to "fix it."

(I won't even get into the number of desktop users at Koch Industries who are allowed to use their kitty-cat's name as a password.)

And my sister, who is otherwise a fairly intelligent person, says that something as simple as the term "operating system" sounds like the grownups in the Peanuts cartoons ("mwomp, mwomp-mwomp") to her.

These are the people who strike fear into the heart of anyone trying to migrate their desktops. Can you imagine what these people would do if they saw a "K" where "Start" should be?

-Michelle (the gal in the corner with penguin earrings)