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Five Things Your IT Guy Wants You to Know
1. You aren’t an auto-mechanic, either…
… but you know how to drive your car. That’s why we call you “users”: because you use the computer and that doesn’t mean you have to be a computer expert. Some things you should know how to do: find an application that isn’t on your desktop, create a shortcut, know the difference between copying files and moving files, clear jammed paper from a printer. It isn’t our job to teach you to use Excel. If you don’t know how vlookup works, consult Google. We don’t use excel, except once a year to calculate 1.5% of $21.
2. There’s nothing you can break…
… that we can’t fix. So try new things. We promise you, if you break it, we can fix it. And if we can’t fix it, it probably wasn’t you that broke it. So click around on stuff. Figure out how it works. We like users who know what they are doing, and are willing to figure stuff out on their own. In fact, this is why we often don’t get back to you on simple stuff. Because we know you’ll get tired of waiting, and just figure it out.
3. We don’t care…
… what your brother-in-law (or insert any family member here) said about how to fix whatever problem it is that you have. We also don’t care how they did it at the last place you worked. They have their network, and we have ours. And while there may be some things similar, there are always a great many differences. So just sit back, check Facebook on your phone, and you’ll be back to checking Facebook and Ricochet on your work computer in no time.
4. Which brings me to…
Yes, we actually have the time to sit and monitor what you do on the Internet. Just kidding. We don’t. And it isn’t our web filter. It is management’s web filter. Nine times out of ten — no strike that: ten times out of ten — when your boss brings you a report saying you spend too much time on Facebook at work, it’s because your boss thinks you spend too much time on Facebook at work. And he asked us for a report. Which we hate, because it takes time away from us checking Face… um … checking for updated drivers for “the server”.
5. The problem with 5 is …
… there are actually a million other things we want you to know. Like, the fact that disk space isn’t cheap. That backups are tough. That the network isn’t slow. That, if we had all the money in the world, we’d buy you whatever computer you think you need but we don’t, and that you don’t get administrative rights to your computer because — if you did — you’d install software that infects your computer, causing more work for us …
Published in Culture
“Something’s wrong with my MS Word. I sent a file to someone and they couldn’t open it on their phone.”
No they were there. Saw it myself when I was programming then. Not sure that secret is the right word. More like the documentation for the APIs were known to Microsoft and a select group of their vendors.
Nope, this one was true to. Happened about the same time that they stole Stacker software. It was part of the Microsoft, Lotus, Novell wars.
BTW – MSDOS was actually QDOS that gates sold to IBM before he owned the rights to it. Ballsey move but a little unethical.
Spin, How many things in your life have you lived that are not documented? What he is saying is true. These things did happen. I do not necessary agree that his conclusion is correct but what happened, happened.
You have to understand that these things were common knowledge in the IT community then. But this was before the internet and cheap disk space so most of this stuff you may be able to find at your library on microfiche or a newspaper archive but a link on the internet, not really.
Lots of things are “common knowledge” that just ain’t true.
Apropos of nothing: I never understood why Lotus and Wordperfect didn’t get together to create a kick-butt office suite. One office suite with 1-2-3 for the spreadsheet, Lotus Notes for email, Wordperfect for word processing, Paradox for the database, and Freelance Graphics for presentations, coulda been a contender.
Nobody, but nobody, was interested in using Quattro for their spreadsheet and/or Wordpro for their word processor.
Probably intransigence from Corel is to blame…
I bet if I wanted to, I could find at least 5 credible articles corroborating what you and jetstream are saying. I found at least that many that contradicted what you are saying.
Spin, sure you can. But I lived it and know the truth of it. I don’t know Jetstream but it sound like he did the same. You can disbelieve us, call us lairs even. But it happen. I troubleshot the issues, saw the code (reversed engineered), worked with the APIs trying to figure them out. Watched the implications of what happen as they unfolded. At the time I owned a software company specializing in retail point of sale software for SMBs so I was and am still in the industry. Even met with Gates, Jobs, Kahn, etc a couple of times back in the day. Everybody knew what was happening, many did not like it but most thought it was just part of the industry. It was their software and they could write it the way they liked, just like we could do the same.
BTW-I disagree with Jetstream on why MS made it big. It had little to do with dirty tricks and more to do about licensing and open architectures.
Understand: I’m not saying it did or did not happen. I asked for documentation that it did, because I wanted to understand it better. I was just entering the IT field when all of this happened. But saying to me “Believe me or don’t, I don’t care”, that’s just not the Ricochet way.
Well this stuff is not exactly documented very well. Most people that do ethically questionable stuff that may or may not be illegal tend to minimize their paper trails as much as they can. It proceeded the internet, so even that questionable light could not be shined on it. Mostly if you try to find documentation on it now you will find a bunch of fanboys on either side yelling stuff with little or no actual proof. There was not a lot of legal aspects to it since the industry was so new and what was being done was happening for the first time so there really were no actual law, rules, guidelines, for this type of behavior.
To be fair this phenomenon also occurs when upgrading to a new version of the same software, not just between different products. Especially if they make a large number of UI changes.