Shark Tank: Time well spent

God, this is both scary and

God, this is both scary and depressing!

When this type of thing happened once and I got fired wrongly I figured it was a bizarre abberation. Strangely, no one was interested in hearing my astounding story of injustice at the hands of incompetents.

When it happened again, I thought I was excedingly unlucky. Still, no one was interested on the amazing coincidence.

When it happened a third time, I thought I was cursed or something.

But from reading these stories, I can see that this horror goes on all the time, everywhere.

Just ONE example, or I'll be typing all night:

In the MFM/RLL days, I was called to an old people's community organization. Their disk needed a low-level format. The nice old lady said "Thank GOD you're here!", begged me to fix her computer, and told me of all the sad, terible things that would happen to the old people if the data were lost.

Being new, I was accompanied by the other tech from this sleazy outfit. He was happy I recognized that the drive needed a low-level.

I got out my personal copy of steve gibson's spinrite. "This reads the sector before reformatting it, and when it formats, it writes the data back too so they don't loose any!" I said, wide-eyed and innocent.

The other tech had never heard of nondestructive low-level formatting. "But won't that take twice as long?" I looked at the old lady wringing her hands hopefully on the other side of the room. She couldn't hear us.

"It will take 20 minutes instead of 10. But we'll save their data". I assumed it was a no-brainer.

"No!" he said. "This is a service contract". "So what?", I asked. "So we already have their money. Just format their drive and we can bill that 10 minutes at the next job. We're not a chairity organization".

I felt like it was the twilight zone. I thought about what to say. "No, I can't do that" I said, and continued the format. It took 22 minutes.

The system was back up and the old lady was ecstatic. "What's your name, young man?", she asked". "David". "God bless you, David!", she said.

We almost got into a fistfight over it in the parking lot, but agreed to take it to the company president.

He agreed with the other tech and fired me. There was no other reason, just this.

===

I have lots of stories like that. Sadly, so do the rest of us.

===[ david

We have plenty of users like

We have plenty of users like that -- in fact, we have entire departments that "don't have time" for anything, especially training. If it were my company (which it isn't, darn it), training would not be optional, unless the user can prove proficiency which precludes the need for training.

I have a user like that, as

I have a user like that, as I'm sure many of you do. She is of course the one that complains the most about everything and anything; then when you show up to help her she says "I don't have TIME for you to FIX it NOW!" The killer was when I said "There's an easy way to keep that from happening, here let me show you how it's done" and got the obligatory "I don't have TIME for you to show me that!"

Yes. But you have TIME to do it wrong and watch it crash and burn again and again. Ooooookay.

Yup, can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em...

It seems like she provided

It seems like she provided the business case to take to the partners to require the training. She wasted 20 hours doing work that could not be charged to anything but overhead, requiring her to take the 2 hour class would have reduced her time spent on overhead and allowed her time to work on things that could possibly have been client specific (and therefore billable).

Most businesses would have taken that business case. If you can present things in terms of a cost benefit analysis, you either convince yourself that what you are trying to do is a bad idea for the company or it is a fairly easy sale to the business because you are presenting it in terms they understand.

Of course, you could embed

Of course, you could embed the Excel spreadsheet as an object in a Word document, thereby giving her the appearance of working just with Word.

Anonymous: WORD wasn't

Anonymous: WORD wasn't opening and altering the spreadsheet. It was importing the spreadsheet into Word. The head secretary then overwrote the original xls file with a word file using an xls extension she forced on it.

She could have overwritten it with a regular word document too if she'd wanted. The only way to prevent it would have been to not allow users to specify their own extensions.

Personally, I'd like to keep the ability to specify the entire file name rather than dumbing down the application more to match users.

Yes, there's user

Yes, there's user incompetence and unwillingness to learn; what else is new? But there's also bad software design here. WORD should not be able to alter the contents of a spreadsheet unless it triggers the spreadsheet to recalculate anything altered and then saves it in the spreadsheet format. Anything else is just asking for this sort of trouble. It's another case of MicroBill trying to be all things to all people, at which he's failed for decades, now.

I might have worked with

I might have worked with that woman in the past.

Back in 1999, at a former job, she tried to get me fired for incompetence, on the grounds that her computer kept crashing.

Her rationale was that the computers at her husband's office never crashed, therefore I must not know what I was doing as an MIS Director.

I explained that her husband's office ran Windows NT, and her desktop was running Windows 98.

She cut me off and said "It's all Windows, and there's no difference, you're just incompetent, and no amount of bulls****ing will get you out of it." She then leaned forward and said very slowly: "Ha. Ha. Ha."

I convinced the company owner to let me get a license for and install Windows NT.

While the crashes stopped, I was still referred to as incompetent. There were no NT drivers for the sound card in her computer, and of course, this was MY fault.

I think this Excel/Word

I think this Excel/Word problem exists in many offices. My old manager was a fond user of Word. In our testing project, we had lot of Word documents with individual test cases for each functionality of the application. Managing them was a nightmare as we were never sure how many test cases we have, how many are pending to be executed, how many passed or failed, etc. There were lot of duplicate test cases as no one knew what each individual Word document contained. I took an initiative and converted all test cases from Word documents into an MS Access database so that we can have more control over it and also export it to an Oracle repository later. After spending 16 days on this activity (after my regular office hours) I demonstrated my new database to my manager. She saw the demo for 2 hours and said that I can't use tools that I downloaded from the web for official use. She said that our company has only purchased Word and we should not be using Access. I tried hard to convince her that all machines already have Access, but to no avail. My hard work flopped because of the love towards Word as my manager only knows how to use Word and nothing else. She hates Excel and Access and any new stuff

Reminds me of the time back

Reminds me of the time back in the early days of Win95 when I found my mother opening Word and using the File>Open to launch executable files (it sounds stupid, but for some reason, it worked in that version of Office).
She was trying hard, but there is just a certain type of user who knows just enough to be really dangerous...