There is a specialised program I use at work which crashes nearly 70% of the time when one tries to print. These crashes, of course, always occur at wildly, insanely inopportune moments, such as when a patient's discharge transportation has already arrived and you are trying to get a signature form with all his follow up instructions ready.
Everyone in the department has superstitions about how to keep the program from crashing - counting to a certain number before hitting Print, tapping the screen a certain number of times, clicking on an empty section of task bar...
I scoff. Ridiculous. Those things can't possibly have any effect on the program. Unscientific. I have found, however, that loudly singing "Yellow Submarine" works quite well.
My coworkers are not as entertained as I thought they might be.
I wonder what the aggregate impact of this sort of thing is on the overall productivity of the US economy...not just crashes, but agonizingly slow performance, awful user interfaces, etc etc. It has to be significant.
ReplyDeleteThere are way too many IT organizations that operate in a passive-aggressive manner and ithe IT managers and employees are more concerned with burnishing their resumes with the latest hot technologies than they are about providing useful service to their internal custoemrs.
People keep saying that IT is a recent innovation. Explain to me, then, how that could be when years ago, Clara Bow was "The IT Girl"?
ReplyDeleteI think it's the programs that are passive-aggressive. My husband scoffs at my notion that some programs are self-aware with free will, but it's obvious to me that the same keystrokes don't always yield the same results. Photoshop Elements gives me fits.
ReplyDeleteThe perversity of inanimate objects.