My phone chirps beside me; my colleague shifts uncomfortably; we
both know its going to be ugly. The familiar number can't be
ignored and so I make my excuses and say it won't take long - this
I know for sure.
These calls can start in any number of ways but rapidly reach
the same conclusion. The best ones start with something like
"I've opened the blog, pasted in the text from Word but how do I
insert the picture?"
Others start with the more ominous "the computer's gone funny
what do I do" or worse still "I'm in London and Desmond (he is the
Sat Nav but curiously has a female voice) has gone mad which way do
I turn - quickly the lights have changed!"
From then on the conversation goes rapidly down hill, we may be
able to progress the problem - with me desperately trying to
remember all the commands for whatever the problem is but we
usually end up with a seriously hissy fit and lots of bad language.
I have to promise to fix it later when I get home.
Now I've deployed the best technical firepower available from Mr
Gates and Mr Jobs; we have thin client hot stand-bys; SaaS, IaaS,
Remote Infrastructure Management, Cloud Computing and most other
technical wizardry you can think of.
But a curious question remains; why can't she who twists a plot
a thousand times and still untangles the threads into a
satisfactory conclusion sort out a few buttons on a machine that
always does what you tell it to?
Mr B
PS. For the curious the Sat Nav question is easily answered -
the answer is always left regardless of destination - in the hope
this minimises the chance of an accident.