The dillema of dealing with people that don’t understand
On paper, people hire me because I have expertise that they don’t, specifically with computer technologies. Same as you’d go to a doctor, mechanic, or whatever, because you have issues that are beyond your experience and you don’t have the time to devote to tracking it down on your own, or you’re a technophobe, or whatever. In practice, a few people, as a just off the cuff number I’d say about 1 in 10, are convinced that they know better than I do about something, and that I should just sit back and implement whatever poorly informed idea that they have.
Today was just one of those days. I get an email laying out a “software profile” for the machines at this office. It consists of the following-
Microsoft Outlook - Email
Internet Explorer - Web browsing
Microsoft Office - General Productivity
QuickBooks - Accounting
Let’s do this by the numbers-
Outlook- bloated crapbag that’s only useful if you’re sharing calendar items. I’ll let you guess if this office is doing that.
Internet Explorer- Jesus, really? It’s crap. It’s been crap for a long time. Firefox, or even Opera for that matter, are better in every single way.
Office- I can’t think of anything good to say about Office. Access is crap, but few offices actually use that. Well, and there’s whole “a macro could ruin your profile or Windows install”. But, with the plethora, nay, the unending tide of alternatives, why the hell would you use Office? There’s OpenOffice, Google Docs, OpenOffice derivatives from Novell and IBM. Even more if you aren’t concerned about having a single package handle all the formats.
Quickbooks- It’s total garbage, but if you do your own payroll there aren’t a lot of alternatives, at least so far as I know. Why you’d do your own payroll is sort of beyond me, but whatever. I’m not an accountant, you see, so I don’t try and make accounting policy.
Now, my problem isn’t the choices, they’re the same choices anyone who isn’t actually into computers would make, because this is the garbage they’ve been exposed to. Everything else may as well say “Supports Terrorism” on it as far as their indoctrinated selves are concerned. No, the problem is that this is supposed to be an immediate policy, and not a list of questions to me. If you hire someone for their expertise, then it only makse sense to talk out your plans with them.