By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, Microsoft, Apple, Uncategorized on July 26, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Week 1 in new job. It appears that I was over-hasty in last week’s blog, thinking I couldn’t turn the Dell computer on. What had happened was I had entered a zone of anti-time.
This is a region between normal dimensional time and space, encountered by the likes of Who, Picard, Janeway and Kirk all of whom have the option re-calibrate their forward arrays to emit tachyon anti-anti-time particles. In the office environment this is not feasible as this lecture may show and especially so when dealing with a Dell.
In my efforts to turn the Dell on, one of the buttons I pressed had started the machine but it took so long before anything happened, I had given up. Being a long-time Mac user, even ancient Mac IIs, circa 1989, played a start-up chime when power was switched on. The boot process was lengthy but one knew something was about to happen, and could watch a progression of icons across the screen as control panels and system resources sprang into being.
Working with Windows XP is, on the whole, an enormous chunk of anti-time for a Mac user. The delays between clicking on something and the result is not necessarily part of this. Instead it is one’s continual attempts to get rid of the gross ugliness of the interface. Something so stupidly awkward, clunky and downright obscene to ones eyes could only have been designed by a committee. They then sold it to a business world which has no idea of elegance and how it enhances productivity. Let’s ignore for now the number of times Windows XP crashes, freezes or programs just disappear for no apparent reason. One second they are there in front of you, and the next you are dumped back to the desktop. If this is how businesses use computers, no wonder the world is in a mess.
Of course there are many other elements of anti-time common to most offices and especially local government. Self-employment for 20+ years makes you efficient. Start the day at 8am, attend to emails, do any correspondence or marketing and start work. By 2pm a day’s tasks are nearly completed, the rest of the afternoon to 6pm makes up an extra half day of productivity.
This is not what happens in offices around the world. Employees waste an hour or more getting to and from work, start around 9am by making coffee and having a chat about last night’s TV. Meetings, both formal and informal, are two of the biggest regions of anti-time and are usually a complete waste. Throughout the day, anti-time slips into your dimensional reality as colleagues interrupt work with offers of drinks, photos of the baby, jokes or requests for help getting the photocopier to work. Productive time is an illusion which stretches through lunch and on to going home time. Flexi-time enhances this illusion further as the gap between start and finish becomes less tangible.
On the other hand, regular pay mean no more waiting 30, 60, 90 or 120 days for payment, or filling in VAT returns, end of year accounts and dealing with cold-callers.
Nice work now I’ve got it but I pine for my Mac every second I spend with Windows and I especially miss working from my own office. I’m looking into the latter but it seems inevitable that the rest of my working life is destined to be ruined by Microsoft. A company who have held the world to ransom for too long with such poor quality software.
Rated: 84% (5 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Bb - July 29, 2009 on 10:59 pm
That’s nothing!
I’ve just spent the last 54 minutes mucking around on the internet while I put off the 6 minutes of work I need to do before going home.
However, this is not because I am a time-waster; I just don’t want to go to the gym.
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