I have the incredible privilege of making my living working with Microsoft products* for forty hours a week, give or take the occasional few minutes I spend under my desk with a gun in my mouth wishing hot wet death on Bill Gates.
The deeper one gets into the inner workings of Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook—my three main tools—the more frustrated and bewildered one gets, and the clearer it becomes that, absent any real competition, Microsoft doesn’t give a rolling fuck what its users really need. “Suck it, what else you gonna use?” It’s Bill Gates’s world: we just live in it.
I’m the king of the workaround, and can usually find a way to get any program to accomplish what I need accomplished, so when I come across the occasional situation when a function that seems basic and necessary is simply impossible, I’m probably reaching that horrified conclusion after a long process of trial, error, and escalating frustration.
Sometimes, when I’ve reached that point, I make one last desperate attempt to find a workaround: I come here, to this bottomless pit of information, and ask if anyone else out there has found such a workaround. Needless to say, propelled as I often am in such a moment by the momentum of frustration, my General Question sometimes carries a tone.
Add to this the fact that I’ve somehow become a very important part of Manhattan’s tiny little world: he’s as obsessed with me as a lover and, flattering though that may be, it’s a bit disturbing to me (think Clarice Starling at the end of Silence of the Lambs). He’s like the little bully in second grade who’s so fearfully in love with the nice, talented, intelligent little boy in the next row that he feels he must deny it to the world, and defensively (and childishly) and publicly torments the nice, talented, intelligent little boy in the next row. When I first came to SDMB, I spent all my time in GQ. I now stay mostly away, not wanting to responsible for the accelerated beating of Manhattan’s gristly little heart, and the possible consequent loss to all of us here at the Straight Dope.
So anyway.
My POINT is that just because I’m forced to work with Microsoft products, it’s unreasonable (though not unGatesian) to REQUIRE me to be polite when discussing them. So be it. All of my future Microsoft questions—god forbid there should be any more—will be duly Pit posted.
I hereby welcome ** Dooku** into this thread, to discuss his/her work—and mine—and try to understand the Microsoft culture that thinks it’s BETTER to alienate its users than to consider their ACTUAL PRACTICAL needs in the design of their products.
[sup]*I’ve accumulated more than 4,000 hours with PowerPoint, and maybe 2,000 with Word.[/sup]