Minor rant about work and my computer illiterate clients

The BBQ Pit
1

clears throat

I tend to reserve my ranting for real life, and have had little practice at online ranting, so feel free to let your eyes glaze over if this one gets a little boring. But it’s been a long day, and I need to let off steam.

I work for the Development department of a company, putting together bids for new work. At the moment I’m struggling to complete a client questionnaire in the hope of getting shortlisted for a project my boss is keen on.

So why am I struggling? Is it the questions? No. They are, quite literally the same for every questionnaire we complete. Is it that I don’t know the answers? Nope. That’s never stopped me. If I don’t know the answers I just make them up.

What is turning the completion of this simple 28 page questionnaire into a familiar nightmare is that once again the client has felt the need to handover the entire development of this cute and innocent little Word file to SOMEONE WHO HAS NO SODDING IDEA HOW TO USE MICROSOFT WORD!!!

Is this compulsory? The pain of completing every single miserable mind-numbingly dull questionnaire that I receive is only ever lifted by the sheer joy of discovering how many stupid things can be done in a single Word document. And today’s is in a class of it’s own.

Need a heading for that section? No, don’t type it in Word, import it from that Excel file you have open. And do make sure you somehow manage to link it to that innocent looking box that has appeared at the bottom of the page. Nothing like an intermittently vanishing heading to liven up my day.

Need a table? Don’t use the TABLE command, make your own table. Draw in the borders using the freehand line tool. Doesn’t it look beautiful. What? How are the recipients meant to fill in the table? No, you wouldn’t know the answer to that one, would you?

And while you’re on a roll with that line drawing tool, why don’t you draw nice lines after every question for us to write our answers on? Yes, I know we won’t be able to, but it’s the thought that counts.

Oh look, we’ve got a smart one here. Decided to use the automatic Heading formats. But only for every third heading. It’s much more fun to manually number the ones in between. And while we’re on the subject, make sure you only use the Tab command on alternate lines. In between, just use the space bar to indent text, it’s so much more trouble for me to undo.

You know that troupe of chimpanzees that are off somewhere randomly typing up Shakespeare? Well the chimps that failed to make the grade are currently being employed by British government organisations typing up questionnaires. Blindfold. They get extra peanuts for putting frames round lines of text then removing the border colour so that the frames can’t be spotted. Bananas are awarded for the intermittent bolding of occasional words with no obvious logic, or for - my current favourite - having a left-margin so wide it take up half the page, then putting the text in a text box (borders hidden of course) and moving the text back to where you would want the margin to be. Further rations can be earned for a well-hidden section break, or individually entering a line of full-stops when you want a dotted line on the page.

Does no-one proof read these documents or care about the impression they give? And just to prove it’s not only the public sector that suffer from brainfade when faced with a Microsoft product - to the private company who sent me a questionnaire the other day:

  • no matter how many times you deny it, you’re Ghent office is in Belgium. Not Germany or Holland.
  • Oh - and that’s not how you spell your company’s name.

Excuse me while I go and lie down. I’m only on page 11. Another 17 pages of reconstructing this document to go. And no-one’s feeding me peanuts for a job well done.

2

I feel for you, I really do. I’ve never had to deal with anything that big, but we have some terrible documents we have to fill out that were done in Word. Even worse, we’ve had surveys to fill out that were online and supposedly created by companies who make their living with that kind of stuff. They’re so bad that it makes me realize how important a good web developer really is (I’m not one, btw, but my husband is).

3

I once had the joy of spiffing up a VB application for a hospital. They recently converted it from a DOS app to Windows. But they wanted it to look just like DOS. :confused:

There were some fields that neede to be filled in, and others that just displayed information. For the display ones, did they use labels? Or make the textboxes read only? Of course not. That would make sense, and we don’t need any of that. They used disabled textboxes, which of course had grey text.

But they wanted those fields to look different from the read/write fields. So they changed the back color to grey.

Grey text on a grey background? Yeah, it’s a problem. The solution? Require every user to change his or her Windows color scheme so that disabled text is black.

:wally

4

If it makes you feel any better Halfpint, after all your work you probably won’t win the bid anyway…

::D&R::

Or you could look at this way…the time you spend fixing it to look better might be the edge you need to win the bid.

5

tdn

You’ve captured the logic perfectly. Logic? Did I just mention logic?

:smiley:
<hijacks own thread>

And can I just point out to my colleague who has spent the last two hours moaning that her Word document won’t print . . . that seven page document of yours has 23 pictures in it. The smallest is 18MB, the largest picture is 34MB.

That may just be why it’s a bit slow. As I told you on the previous three occasions.

:smack:

6

When I did phone support, I often got this call:

Clueless Asshat: “I have a million-dollar proposal due in ten minutes, and Word ate my document! I need it back now! It’s 40 pages long and I’ve been working on it for 6 hours. You have to get it back for me!”

Me: “OK, what did you save it as?”

CAH: “‘Save’? What is this ‘Save’”?