[ILUG] OT: Of Tesco Trolleys and Linux (was: anti-spam thing...)

[Matthew French]

> Of course, having just had a conversation with a girl at customer service
in a
> Tesco where they've had to block up the punt slots on their dual currency
> trolley locks because the great unwashed were putting 1 Euro coins into
the
> clearly marked 1 punt slots, I suppose there's no end to the stupidity of
> Joe Sixpack - and some people would like to dumb down my favourite OS
enough
> for this person to use it - I surely hope not.

This example reminds me of one of my early lessons in IT humility: a long
long time ago, I was doing tech support for a University and we had this one
machine with two 5.25 floppy drives. For some reason people kept on putting
their floppies between the drives, instead of into the top one.

So every time I would moan about the stupidity of the great unwashed [or
masters students as they were known at the time :)], whip out my screwdriver
and and extricate the floppy.

Then one day I sat down at the same PC with a floppy and, for absolutely no
logical reason and being fully aware of the difference between a gap and a
floppy drive, I put the floppy into the gap [Mind the Gap?!?]. After that I
was not so quick to sneer and paid more attention to seemingly stupid
problems.

I haven't tried a Euro in a Tesco trolley yet, but looking at the coins a
EUR1.00 coin is roughly the same thickness as an IEP1.00, but about half the
diameter. I can imagine it being very easy for anyone to take out a shiny
new Euro coin and, whilst temporarily distracted by a pretty
guy/gal/ram/ewe/lost penguin/wandering itanium cluster, stick the coin in
the wrong slot. At which point it is too late to recover from the mistake.

To bring this vaguely on topic:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23245.html

Just because we have been programming shell scripts for the past ten years
does not mean that everyone else will appreciate the benefits of regular
expressions. In the same way that some users get confused by the trolley
interface, they can do something silly with their configuration. It is our
job to make the chance of that as small as possible, rather than scorning
people who only want to accomplish a task. Although people who show no
interest in understanding the application and moan when it does not do what
they want *should* be scorned, but that is another debate entirely.

- Matthew




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