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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Well, that's unexpected (Speedball reboot)
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2024 10:34:44 -0500
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On Sun, 3 Nov 2024 16:27:15 -0800, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

>On 11/3/2024 2:33 PM, Zaghadka wrote:
>> On Sun, 03 Nov 2024 10:39:13 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
>> Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>> 
>>> I never had such fun experiences. It was always the usual nonsense;
>>> program crashes with error (but never bother to read what the error
>>> message said), or problems caused by malware, or dead hardware.
>>> Usually the worst was when the user fucked himself (who needs
>>> c:\windows\system32 anyway?) but it was all pretty ordinary in its
>>> stupidity.
>> 
>> I think my most memorable support experience was a woman in accounting
>> (or was it HR?) who was complaining that her column of numbers, from a
>> database import, wasn't summing in Excel. I banged my head against the
>> wall for 10-15 minutes trying the usual stuff until it occured to me to
>> ask her to click the column header and check the "Format..." dialogue.
>> Sure enough, the entire column was formatted as "text." (*facepalm*)
>> 
>> YOU CAN'T SUM STRINGS.
>> 
>> To this day, I don't know if it was the import software or PEBKAC.
>> 
>> My boss said, "I never would have thought of that."
>> 
>When in doubt its PEBKAC.  That said Excel can be very difficult to use 
>sometimes.  It simply has too _much_ functionality, it can do so many 
>things that 99.9% of users would never even think of using let alone 
>actually try.  So sometimes it makes it difficult to use the simple 
>everyday functions.

It's not just that it has so much functionality, it's that Microsoft
made it so easy (comparatively) to use that even a high-school intern
can create a script that (mostly) does what it needs to. And then
those hacked-together scripts -after years of use- suddenly become
essential business logic.

    [It's sort of the business equivalent of XKCD's dependency 
     meme (https://xkcd.com/2347/) except nobody actually maintains 
     the project or even has any idea its there. And there are a
     lot more of them than the one]

Eventually, one of these scripts breaks and nobody has any idea how
the data it output was created (because nobody remembers the script,
or whose Excel spreadsheet runs it) and when you do find it, nobody
knows exactly what it's doing or why. 

And that's even before you get into the fact that waaaaay too many
business "databases" are just oversized lists in Excel...

But if you really want to bitch about tech support, I just got one
word for you. But be prepared: it's a very, very scary word.


PRINTERS.