Remember DOS Shell?

I remember when I was probably 13, my dad (who lived on the other side of the country) sent a Tandy computer as a Christmas gift for my sister and I. Even back then I knew that Tandy was built by Radio Shack, and I already had a negative view of electronics made by them. I know that it's a good store for parts and some other things, but before they started carrying name brands, I was hesitant to accept that they made quality merchandise. So I was a little bitter. I know, I know, it was really expensive at the time, and it was a good gesture on my dad's part. Looking back on it, I'm surprised that he was capable of thinking to buy such an educational and worthwhile gift.

I don't remember much about that piece of crap computer besides how useless it was. My mom had just started taking classes in WordPerfect, so she was able to use it for that, but all I could do on it was play the DOS games like Snake (aka Worm). Eventually my mom bought a garage-built computer from a friend of the family. It was a step up, but not much better. The baud rates available in my town were abysmally slow, and you needed a faster modem for higher baud anyway.

We used Prodigy at first for access, which was okay, but still fairly useless. Then we got AOL, and I told my mom almost weekly that I didn't understand what it was for and why she was paying for the service.

With both of those computers, I remember the text on the screen and how simple it was. I remember that colors were simple, links were always all underlined, graphics were pixellated, everything was so slow-moving and looked like crap, and there was still some use for the DOS prompt. That use currently escapes me for some reason.

Flash forward fifteen years, and my first exposure to computers is a distant fading memory. Thank God. I hated those slothful things. It was always so obvious that the possibilities were there, but it was so irksome to deal with how long it was taking for them to get faster and more efficient.

When I started college in 1994, the community college I was going to still had rooms in the library with typewriters for people to use for their term papers or whatever. There was also a computer lab, but the only people who used it were the computer science students. By the time I graduated college (after taking a LOT of time off) in 2001, computers were everywhere. Every building on campus at Wayne had them, there were several labs available to all students in several different buildings. The Undergraduate Library had a section for students only and a section for the general public.

Now computers are everywhere in my life. I get up in the morning, go to the computer room in my house which currently has a Dell PC notebook (mine), a Mac G4 desktop, and an original green iMac. First thing I do is check my email, then I read the news, and if I have time, I make something or start something on Photoshop. I do this every morning. Then I get in my car to go to work and listen to CDs in a CD player that has an MP3 decoder in it, which in essence is a small computer. Then I get to work where I have to log onto two different computers and for the first few hours I need to constantly check four different email accounts between the two machines. After that I sit at my own and at all times I have Gmail, MySpace, a news website, Outlook, Windows Media Player, a web-based proof of delivery site created for my company, and at least two windows from my company's database application. At all times, all day long, I have all this going on with my computer at work.

Fifteen years ago, I may have known that it was possible, but I never thought I'd see it. I felt like I'd never get my own computer that was fast and had more than 256 MB of hard-disk space. Now the damned things are everywhere.

Do I sound like an old man complaining about 'those damned kids' yet? Maybe I am.

Okay, this is related but separate. As I noted down the page, my company was bought out last year. When this happened, the new parent company had been in the middle of creating a new web-based application for order entry. It's pretty, with blue and orange and silver and all kinds of helpful buttons and little question-mark icons that you can click for help. Just like anything else on the internet nowadays, you can take your mouse and point at something and click, and it will most likely do something, even if it's not what you want it to do. Also, just like most Windows-based apps, if a letter in a word is underlined, that means you can press 'ALT' plus that letter and access that button without clicking on it. Oh, will wonders ever cease?!? What kind of futuristic year 3000 world is this?

We take it for granted, that's what I'm trying to say. Most of us who use Windows or Office and the most recent versions of each will ever only understand or use maybe 20% of all the functions available.

This wonderful new company that I now work for has decided that it can't afford to make new software to accomodate all the competition they've been buying up. You know why they can't afford it? Because they made most of their money by sending out stuff on hard copy, but their big goal for the past year was to get 100% of our recipients online for electronic delivery via satellite. Now that so many of them are online, the higher profit margin hard copies are less and less, so there's less capital to reinvest into the company.

So what's the big new plan to accomodate all these new affiliates and their separate billing systems? Revert!

I got a preview of the data-entry application that the parent company has been using for years. I can honestly say that it is ri-goddamned-diculous. Black background, white chunky text, I felt like I was looking at a DOS screen. Oh, wait, I think I was. No, it runs on a UNIX platform, but still, it's ridiculous. This is what they are going to make us use.

I know, I'm whining about something stupid, but it's not me I'm concerned about. It's my underlings, many of whom barely knew how to use a computer when they came here. My minions will be hit the hardest because when they don't know what to do within a certain screen, they won't be able to click on a little question mark. No more cutting and pasting for big long lists of data. Hell, they won't be able to click anywhere! You know what they'll have to do? They'll have to ask me.

As it is, I already get assaulted on a semi-hourly basis by people who should know better by now. One girl has been here for two years, and she still asks me basic questions. I was in awe last week when I found out that her college degree is in network administration. Wouldn't that imply that one would know a little bit about computers, like share drives and things like that? She can't even map a network drive without being shown how! Note to self: don't ever, ever go to the University of Alabama for network administration. Good, got that out of the way.

The other twit is barely 20 years old and thinks she's 30. She's an extremely aggressive personality, always thinks she's right, blah, blah, blah. But, not an hour goes by without her apologizing to me for something whether it's being in my way when passing in the hall or for asking me yet another (stupid) question. So irritating. What is that all about? It just makes me think that her apologetic behavior is all a front so that I'll believe her when all this frothy bullshit spouts from her mouth every few minutes.

I don't hate my job, really, I don't. Is it so much to ask to have modern equipment and software, and semi-intelligent minions?