I just need to vent. This post is a rant and can be safely ignored.

When working with Microsoft Office products, I am very particular about a lot of aspects on my computer: ranging from toolbars to screen real-estate to defaulting fonts and styles for use to a lot of other tiny tiny aspects. Going further: with emails in Outlook, I use categories (which are akin to labels in Gmail) to manage things and have defined a lot of my custom views on the basis of which folder is being viewed.

At [company] today, I had an issue with another Microsoft product (which is mentioned under the same banner as MS Office) that I had recently installed. I called the IT support desk and this guy remotely took control of my computer.

Of course, most support methodologies today revolve around trial-and-error -- or often error-and-error -- and the first repair step in his manual called for him to reset all settings for MS Office. And being the nice unassuming self-proclaimed expert, he never bothered to check with me whether such a reset should be performed or not; he just went ahead and clicked [OK].

Every ... single ... setting ... wiped ... out. When I remonstrated with him, his initial response was, "I have done the same thing to many VIPs. None of them complained!".

You *$#^$#@!*%ing *##hole -- none of them bother to make their MS Office applications as efficient as I do. Use your @!*%ing brains. The least you could have done is frigging let me know what you are doing before you plunged in.

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Anyway, Kipling once said:
[lots of stuff]
If you can ... watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools
[lots of other stuff]
Then ... you will be a man, my son.

I guess here I have no option other than to be that man. It will take the best part of 3 days before I have everything set up as before - but I guess I have to do what I have to do.

[ This post ] from deponti set in place a chain of thoughts that led to this story that I read a long time ago. It is one of those stories that has had a deep impact into the way I think. A condensed version of the story is given below.

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There was this zoo that had three gorillas in a cage. Let's call these gorillas A, B and C.

( Read more... )

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The one aspect I carry from this story is to always question conventions. Query the reasons for rules. Of course, if I see reason, there would be no further argument -- but if there is no such convincing reason, then I would be inclined to strongly question the very existence of said rule.