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Admin
This happened to me doing a temping admin job a few years ago. I got faxed a copy of a spreadsheet and had to type it up in a new spreadsheet.... When I asked why they didn't just email me the .xls, I was met with blank looks. Turns out, half the company was running Windows 3.1, half Windows 95 and their IT guys couldn't work out how to set up an internal email system that consistently worked. This was in 2001. I lasted two days in that job.
Admin
Its usually less of a bother to let them do it their way. Don't push your luck, at least you could see what they wanted.
Admin
I realize you're young, and the world seems clear easy to understand. That you burn with the need to mark your place on this earth. But, I hope, one day you will realize the world is more than black and white. That the world is full of colors, and grays. That all is not as simple as your youthful arrogance lead you to believe.
And on that day, how ever far away it may be, I hope you remember these four simple words: GIYF.
Admin
Hmm I'm willing to bet gluing together a mock up took them 1/10 the time it would have taken them to figure out how to do it in HTML/word/whatever (there paying someone to do that!)
Admin
Not exactly the same, but closely related.
When our users need to communicate changes, they take a screenshot with this old screenshot tool, print it, markup changes by pen on the print-out, scan the print-out in which generates an image file, then generate a PDF or Word DOC from it and then email it to me (or other developers).
Yeah - you should see what that looks like!
Needless to say, our team lead is pushing for a replacement of this old screenshot tool that lets the users take a screenshot and then oh-my-gosh actually markup changes within the tool. Then they could click a button and it would email the image to whomever they wanted. Simply crazy :)
Admin
For creative work, using software can put the person into a logical thought process and impede the flow of ideas. We've all heard of authors who prefer to two-finger it on a manual typewriter, or even scratch their words with a fountain pen.
Admin
I would hate to see how you reverted to a previous revision.
Admin
Funny...I was just reading about Rube Goldberg devices.
Admin
I've been known to use "Paper Visio" once in a while for quick and easy development, or those times when I really really don't want ot look at a monitor.
I guess the WTF is that I then scan the results into the computer and work on them digitally.
Admin
Admin
Well, i can assure you that this kind of thing really does happen more often than you could think. We did receive on multiple occasion, hand-annotated print of website pages on our fax machine. Well until i made a little comment on the methodology ...
Admin
You gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen You've got whiteout all over your screen You think your Commodore 64 is really neato? What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito? You're using a 286 don't make me laugh Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half? You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette You're the biggest joke on the Internet
Your database is a disaster You're waxing your modem, trying to make it go faster Hey fella, I bet you're still livin' in you parents' cellar Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar And posting "Me too!" like some brain-dead AOL-er I should do the world a favour and cap you like Old Yeller You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller
(with mad props to Weird Al' Yankovic)
Admin
I, personally, have seen "it's not working" for powered off equipment thing, twice. One time was a usual clueless user story. The other time, the person who reported that the powered off equipment wasn't working was actually a software developer. Although she had a good reason. We usually left her computer on all the time; two weeks before, her monitor had died; the week before, the replacement monitor had died; and we had powered off all non-essential equipment in her area over the weekend because of a chiller outage. So she got in, found her second replacement monitor "wasn't working," and assumed it was dead again. When I came over and turned it on, we all had a good laugh.
My wife personally saw someone pick up the mouse when she asked the lady to "raise the mouse". Of course, this was in a university context in the mid-1990s; we got through a fair number of people who really were seeing a computer for the first time.
In terms of the cut+paste thing, I don't see this as a problem at all. A fair number of people have pointed out that this is an accepted way to do mock-ups, but it's not a WTF for even a more fundamental reason: the people doing this are clients, who by definition are relatively non-tech-savvy people hiring technical people to do technical work. Non-technical clients aren't supposed to use technical tools. That's why they hire us.
Admin
Where is the WTF? Non-technical person wants to mark-up a web page and present some change idea: print, cut, and paste seems exactly the right solution. If they could make the changes, why would they hire someone else?
Admin
I wonder why they dont take a photo of the screen, print out the photo, cut the lines out, arrange them on a wooden table, take a photo of it and finally, OCR it.
Admin
[ Same company whose paper based version control required me to print 600 pages of source code to check-in. ]
You have got to be kidding.
Admin
What about copy and paste?
Admin
Makes sense. While I'm no stranger to OSS mathematical tools (I have Maxima and Octave mapped to keyboard hotkeys), for day-to-day work I very often use a circular pocket-sized slide rule. For quick-and-dirty EE calculations it's a godsend. That one even has an LCRf nomogram on the back. It's actually faster to use than the keyboard, while you do the analog prototyping. Heck, even for mechanical engineering back-of-the-enevelope style calculations, it's good too. A circular rule is easier to use than a linear sliding one, because it naturally wraps around as your decimal digit shifts around.
For a laugh, I did a final once using that rule, no calculator (in a graduate level course). Worked just fine, and I didn't have to worry about batteries. My "usual" calculator would be the old Handspring Visor running easycalc, but I did run out of batteries once - it had spent the night in the car, it was waaay below freezing, and the batteries lasted about 30 minutes into the final. The slide rule won't leave you stranded. It's EMP resistant, too! ;]
I'm 30 and I publicly admit to being in love with a slide rule. I'll better don my Nomex suit right now.
Cheers!
Admin
Hey, if it works, it works. They're hiring you to make the cosmetic changes, not to work with this computer device thing themselves.
Doing it for code IS a real wtf. How old is CVS? Oh yes, first public release in 1986. Not to mention SCCS and RCS.
Admin
This is the real WTF, using word to send pictures... nice, does any one remember JPG, PNG and all that or have Word taken over the computer industry as the new operating system... since Vista sucks.
What: jumentum?
Admin
I remember when we sent a Senior Analyst (a Senior Analyst, no less) to Belgium to install our system. Which promptly broke and dumped core.
"Wurrr, it doesn't work," said John (for it was he) over the phone. "What do I do?" John was a small, bearded, idiot.
I was in a playful mood that morning, or perhaps I'd ingested too many of the wrong kind of drugs, but my immediate suggestion was "Why don't you fax us a print-out of the core-dump?"
Two hundred pages of gibberish, and half an hour later, we took pity on John and suggested that he take the client to lunch at one of Ostend's finest chips'n'mayo establishments; while we worked out a way to have the salesman explain that we'd just delivered a totally fucked-up release, accompanied by a clueless cretin who was supposedly the technical expert on the product.
Admin
Hopefully I'm not the only one who remembers "back in the day" when ALL cut/paste was done with scissors & glue -- that's where the desktop metaphor got the name!
<mutter grumble> Kids, these days...! ;)
Admin
I don't see all that much of a problem doing design mock-ups in this way if it works for them. After all, they're the clients, not the experts at computer graphics.
It would be nice if they'd email any large amounts of copy, though, so it wouldn't have to be re-typed.
Admin
Actually, paper prototyping can be faster than using MS paint or anything. I know from experience, that with some scissors and glue you can slap together a pretty decent mock-up of what you want in about 60 seconds.
Sure, it looks more professional to use a digital editor (and I'd use one at any corporate office I didn't want to be made a laughing-stock of), but it does have a legitimate use of being faster.
Admin
my boss does the same thing...he refuses to learn how to do it on the comupter
Admin
A friend of mine bought hundreds of sheets of LetraSet in the early seventies, from a retiring graphic artist.
Instead of rubbing the letters to put them on the page, the artist had CUT OUT every letter and pasted it on to the paper. I would not have believed this if my friend had not showed me around 100 sheets with little windowpane holes.