I’ve thought about my friendly,  faithful, dependable old SE and............how painfully slow it is. But what one should really think about is actual productivity. 

Once again I find myself in a business environment surrounded by blue skinned IBMs. Such a cruel world it is. At least this time I have a few cousins, a IIsi is our network server, another si is in the hands of a neophyte (has only WordPerfect on it and a stripped naked, no frills System 7 (how utterly b-o-r-i-n-g......) and a boss man with an old IIx and who hasn’t the foggiest idea of what to do with it except hire grad students to create programs on it. The rest are PS-2’s, a couple of 386’s, and a new wave of light speed 486’s. Boy, did I think I was going to get my doors blown off. tsk, tsk. Not to worry. There is a god after all. Either that or I’m in big time league with the devil. One other piece of background. The office standard spreadsheet is Excel (oh yes, yes, yes) and the word processor is WordPerfect (what else would one expect in such an office configuration). Of the DOS users, the clerical staff can almost use WordPerfect, and only the computer manager and the graduate student computer specialist are able to use Excel. The rest? Well......... you see it’s like this. Excel bombs the PS-2’s, too memory intensive. And then there’s windows and network memory usage as well. These folks get their applications via the network, no local hard drives. And so they struggle along. They upgrade here and there and the secretaries whine about all the new sh_ _ they gotta learn, because of it, and the new applications they are expected to use. So they mostly struggle along with WordPerfect and its column formatting in lieu of spreadsheets. Now I’m gittin’ to the good part so bear with me folks.

The envy in their eyes is well worth the poor pay, just to watch them grovel as this little ole SE pumps out dynamite looking documents of every description without missing a beat. “You want it to look like what? Just a minute. ** How’s that?” (Note: ** stands for wham bang). But, the other day I almost lost my patience. (No, I didn’t do anything radical like buy a new Mac). You see it was a day that I was running a little late in preparing for my new space planning committee meeting and I wanted a committee sign-in sheet with a list of member names running down the left hand column, with meeting days and times in the headings across the top and a grid of boxes to check denoting attendance. Seemed simple enough. Especially for those super speedy machines out there, and I would be free to attend to other matters, ..............or so I thought. After all I had 3 hours lead time! I knew it was started right away, for as I discussed the intricacies of the task, the head secretary began gearing up (which translated means getting the screen turned on, aimed, and focused, or whatever these IBMers do). Two hours and 45 minutes later I returned to the scene of the crime to see what the hold up in printing was. To my horror I found the head secretary bent intently over the keyboard while an engineer stood behind her, manual in hand, vocalizing “now press ,, control key : the alt key ,,/<C: character setting \\15, font size......bla, bla, bla”. I couldn’t believe my eyes! They were working in column one and had weird looking paragraph returns in all the boxes. I couldn’t help myself. I cried out “Big Blue what have you done to us, and you too, you S.O.B. Bill Gates. Then, near tears, I returned to my desk with 10 minutes ‘til meeting time, churned out the desired form in Excel, and made the meeting with 5 minutes to spare. 

REST ASSURED YOU POKY OLD SE, THEM THAR’ SUPERCHARGED 486’S HAVEN’T EVEN CAUGHT UP TO YOU EXHAUST FUMES YET! Any way, so much for speed versus productivity. Oh, I almost forgot the punch line! A week later a clerk-typist, still working on the DOS version, told me she was having trouble getting the dates and times to fit into the column widths without reformatting the entire sheet. I smiled politely and told her to keep up the good work with this radical new form.