Understanding technology

We watched a programme Friday called the IT crowd on Channel 4 and as Ian has been a life-long IT geek he found it quite amusing. In the show the office manager had been voted employee of the month and had to do a speech to the shareholders. As she was pretty incompetent she asked the IT geeks to write something for her and as they disliked her they decided to set her up. They convinced her that the Internet was something portable and gave her a black box with a flashing light on it to present as 'the Internet' and then sat back to watch her look stupid..only the whole thing backfired as the shareholders at the meeting also had no idea and were convinced that the Internet was something that you can carry in black box!

Although we laughed it is a sad fact that there are many people who commission IT services (in places such as the NHS) who also have about as much knowledge! On a more basic level, one of the IT support staff at work got called to assist someone who was doing a PowerPoint presentation and couldn't get their memory stick to work. When he arrived they were trying to insert it into the Ethernet point! (Ian has also been asked where the any key is).