Basic needs
waste by macwagen A teacher came in last month and asked to get rid of that thing that had apparently possessed her private laptop .. took me quite a while to figure out that the problem was with Office2007 that one of the technicians had just installed on several staff laptops. Steam generation was still very much in evidence when I reached for Office2003 so I gave that a miss, feigning a grasp for my tea plunger and invited a morning cuppa.
When the stormy atmosphere cleared, I quietly installed OpenOffice. When the software was finally registered and it had fired up, I heard behind my back a very quiet and polite "thank you for fixing the interface". Ironic but perhaps not entirely unexpected as she had been using Office 2003 until now.
Lesson one - floaty toolbars and things in strange places are for ubergeeks like me and users that enjoy the challenge of hunt and seek. The rest don't like being messed about. When nothing happens as expected, it is broken.
It seemed that everybody she had sent her job application to couldn't open and read her precious paperwork that she had laboured and slaved over. I quickly gathered this was both partly the fault of her word processor and the recruitment online system used by the department of education. Her family efforts to support her navigation of this upgraded system only raised her frustration level.
When I quietly suggested and tried to explain the delicious details of the docx doc odt war, I was again fixed to my chair by a frozen glare that reached all the way to the file server room and stock exchange.
Lesson two - avoid the format war discussions and debriefings directly after the battle. Users are not interested. More often than not, they just wish that things work, dream of occasionally clicking and mostly just typing.
We did later manage to have a good chat about the deeper mysteries of why software costs so much, why it will not work on any computer, why stuff never prints out as you see it on the screen, why e-mail attachments can end up nowhere and who pays for the Internet. As I ducked out to make another brew for afternoon tea, she wanted to know how much it would all cost. When I indicated it was free, drop dead easy to use and tossed the growing smile an open cdrom that I had picked up at a conference last year.
Lesson three - deep down, users crave freedom but only when their basic needs are first satisfied.
This morning she came back, asking what labs had OpenOffice installed. I am pleased to say is has been co-installed on all the staff and student school computers.