Cable
Email: Cable4096@nospam.com
Subject: Send In The Clowns (Er Accountants)
Your post reminded me of events that happened back in 1994 at Emerson Electric. We would have Corp Accountants come in, and they used Power Books or Mac SE/30 systems to port around and go over the books with. They had no clue how a computer works, or how a network works, or why they can't use a PC Printer without a special adapter on their Mac.
The time came that they needed a hardcopy, so they asked me if they could use my IBM/Lexmark Laser Printer, I asked them if they had a parallel port on their Mac, they claimed they didn't need one because all Macs talked to all PC devices and PC systems where not needed. So I told them to go ahead and plug it in if they can. They saw the centronics port on the back of the printer and looked for other ports. Their Mac printer cable wouldn't fit on the centronics port, they couldn't find an ADB port on my printer. They then got fustrated and asked me if they could use a network printer. I told them we have a Token Ring network and the Macintosh doesn't come standard with that, they would need a Token Ring adapter, and that they shouldn't try to plug their network connector into a Token Ring or else it will cause problems. They didn't believe me and thought I was one of those Crazy WINTEL NAZI IS types that is Anti-Apple so they went hunting around for one, found a Token Ring port, unpluged the 9 pin cable from the PC it was connected to, and then they had a 9 pin adapter to whatever it was they used. The result took down one MAU and one CAU, and got our NA really ticked off at the accountants, especially that they where warned by an IS employee not to do that.
I told them there was a Mac section in Marketing, but it was halfway accross the building and they didn't want to walk that far. Then they wanted to use one of our PC Systems to print it out. They asked me to help because they had no idea how to use one. I had an old Compaq Prolinea 486DX 66Mhz system I set up for them, booted it up and it came up to WFW 3.11 and logged them onto our network under a guest account. Then I showed them the office group and the Excel icon, and they took over from there. They remarked at how faster the Windows version was in loading and printing, and how it was able to read a Mac Excel spreadsheet without any problems.
Windows didn't appear to be any harder to use than their Macintosh. As a result, Accounting started a migration over to Windows and other departments started phasing out Macinotshes.
I thought it might be fun to keep a shinning example of a Mac-unsucces story. Somehow the MacJihad crowing about a few units placed into a naive employer's hands is regarded as a good thing for Apple, while events that aid in getting rid of Macintoshes transpire every day are glossed-over. I particularly like the fact that the Mac users "knew what they were doing". It's that kind of wreckless pompacity that pretty much sums up the Jihad to a tee.
-mgabrys
