information systems irritating symptom

Doesn’t it seem that there’s a growing disjoint between personal computing and office computing? Because of the cheapening costs of computing, a significant amount of the emerging labor force are now exposed to the internet, online gaming, windows XP & even Vista, and video telephony (by contacting OFW relatives).

Yet when it comes to business systems, it seems that we’re still firmly stuck in the mid 90s, or even 80s. Isn’t it weird when you logon to windows, you see this screen:

















Only to be exposed to this text-based system for your regular work?


















As late as five years ago, this wouldn’t have mattered, since only a few had exposure to updated operating systems and applications. But now with the democratization of computing, and business systems not catching up, the gap is becoming more pronounced.

Plus, the older generation used to text-based systems don’t handle that directly anymore (being part of management), yet the younger set have to face the older system their superiors faced.

And I wonder how this affects the morale of the knowledge workers who have to face this anachronism day in and day out. It may not be a major factor for quitting, but it may serve as one of Herzberg's hygiene factor which may increase job dissatisfaction (like faulty toilets or poor fringe benefits).

thinking a tad too much

i'm usually the over-analytical person all-around, but sometimes my significant other beats me to it.

bambi & i were hanging out at her sister's house when bambi's niece brought out this souvenir "snowball" from HK Disneyland. it was an aquarium with fishes swimming around and it looked like this:


i then thought, cool, it looked real enough, but the aquarium was an enclosed globe ball, so the fishes weren't real. i then wondered how the fishes moved around. (it moved through magnets)

bambi on the other hand took the biologist approach: wow, look at the fishes! wait, one's a tiger fish and one's a clown fish and one's a freshwater fish while the earlier two are saltwater fishes, so how could freshwater fishes survive with saltwater fishes? but she still didn't arrive at the conclusion that the fishes weren't real.... hehehe!

what was worse was she tried to justify her reasoning by pointing out the following:

• there's an opening at the bottom, maybe you could put food in it? => um, it was for replacement water....
• the opening could be used to pump air in it? => i don't think so; besides, where's the air pump?
• well, there are fishbowls that don't have air pumps => it was an enclosed globe....

by this point we were both laughing our heads off....