The Human Factor

I wonder how many of you showed up for work this morning? If so, don't be embarrassed or unduly put out. I woke up at 8 a.m. to a bright, sunshiny day and the thought that we might have a delayed opening never crossed my mind. It wasn't until I checked my email two hours later that I saw the message from alerts.com. Had I been on the early shift I bet I would have shown up early. Way too early. The lesson learned from this, I suppose, is to check your email, call your branch, or pull up our website when there's even a slight possibility of a delayed opening.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live inserted itself into my life this weekend while I was trying to update an Excel spreadsheet. This free document sharing program from Microsoft is modeled on Zoho and GoogleDocs, although you need to download Microsoft's program to use it. If the library decides we want it, we'll need ISS to install the software on our staff and/or public computers.

Because Office Live supports Microsoft Office Word and Excel, I think that it might, in the end, be a more attractive option than GoogleDocs. However, right now I can't get rid of the annoying Office Live ad that pops up every time I open a Microsoft document, even when I tell it that I never want to see it again. I would not want to inflict that on the rest of my colleagues.

Musings

I've been wondering recently just what my dad would have done on the web if he'd been born just a little later. Unfortunately, by the time attractive web pages with bells and whistles arrived he was already suffering from Parkinson's disease. Not that he didn't try. We bought my folks a computer. Our first sign that all was not well was when we had to extract my dad's Visa card from the floppy disc drive. Eventually, after we could no longer get the thing to work, he literally took it apart. I had my first look at the insides of a pc.

In his working days, my father was a wonderfully witty book review editor and columnist, and also a talented photographer. Although in general a techno-klutz (he never learned to drive), he did learn to use a word processor. I think he might have enjoyed having a forum beyond the Sunday paper for his take on the world. He would have loved posting his photos. And the man who wrote about one letter to me in his whole life might actually have had a use for e-mail.

Whether I could have turned my dad into a competent computer user I don't know. But every time I help a senior use the library computers I know that nothing they do on them can surprise me.