Last week, I wrote a post reminiscing about my best friend in elementary school, and it prompted other thoughts about how we formed and maintained relationships back then, in the early eighties.
Thinking back, it’s interesting how the telephone played a relatively minor role in the friendships I formed. I used it mainly to call my friends to see if they were free to play. I’d ask if they wanted to come over, or sometimes I’d ask if I could come over to their house.
There’s an amusing story related to the latter request. My friend Murray’s Mom was a school teacher, what we would today call a Special Ed. teacher in fact. Whether this made her particularly grouchy when she was at home, I am not sure. She was typically a fairly cold woman, however. She never had much to say to me when I visited, unless it was to correct my manners. She is the one who told me I should never “invite myself” over when I called. What she was referring to was my habit of finding myself bored at home and phoning Murray to ask “can I come over?” She called this “inviting myself,” and apparently it was poor manners.
I’m sure she would have a few words for my son and his friends.
It confused the hell out of me, because how else was I going to find out if I could come over? Was I supposed to sit waiting by the phone for Murray to call me? I can remember Murray and I using some subterfuge to get around her restrictions. I’d tell him at school to ask his Mom if he could invite me over, and then he’d call me later and invite me.
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There’s an old saying that if you want roses, you have to respect thorns. Company IT people can often seem like they are made mostly of thorns, but I would contend that the benefits they confer are such that they deserve respect at the least.
A co-worker of mine off-handedly insulted an IT guy last week, and the situation made me uncomfortable for a couple reasons. It wasn’t the first time he’s insulted one of the people charged with installing, upgrading, and maintaining our hardware and software, so on the one hand there’s a moral part of me that doesn’t like to see anyone disrespected–and on the other, there’s a purely selfish part of me that believes in another proverb: “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Our systems are locked down extremely tight. We can’t even download and install iTunes without supervisory approval–and even then, someone from IT has to perform the download and install from an admin account. It seems to me that it’s to our benefit to be nice to the people who do this work.
Anyway, to get to the story, last week we were upgraded to new Dell PCs running WinXP. Yes, I know it’s been about eight or nine years since XP was released. Yes, I know Microsoft is on the verge of not supporting XP any longer. This is how government works. For security and cost reasons, we aren’t on a corporate upgrade cycle. The United States Government is on my Uncle Dan’s upgrade cycle–you know, the uncle who lives way out in the sticks of West Virginia, still accesses the internet via dial-up, and runs a PC with Windows ME Home Edition. Maybe Uncle Dan will upgrade to XP this year, too, finally.
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