🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <900917045...@lilac.berkeley.edu> (sorry, lost your
name) writes:
> We have a very dumb
> secretary, and whenever software asked her to "press any key", she'd press
> Shift, Control, or Alt, and then run to everyone complaining that the system
> didn't work. Eventially everyone's become convinced that she's too dumb to
> remember that 'any' key means the space bar, or use a computer in general,
> which may have been her secret goal, since it reduced her workload. :)

Little or no offence meant, but I think some of us have planks in our
eyes...

Hey, who are you accusing of stupidity?  ``Press any key'' means ``Press
ANY key''.  This person was quite right to complain that she'd been lied
to by programmers who should have known better, but who had allowed the
fact that they had a well-formed mental model of the way that computers
operate to prevent them from realising the large majority of the
population posesses no such model.

Dumb (or at least thoughtless) programmers, say I, not dumb users.
A smart programmer would have anticipated this problem, and ensured that
it didn't arise in the first place.
-- 
Dominic Dunlop