10+ years ago when I was job hunting, personnel agencies were my friends. I managed to stay employed in a geographic region with lots of competition and worked with quite a few very talented, skilled people. I’m talking about computer skills. We all had to take proficiency tests in order to be accepted by placement agencies. Candidates had to maintain a certain level of demonstrable skills if they wanted to remain employed. Flash forward to today. I’ll call it ‘Nerve Gas Syndrome.’ It’s as if a bomb was dropped on computer users which sucked their skills dry. Computers have become so commonplace and easy to use that we’ve forgotten how to really use them. Let’s do some math: let’s take the current Microsoft Word user base and subtract the users who know what ’styles’ are. Let’s call the difference ‘intUsersAsleep.’ Then let’s take a typical, moderately complex, lengthy document, calculate the percentage of extra time it would take to compose that document without using styles. Let’s go ahead and call that percentage pctTimeWasted. Way I figure it, intUsersAsleep X pctTimeWasted = … Bad Math. “What’s a style?” you ask. I say, if you don’t know what styles are, you should not be allowed to touch Microsoft Word.
Tags: FrontLines by Keith
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