Those who know me, know that I work with email software, particularly mailing list managers, and more particularly one particular mailing list manager. My title at the company is, hell it doesn't matter. But I've been there 17 years and watched the software change dramatically.
Anyway, as part of my job I monitor and assist (sort of at a 2nd or 3rd tier level) with product support. And reading support this morning I ran across a moron, who unfortunately is typical of the people operating our software these days. Basically he asked what to set in our software in order to prevent people from hitting "reply" or "reply all" in their mail client in response to a given piece of email.
To which my immediate mental response was, "You can't. That's a function of the mail client and the ID-ten-T running it. Our software does not have any way to send some super-secret command in the email headers to tell mumble-dozen different mail clients to disable some part of their command structure, and even if it were possible to do that, we wouldn't implement it, because that would be tampering with somebody else's software installation, which a simple email isn't supposed to be able to do (imagine the security holes that would undoubtedly open up). But you should know that, because you work in IT in a higher-ed institution, and are supposed to be not-stupid."
I say "mental response" because I can't write something like that back in email to a customer.
But this kind of shit frightens me a little, because it is becoming the norm, not the exception. I read stuff that Og writes about working with computerized precision machinery, and I wonder how in the hell his company is going to find someone to replace him when he retires. I wonder how my company is going to find someone to replace me when I retire. The smart is not coming out of universities these days. I fear that we're returning to the master and apprentice days in the IT business.
Although I'm not sure that I truly fear that. A lot of us guys (and a few gals) who pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps years ago came up that very way. I don't have a degree in software engineering, but I are one, because my boss, who knows my skill set, says I are, and after 17 years I am not going to argue the point.
Anyway, just a rant about people who put fancy titles in their .sig files and then don't appear to have the intelligence God gave a turnip to back those titles up. (For what it's worth, I haven't used a .sig in years; I got over that after I finished my undergraduate degree. Besides, in this business, if you don't know who I am, you've been living under a rock since 1994 anyway, and who cares.)
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