By Dan Barber
Looking back my initial phobia about the potential advances and dangers of computer technology was spot on.
I was always afraid of the questions the geeky looking, yet super smart young people posing as sales clerks in the computer stores would ask me while I was shopping around for my first computer. I was afraid of sounding stupid when they were asking me what I wanted to do with my computer. “Huh…plug it in and look up stuff on the interweb.”
What really amazes me is how the U.S. Government made me into a web designer/webmaster…just because I knew how to type, spell and maybe put together simple sentences as a Public Affairs Officer and former Navy Journalist.
I couldn’t convince my bosses at the time to hire one of the geeky looking, yet super smart young people at the computer store to do those chores...probably because they wanted too much money to work for the government.
I am one of you…wondering what in the heck went wrong with our government’s management of websites. I believe the answer to that is “a lack of knowledge combined with the fear of the dangers computer technology and budget constraints.”
One of my responsibilities as a Public Affairs Officer was to approve anything placed on our public facing website. In an effort to save money my bosses decided that if I was the approving official for our website then I could learn how to design web pages and also be the webmaster. That meant that I spent the last 15 years of my career arguing with people about why they couldn’t put something on our website!
I have discovered that it is darn near impossible to take care of any kind of business today without the use of a computer…no need to speak to another human being face-to-face at all!
Want to buy a new suit? Don’t know your size? No problem, instead of having a tailor there to measure you, just take your measurements as instructed by the suit-selling.com (ss.com) store so you can feed those measurements into their database. Of course, you’d also need to select the color and available material for your new suit, but instead of rummaging through the various color and material samples at a store, you can just click on the good looking suit model on your computer screen and match the color and material samples that are available at ss.com.
You can then enter your credit card information over the ss.com “guaranteed to be secure” internet connection for payment. When payment is received your new suit will be shipped to you within two business days.
Two weeks later you log on to ss.com to find out why you haven’t received your new suit yet, even though the payment was received by their company. After reading the “frequently asked questions” on their website, you are directed to call a customer relations line because apparently your question wasn’t frequently asked…finally, a very friendly human being to talk to whose primary language is not your language comes on the line. They try hard to assure you that your problem will be taken care of immediately and if you aren’t satisfied please visit their website at ss.com.
A week later an individual working in a warehouse owned by, a geeky looking, yet a super smart young person, uses a faulty scanner to locate your new suit off the shelf and sends it along on a conveyor belt to be packed for shipment. Soon your dusty new wrinkled suit is dropped off by your front door.
If your new suit hasn't been stolen by the time you get home from work you excitedly open up the box to try on the suit…only to be disappointed that it does not look the same on you as it did the good looking suit model on ss.com website or it’s the wrong color, material, size etc…
You then go on ss.com where once again you are directed to the frequently asked section to file your complaint, only to discover that your complaint isn't frequent enough to be listed before you can call their customer relations expert located in Bangladesh!
There isn’t a salesman standing in front of you to yell at or punch in the nose so the next best thing is to punch out ss.com on your computer monitor.
Now you are back at the computer store to purchase a new computer monitor, where a geeky looking, yet super smart young person ask you “what kind of monitor do you need?”
Based on the number of computer monitors you go through you might want, “a cheap one.”
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