I’m amazed at how illogical people can be. I left a newspaper as head of the IT department in 2019. (Dept. closed and let go)
But back in the 1990s, we were running a DEC PDP-1145 main frame. The terminals were green screen, text only.
The assistant city editor was a proud Luddite. She called me one day because a file one of the reporters was working on “disappeared.”
I started a forensic investigation, asking about everything the reporter did before the file went away. The City Editor was hostile to my investigation, suggesting that I was blaming the reporter for the loss of the file. I tried to explain that I was gathering information to find out what happened. Hopefully I could recover the file. If not, at least we’d all learn what NOT to do next time.
At some point in the exchange I said in exasperation, “You know the computer can’t just get a wild hair and delete a file on its own.”
I swear to the holy spirit, she looked at me with straight face and said, “Well I’m actually of the opinion that it can.” …
It took me a few seconds before I could respond. “If your car is gone from the parking lot when you go home tonight, are you going to assume it jut cranked itself up and left on its own, or are you more likely to assume somebody stole it?” I asked. Of course she thought that was idiotic. "But her car wasn't a computer," she insisted.
“The computer is a machine, JUST LIKE YOUR CAR.” I told her. “It doesn’t make decisions, it follows instructions.”
I eventually found were the reported had used an invalid file name. (There were 10,000 notices posted at every work station about file names. It seems that most of the reporters couldn’t be bothered to do the research of looking at the paper taped to their terminal.) This lady had saved the file with a slash (/) as part of the story name. In those days, that designated a subdirectory. The machine dutifully created the subdirectory and dropped the file into it. They couldn’t find it because they were looking in the directory it should have been sent to, not the newly created one. Their attitude was, "Well it knew what I wanted. It didn't have to take it literally." ...
These DAs were really anthropomorphizing the furniture.
How the heck do you bring knuckle draggers like this into the present, much less the future?The DEC system was an upgrade for some old IBM main frame that literally used punch cards. The old IBM machine crashed and spent more time down than up. When we went to the “Tiger” system, (A name complete made up by the sales department. It had nothing to do with any actually system on the market.) the staff was promised that it would never crash. That was serious oversell by the IT guys, (computer guys in those days) and the sales guys who had moved into upper management. What they truly meant was that it would crash less often.
The City Editor mentioned above was a reporter in those days. She called me one day in tears with snot running from her nose, threatening to quit if I couldn't recover her story. This was late in the day. I suggested that she just revert to her last saved version. I mean how much was she going to lose? a paragraph since her last save?
Yeah, she'd taken the “Will not crash” sales pitch to heart. She’d been there almost 8 hours without ever doing a single save. Apparently Alt-S was just to inconvenient to her creative process, so she hadn’t done a single save all day.
Fortunately for her, it was her terminal that crashed, not the mainframe. When I rebooted her terminal and logged her in, there was her pulitzer prize (yes that’s sarcasm) story in all of it’s glory. I immediately saved it, then advised her to save repeatedly and often.
Yes, I can believe this progressive moron thinks guns are evil and are the problem. Personal responsibility seems to be a completely alien concept to her. But she was proud of her journalism degree and seemed to consider herself quite the intellectual professional. Sadly, by the turn of the century, she was the person "guiding" young reporters and selecting which stories we ran. MSM in a nutshell.
MAn we need a like button! 
