Indeed, the hidden extra functionality is infuriating. A way around it is to use Addintools Classic Menu for Office

IMO Office 2010 is considerable better than 2007. The ribbon was polished more, adding commonly used commands to dropdowns. IMO, it is what the ribbon should have been from the beginning (in 2007, it was little more than a nuisance, with o 2010, it can actually help)

While I might agree that some people do become stupid with tech (and oversimplify the complexity that computers are covering up and compensating), we also can't oversimplify the fact that it's not trivial to go back 20+ years to pre-computer procedures overnight for a temporary problem that will go away in a few days (or minutes or hours, as in the case of the tire shop employee).

Besides employees not getting paid enough to go the extra mile (or that they're supposed to be doing something else), the likely end reason is likely that it isn't affordable or efficient or even possible. As it is, a common complain in the healthcare industry is that they're understaffed, and with automation, the number of employees has been reduced so much they would never be able to deal with the backlog manually (assuming that enough employees had the training to deal with pre-computer issues). Not to mention that in a complex team workflow, exceptions would make it risky (ie, if the patient isn't registered in the system, his/hers tests can't be attached, so the doctors can't access them properly, opening the hospital to liabilities).

Old systems likely broke down and got replaced by digital systems that require much less from their operators. Before they might have been able to print, but maybe that printer isn't there anymore. Going all the way back to pre-computers might mean leaches.

As for your tire experience. Maybe the employee was lazy and wasn't willing to go the extra mile. Or maybe he didn't have a yellow pages or a company directory (which might have been on-line). Or, likely, he is supposed to tend the counter, and isn't allowed to do something else when he is supposed to be servicing people coming in the door (or answering the phone). In the "olden days", we might have been dealing with the store owner, which would be more inclined to GEM, but with franchises and staffs cut to a minimum for the sake of 80%+ normalcy, it's no surprise that the quality of service suffers.

In spirit, I agree that computers have made it too easy for stupidity to thrive. In fact, they have made it so easy that it is endemic at the business level, not just at the employee level. Rather than doing the work, businesses just farm it out to someone else, and then to someone else (ie, the "Cloud philosophy"), and you end up dealing with shells that are so far removed from the data that have no knowledge or interest in providing a reasonable service that falls slightly outside the normal expectation. And even when it's a typical offering, quality is often substandard and it only fulfills the need in the most general sense. But I'm starting to digress to another topic, so I'll stop.

Being devil's advocate (I love my PC with 3 monitors, I can understand why users like the concept of the iPad -ie portabiliy and surface simplicity-, but wouldn't want to have one w/o having a PC nearby to overcome its limitations when you have to do something serious).

A pro-Cloud, pro iPad as a replacement argument would be that you can always connect to a remote system to do your work, and you can have multiple iPads (one for each screen/data that is relevant to your work, each connected to different apps/windows). You could have a stack of iPads on your desk, and just cycle through them as you are looking at the data (think a Star Trek episode with a desk full of pads).

It's a matter of how dumbed down is the interface to the apps you need, how polished is the process to enter data and that would allow you to jump between steps by just tapping a couple times and moving between tablets (or how easy it would be to connect to multiple apps on the same remote control session). IMO, a mouse click away (or Alt+Tab) is far easier than moving around in your chair and picking up another screen, but people that are more tactile (ie, "paper lovers") might prefer this approach.

It would be expensive having multiple tablets, but probably nor much more expensive as a 3+ multi-LCD setup a few years ago (before LCD prices plummeted), and prices will continue to go down. The real expense is that the cloud/server side is easy enough to use so you it can be used in this manner. It's just a matter of how much is the organization whiling to pay for creativity.

It reminded me of an episode of 7 Days in which a researcher develops a vaccine for cancer that mutates and kills everybody, and a future incarnation of the org makes a long jump (7+ years?) to stop her from developing the vaccine (kind of a Hitler dilemma with an innocent perpetrator). It also reminded me of I Am Legend.

Sounds like either forcing 801.11n only or using 801.11a is the only inter-operable alternative unless you can modify the devices and play with other parameters.

What about getting the convention hall organizers (or you and your nearby booths) to try and build a mesh, so everybody is on the same network (and can somehow tweak parameters to reduce interference)? Maybe coordinate the channels between nearby booths so they don't overlap? Not that there are than many channels to distribute.