One of my skills is working well with difficult people - or highly stressed people. It slowly incorporated itself into my whole workflow. In the job I retired from, it was mostly difficult people, a few stressed like her.. My present work is often dealing with stressed out people.

In this case, the poor young woman was about ready to piss herself. She was about ready to truly freak. Just about to the point where she was ready to stop taking input. So I got her calmed down to the point of at least just crying. Then slowly relaxing after I told her we could fix it, then got her prepped for her talk.

Her real issue with being difficult was insecurity masked by being rude - she was actually an okay person.

One time I caught a guy (literally) who became faint right when his presentation started. Took a small break, I told him that everyone there wanted him to do well. Once again the breathing exercises, and I hung out right by him when he finally gave his talk. I stood at the podium, running his powerpoint while he talked.

I do antenna designs in spreadsheets. First the basic calculations, then the adjustment calculations for final SWR accommodations. I might try plotting out frequency sweeps some day if I get bored.

I use spreadsheets all the time, yes they are wonderful tools. Only downside is friends teasing me, some claiming I use a spreadsheet to plan intimacy. Of course not - that's my wife's job.

There is usually a difference. The headline claims executives, the summary, scientists.

Microsoft shills.

So it looks like in 3026, everyone will still be using O365, because, well - that's what they have to use.

I agree, Libre Office is a superior product. And it has gotten even better over the years. It is my daily driver, and I have O365 and Mac Numbers.

Also, if you don't run a pilot project correctly, you are going to get sketchy results. Libre world isn't all that different than O365, but yeah, you need some training. The open and save options are much greater - some might get confused. But the differences aren't even too difficult to overcome.

I think the problem is a combination of people not wanting to change workflow, sort of an inertia effect. I've gotten some people running on Libre Office, and they are happy. I don't know enough about Collabra, so I don't have the details of how it works.

The inertia, the "tools I use" outlook brought up a memory. This all happened within a couple weeks. A guy on the non-technical, more marketing arena at work needed to make an instruction manual for the projects sponsor. So he used PowerPoint to attempt the manual instead of Word. It all fell apart on trying to index and other issues. Problem was, he used the entire budget for his mess. He brought it to my department and tried to get us to start all over without charging for it, which we couldn't do. Had to get special permission and an emergency charge number from accounting. Then there was the young lady from accounting. Fresh graduate, she needed to put together a presentation. So of course, she used Excel. And likewise faceplanted. She was also a bit of a handful. Came in all afire, ready to bite my head off, eventually crying and hyperventilating. Fortunately I knew her reputation already. With a barrage of screenshotting and redoing the things Excel doesn't do, I got her a reasonably nice PowerPoint, had her go over it. Even taught her some breathing exercises. She ended up doing okay on her big presentation, came back apologizing for yelling at me.

Stockholm syndrome, inertia, perhaps a bit of baksheesh? Or maybe a bad choice?

I don't know much about Collabra, a quick search shows it is an online app. That for me is a quick, hard, no thanks.

I salute you sir!

And the wonderful thing is that you have choices that don't use systemd. Or do you want everyone to use what you prefer? MacOS doesn't use it so maybe that would suit! 8^/ MacOS uses launchd. Anyhow, use the OS version that pisses you off the least.

This needs to be at +5 - get to work mods!

I am in utter awe! I laughed until the tears rolled out. Possibly the best thing I've ever seen on the internet, let alone Slashdot.

Out of curiosity, since I've been around long enough to hear about how every technological advance is terrible, and since you believe that AI is a terrible thing - riddle me this, at what year should we have frozen technology? When should we have become latter day Amish?

I think hunter gather times might have been a good time to freeze technology, before the agriculture advances. What is your year we should have stopped? The loom? tight before the Industrial Revolution? During the time of subsistence farming?

You need to work hard to get humanity back to when technology wasn't "harming" people.

Now before you get too worked up, here is why I ask those questions. People have a tendency to believe that the technology they grew up with was the proper point. I recall a time when personal computers were a so called tool of the devil. And yet, they are the tool many of us do our jobs with now.

We can still find people who are pissed off that tube technology is so much better than transistors, integrated circuits and Software defined radios. Seen anyone doing punchcard programming on IBM 360's recently? I did that at one time. People whine about modern cars, preferring ancient ones, yet I remember pulling over to the side of the road to crack open a beer in teh mid 70's when the car my father gave me hit 100K. And at that point, it was pretty well knackered out. today, cars regularly goo 200-300 K miles or around 500,000 Kilometers.

The list goes on, I won't belabor you.

All technology comes with a cost of both good and bad happening. And I get it. A lot of people here are programmers, and that field will change. If I were a programmer, I'd be updating my skillset - I've upgraded mine several times over the years, as technology changes, I've changed along with it.