Computers can do anything... including berate morons.

My company provides technical support to a local non-profit agency. Specifically, my predecessor designed a pair of MAMMOTH databases in Microsoft Access for them to track all of their operations. The databases are absolutely gigundo, so they require a certain amount of periodic maintenance.

The administrator in change of overseeing the database is basically computer illiterate. This would not be nearly as frustrating if it was not obvious that this was practiced illiteracy, cultivated for the sole purpose of providing an excuse for making ridiculous requests of the people who work on the database, namely me.

My predecessor used to get extremely frustrated because whenever she told the administrator that it was not possible to she what she wanted with their current computer setup, the administrator unfailingly responded with, "Yvonne, computers can do ANYTHING. You just have to tell them."

Yvonne, not being a confrontational person, would just bite her tongue and live with it. Or so I thought before today.

I was called to that office this morning because the administrator had managed to blow up the database. This wasn't a hug crisis, as far as I was concerned, because the database is backed up every day, so even in a worst case scenario, we could always pull the previous version off the backup tape and we'd be fine. However, it appeared to me once I looked at her machine that the problem she was encountering may be due to some sort of corruption of the macros, the small sub-programs that Yvonne had written into the original database. I decided to take a look at them and see if there was anything obvious that I could fix. What I found nearly sent me into convultions from laughing.

My former boss, always polite and well-mannered, had written custom error messages into the macros that would only show up when the administrator did something particularly hair-brained. Messages like "Wrong Button, Dummy" and "That's not the right way to do it. Duh!" were sprinkled throughout the macros. Great stuff.

I have a whole new level of respect for Yvonne, now.

Laterz.