So, I used to spend most of my online time as a musician and record producer. Posting videos, tweaking my website, little promo here and there. I work on an aging iMac that I love using the Adobe suite and other rock-solid Mac programs. Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not an Apple fan-boy. I’ll likely outline my complaints against them in another rant. But my bread-and-butter gig is being a public school teacher, and as many of you know, this Covid19 pandemic has all Illinois educators implementing “remote learning”; a cute euphemism for providing content and instruction via school laptops pushed out to an enormous array of personal devices running an enormous array of interfaces and operating systems.
Now, I had already had the unpleasant experience of doing a couple hours of work each day on a shitty school-issued laptop running Windows 10, and that was pretty fucking stressful already. Microsoft Word? Jeezus what an inexplicably inconsistent and maddeningly slow piece of shit that is right there. How it came to be that the biggest software company in the world can’t manage to display bullet points symmetrically and consistently is beyond me. And I don’t know if this has come up at any staff meetings, but if a shared Word document is always displayed with a giant page break at the end of every page it’d be nice if you could give an accurate preview of where that is located in the document when you create it. As it is you have to toggle back and forth to a print review to see the end of the freakin page. Seemingly, all the snafus and head-scratching lapses of usability of that one program are shot through the entire Windows 10 OS. Minimize a document to clear your screen, double click a new document of the same type, and instead of the new document popping up, the minimized document pops out, obscuring your new document. Not a big deal, but what the hell? Need to listen to a voice-mail from a colleague? Plug in your headphones, and that infuriating “what did you plug into the headphone jack?” prompt pops up. Fucking headphones! That’s what I plugged into the headphone jack! Again, not that big of a deal, but it pops up behind any window you already have open, so, if you’re not wise to this stupidity, you spend the remainder of your planning period trying to find out why your headphones won’t work because they won’t pass audio until you clear that stupid prompt. Sigh.
Anyone who’s worked with good software doing complex tasks knows that a good suite of keyboard shortcuts can make or break a tight deadline. So what does Microsoft choose for it’s software? Mousing through menu options. Everywhere for everything. Want to do something on Windows that you can do with the press of a spacebar on a Mac? Mouse and click through three menu items. Multiply that by the hundreds of of useless options that all Microsoft software is burdened with, and it’s no wonder American office workers are stressed and slamming their carpel tunnel afflicted fists into their keyboards daily.
I’ve said it before, Windows machines are good for gaming and sawing in half, nothing more.
Redlight•Records 