The legacy of imperfection

I/T folks my age (40 or thereabouts) seem to like to swap stories about plinking away on PCs boasting a whopping 16 Kilobytes of memory and having to save our programs to cassette tapes and "chatting" from command-prompts and all that. Aside from the "bonding" it provides, the horrified looks from the "young'uns" are usually worth a laugh. But I realized today that there's another "legacy," if you will, of being exposed to computers of the pre-Windows, pre-plug-and-play era: The feeling that you're not entitled to have everything work out of the box never quite goes away. (Whether it should is another debate for another day.)

I thought about that today when I was trying to copy data from my workstation's copy of a database to one on a different machine, and my workstation's software decided to freak out every single time I tried to export the database lock, stock and barrel. No error message, just a lock up that forced me to deliberately crash my browser and log in again.

The solution was simple enough: Just export the database in pieces. In this case, rough thirds seemed work. After a quick test to prove that something in the export process itself wasn't hosed, coaxing what I wanted out of the silicon and electrons was a matter of a few extra clicks and a couple more minutes. All in all, just an exercise in rewinding my brain to a past mind-set--and by "past" I'm only going back a decade--when I wouldn't have expected my employer to provide a bleeding-edge PC, nor could I afford one myself.

As workarounds go, it wasn't even remotely inspired, and anyone--even in this age of super-sleek software--with even average persistence would have arrived at the same solution. Coming from a background where the duct tape so often showed, however, saved a certain amount of freak-out. Which is nothing to be sneezed at. Particularly when this won't be the last curve-ball thrown at me on this project.