Re: Memories ...
"In The Good Old Days (tm) we had shelves and shelves full of manuals, with well-thumbed indices."
In the Good Old Days I had a cabinet mounted on my desk partition with the OS & RDBMS manuals in it. I only needed to raise my arm to pick up any of them.
One day some Big Boss came to visit the call centre next door. (It was quite big - the support manager of the database company visited one day so I I gave him the tour and his jaw dropped when we went in there.) Big Boss made some comment about how great it was having everybody able to communicate with the low partitions. Next weekend all our partitions were lowered and my collection of manuals was "over there" beside the window. A few steps away is not the same as within arm's reach; those few steps and the time they take break concentration.
To cap it all there was a bit of a swap around and I also acquired a new team just behind me who, for some reason, had to have a dot-matrix printer on one of their desks.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
