Many Pies

Many Pies

Friday, January 16, 2009

Variety and diversity


I'm at the Wycliffe Germany offices at the moment. I'm taking part in some training for our corporate personnel system. In the UK office I'm used to the similar setup - Windows XP pretty much everywhere, PCs from the same supplier. Here we have people from several European countries, as well as some Africa. We have Windows XP and Vista, Mac and Linux, and for browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

In order so that everyone can try out what they've learnt we had to get everyone in the room to connect to the same wireless network connection, start using a VPN connection and get to our training system. With such a mix of hardware and software it took a while! Localised versions of Windows and browsers mean that error messages need translation, but if you've seen the same dialog box in English and can remember what goes where then you can tell someone what to click on without understanding their language.

As with life in general, variety makes things interesting, but I wished this morning wasn't quite so interesting!

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