Some years ago when the computer industry was in it’s infancy, an american company decided that the word describing a thing of generally thin and circular geometry should have the spelling “disk”. Whereas here in the UK the spelling had always been “disc” from the Latin “discus”, this had been the spelling from the 18th century. Now I’m not an English purist, well how can I be I’m from Scotland, but to cut to the chase we now find that the word “disk” and the word “disc” now mean different things.
Not that most people would know this of course, but for those of you who might be interested – in general “disk” is magnetic media and “disc” is optical media. I personally am gobsmacked (A word from liverpool – of Gaelic origin – well the Gob bit is.), that more people aren’t using the English spelling for both. As it was the first and correct spelling, still we could go down the VHS – Betamax argument here couldn’t we! Now the title of the post relates to an incident where a customer had a problem with some magnetic media (A Disk) and when asked if they had copies it turned out that they did using a photo copier! Hence the reason for the Blog title, the support person that was trying to help them kindly offered to fax them a copy of the media that was required. All things considered – on the day this was not a very popular decision, humerus yes popular no!
I would have discounted this when I first started in IT, but when I worked for Olivetti in the early 80’s I did actually receive an 8″ floppy with a compliments slip stapled to it – through the jacket and the floppy disk – and was expected to repair it and recover the files from it! So I’m not prepared to discount as urban legend that people would have photocopied discs – I’ve actually had one myself! (Although I think the one in question was 5 1/4″).
I’m now at the end of a contract and will have to start looking for an other one, I’m sure that I will exchange one lot of Muppets for an other lot of Muppets. But on reflection this is how I make my living, I like to think that I do my job relatively well, the fact that I have only once not been offered an extension to my contract gives me some degree of confidence. But I know that when or if I get a position in a new contract I will be dealing with a new bunch of muppets nonetheless, the probability is that they will not know the difference between the words “disk” and “disc” or they will. But if I’m totally honest, they probably won’t know the difference between bored and reamed (Engineering Joke) either – so I’ll be safe for a little while.
Still in conclusion I would say, the IT world now has a different set of problems. There are still chances to make your mark if you are good, but not if you are expensive and good. As in reality there are plenty of people who are mediocre and passable, yet they seem to get the jobs that you are always after – I have seen people fired after just a few days as they are totally incompetent! But that doesn’t seem to bar them from any job, especially when they can lead the customer into the cumfy zone. And especially when they tell the customer what they wanted to hear.