Today I was sitting happily subjugating spreadsheets when one of our researchers came in, to provide me with an interesting example of a dichotomy in technical knowledge.
"Hello! I have a difficult IT question for you. The external mouse for my laptop isn't working, and I was hoping you could come along and fix it."
So, I trotted along to her room, to find that what she was waving around was... not remotely a mouse. It was, instead, a receiver for a wireless mouse which she'd dug up from the depths of the stationery cupboard. (Where I'd hidden it for exactly this reason. There's no mouse to accompany it.) Now, it was round, but it had one teeny little button, and a huge dip in the middle, and wasn't hand-sized at all. In short, it didn't really look like a mouse.
I didn't have the fortitude to explain, so I ran off with it, and returned with a shiny new mouse.
What makes this interesting to me, is that this same researcher is completely fluent in statistics programmes and GPS and mapping programmes, all of which are so complex that they make my toes curl* just looking at them.
People are so interesting!
*not in a good way.
