What Is This, 1994?

For some reason, I have been bopping around the office here in Hong Kong, having been given three different work stations in the scant week or so I've been here. Is that a record? The office is pretty crowded, and the first week, they just put me at desks of people who were out. But that makes it difficult when I have to create files, and there is no central storage (the whole computer system here is very outdated).

So, when I arrive this morning, I'm told about my new work station. There's a monitor with a sheet of paper taped on the front. It says "student". Well, I assume that's me. Across the aisle, I spy another monitor with a paper similarly attached. This one says "Vivien". Evidently, they've kicked Vivian out of her comfortable, established work space and told her to move all of 4 feet. She seems less than thrilled with this development, and I don't really blame her. Her new desk, recently vacated by another, was covered in files and other detritus. I watched for the next 30 or 45 minutes as she moved her life 4 feet. I apologized several times. She didn't seem to blame me, but you know down deep, there's some resentment. I'll have to be extra nice (but not too nice) for a few days. I felt especially bad when she spilled her coffee cup. It sure looked like a spill proof cup to me, but obviously not. Gentleman that I am, I ran to get paper towels to help clean up. Hello, miss lady.

Soon I was comfortably ensconced in my new digs, diligently typing away, but things were running a bit slow. Let me tell you why.

1. The keyboard had a few dead spots on it... Pretty much the whole left-hand side. Had to press extra hard (actually, it was pretty much the whole thing, but the left-hand side was worse). So even though I thought I was typing like the wind, I was missing about 10% of my letters. That lowers the accuracy a bit.
2. I glanced at the yellow post-it note affixed to the side of the case. It described the system as a PIII 700MHz running WinXP, with 256Meg of RAM and a 12G hard drive. This machine did not like to have multiple apps running.

Anytime I opened more than a Word doc and Outlook, the machine immediately started choking. It would take Firefox like 30 seconds to open. And forget about scrolling around or loading new pages. Wow.

Tomorrow, I think I'll ask Vivien how long she used that machine, and how was that? Did she notice anything wrong with the keyboard, or the performance? I guess she probably won't care as much as I do, but I'm still curious.

Oh, and it's got a 13" monitor. Joy.