I have to admit that I have a bias against Mac users and the Mac itself, but I didn't start out that way. My experiences changed that, though (I mean no offense to any current Mac users, but back in the day, the Mac caused me endless nightmares in my professional life). We had to convert all of our company's secretaries to use the Mac because when we got a new CEO, he brought along his old, long-time executive assistant when we recruited him from another company, and she INSISTED that all of the other secretaries use Mac and not PC (she refused to try to learn how to use a PC). Everyone (Especially the secretaries) resented her for that. And I had to support both Macs and PCs.
We had tons of problems, right from the start. First problem was that 3 out of 5 of the Macs we ordered had faulty hard drives (they had disk crashes right out of the box). They came with virus-infected pirated software preinstalled for our convenience (and this is from one of the big Mac retailers). The drives that were recommended to us seemed adequate for our uses, but we were still thinking like PC users -- they were far from adequate (the reason was not apparent until much later, and I'll get to that). Because of this one stubborn mac user (with far too much power for a brand new employee) we had to figure out how to network the VAX, PCs, and Macs, which also was a nightmare -- we went with Pathworks for Macintosh (we already were using the standard Client/Server Pathworks, to network the PCs with the VAX). Pathworks for the PC was not the greatest product out there, but it served our purposes. On the other hand, Pathworks for the Macintosh was a horrible piece of software that sort of worked, if you didnt' look at anything too closely.
Now I want to say that my PC Support duties were totally part-time == I was a programmer, but I just happened to be the only one with sufficient PC experience at the company to do PC Support. We had about 30-50 PCs total scattered among our offices across the US. Support for them, including installing new printers, troubleshooting, maintaining licenses, replacing hard drives, network software upgrades, etc. took up relatively little of my time, (except when we got major network software updates, but even then, the problems were not usually user problems). We now had only 5 MAcs, and the problems we had just were constant, and most of them were centered on the one and only supposedly EXPERIENCED Mac user -- the CEO's Secretary. She should have been training me; but no, she had to be the most PC illiterate person I have ever met that actually had PC experience (I mean PC in the generic personal computer sense). She did all sorts of stupid things.
She wanted to do backups of her work, but backups to floppy were too difficult for her. I agreed that it was a good idea. We gave her a some space on the VAX and taught her how to back up her work to the VAX drive. A few weeks later, the server crashed. IT turns out that she got tired with simply copying over the files that she wanted to backup there (she wanted to maintain her convoluted directory system that she had on the Mac) so every night, she woudld simply drag her hard drive icon to the VAX drive icon. Unfortunately, she didnt' bother to check which directory that icon was actually pointing to, so she kept making copy after copy after copy of her entire hard drive. It was nearly impossible to track down the problem, since the VAX limits you to directory nesting of 255 (I think) levels), but Pathworks for Mac did not actually check the nesting on the mac side (And left it to the VAX version to simply throw up when it saw that).
This happend 3 times in a row, every time we told her not to do that and she sounded like she understood, but she did it again and again.
So next we got her an Iomega drive (I forget which one) to do backups to. She said she understood how to do it, but there I Was every friday evening helping her. She finally gave up on doing backups completely, which was fine by me, until she had corrupted files...
Anyway, the whole experience for me was a nightmare. I'm 100 percent certain that no other Mac user in the world could have been as bad as this one woman. But this experience has soured me completely to Macs and I will never ever ever buy one or recommend that a friend or family member get one ever again (I used to recommend it to my pc-illiterate friends, but stopped doing it when I thought that my worst fears would be getting midnight calls about their Macintosh problems).
Anyway, that's my sad story. Use a mac if you like it. I just don't want to hear about it. -Haldur
