Left VS Right

So I spent yesterday designing touch screens.  Or at the part of yesterday I wasn't sleeping after a location upgrade.  

Anyways...   Proprietary Bob has the old version and the new version of everything they do.  The old version communicates through a bus that can cause all sorts of havoc.  In the new PCI compliance style interface, the old system doesn't work as well as it used to.  A customer can swipe a card and be out the door before the register ever realizes the card was declined.  So you have new technology, linked together using the best of the best of 10baseTX technology.  And you can get rid of the old tech and everything works in sync because you don't have to worry about whether Proprietary Bob wrote CSMA-CD into their algorithms.  By the way, you can tell it's a bus...  They have a piece of equipment that all devices communicate through.  It's a wired bus with a proprietary name.  But it can be replicated with a $10 off the shelf phone jack splitter.  Awesome work there, Proprietary Bob.  Awesome.

By the way, Cisco needs to update the CCNA.  In the description of a bus, they should indicate the best place to find one is a landfill.  Also...  should you ever see a bus in a working environment, quickly slam it in to a wall and break it...  claim you slipped if necessary.  Buses are worthless old technology and the world will be happier without them.

Now that you're up to date, we can go back and talk about touching things.  Essentially, Bob has given you the option of putting the sales list on the right side of the screen or the left side of the screen.  When you are not designing the thing, whether to put the list on the right or left isn't a big deal.  When you are designing things, it is a big hairy deal.

Now... the default is the left side.  I'm going with the assumption that most of the world or employees that would be using this thing are right handed.  And moving the right hand over the screen would block off a display on the right hand of the screen if the elbow flew out like Joe Cashier was about to go throwing elbows in his infamous throw-down of '02.  Now, if Joe Cashier moves their arm like T-Rex, then we've got a limited range of motion thing going and the elbows aren't going to be blocking off right hand side of the screen. 

The real problem is I can't predict how other people are going to use devices that I have to program and design.  If the device is designed well, it won't take 50 pokes to the touch screen to sell a pack of gum.  But designing the thing correctly makes a lot of difference in terms of speed and customer satisfaction.  And because I'm the tech who works on new projects, then I have to design those things. 

The astute out there will be saying this: isn't that an operations issue?  And the answer to the question is yes. 

But the real answer to the question is operations is spineless as a general rule.  They are willing to destroy a single persons' life for miniscule infractions but they are unwilling to make the large decisions that could negatively impact a business.  Screw one person: perfectly fine.  Screw 700: no way.  In IT, we have no designator between the two decisions.  In the end, a choice has to be made and if no one else will make the decision IT will.  Because someone told us to accomplish a task, and we'll get it done with or without the blessing of others.  Because others generally don't know what they want. 

IT is a dangerous job in that we have to go and screw everything up the first time so give the operations side an idea of what can be accomplished.  And then we have to rebuild what we created to please operations.  It's a painful cycle.