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-> As I see it,any one person, given desire and a minimal amount of
-> basic intelligence, can learn to do any other person's job.
I gave some thought to this also. Before the information revolution, it
was easy to identify the trade and the tradesman by the tools they
used, and there was a mystique to it that automatically conveyed a
measure of respect. Try making sense of a composing stick or a maul, a
torque wrench or a theodolite if you have never used one on the job.
Nowadays more people use computers to get things done, and there is a
blurring of the boundaries between what *I* do on the computer
(important, valuable, skilled work that took me a long time to learn),
and what *everyone else* does on the computer (unimportant, not
valuable, unskilled, simple-minded, and so on).
I would characterize this as the information food chain. Everyone thinks
they're at the top and tends to sneer at other computer users; we have
engineers who think tech writers are glorified typists, we have tech
writers who think the same of journalists and graphic artists, and on
and on it goes. We have made the fatal mistake of failing to separate
the task from the tools.
Cheers, @DISCLAIMER@
Gwen gwen -dot- barnes -at- mustang -dot- com
MSI * Connecting the world 805-873-2500
