One of the strange quirks of being robbed is the concept
of the “like for like” replacement in terms of insurance payouts. Normally,
this is a good thing. The stolen items might no longer be available and,
perhaps to ease the gnawing sense of horror at having been robbed in the first
place, a newer, shinier, “upgraded” version of what was lost can help to make
things seem just a little bit better.
Anything unique, of course, is utterly irreplaceable. I
still have a slight “pang” every time I think about my late father’s silver
pocket watch and that went “out of the window” due to the actions of “person or
persons unknown” (who may or may not have been future rock stars) over twenty years ago.
The real issue with that, of course, is that even if
someone were to magically restore it to me tomorrow, I couldn’t be one hundred
percent sure that it was the same one because I have no photographs of it, I
don’t recall it being engraved in any way and for most of the time I had the
thing it was kept in a box in a drawer, and the only thing about it that I
remember clearly was the bit of string that was tied the winding key to the fob
chain, and the glass face that opened up and closed in an interesting way.
Well, it fascinated me when I was a small person, anyway…
It was just that it was once my dad’s and now, like him.
It’s gone forever…
There is always the tricky matter that the swines who
stole your stuff in the first place might come back and steel your new stuff
just as soon as you’ve had the chance to get it, but it is sheer madness to
live your life under the assumption that they will. You have to get on with
your life and, whilst fearing the worst, you must hope for the best.
The difficulty with “like-for-like” when it comes to
computers, however, is a subtle one and one which is unlikely to bother the
“gadget-junkies” of this brave new world of ours, but is, actually, a right
royal pain in the derriere…
It’s the fact that, in the intervening time, the
“operating system” will have been upgraded.
Now you might be thinking “Ooh, exciting! Shiny and new”
etc., etc., but, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a company like A**** and A**** who seem to have a philosophy of never looking back and always
embracing the future, what you actually tend to find is that your
“like-for-like” replacement won’t do the job any more because many of the
programmes that you used to use to do your job will no longer work (sorry,
are no longer “supported”) and many of the
files that you have created during twenty or more years of creating them will
no longer open in the shiny new “upgraded” (and therefore “better”) versions of the software that you have to use.
But then that’s the thing when your corporate philosophy
seems more interested in providing shiny new toys for the kids to get for
Christmas than in actually providing computer equipment that will do the job to
the generations of designers who have embraced your products through the years
when everyone else seemed to unable to touch your products with the proverbial
barge pole.
The “thinking” of the kids in California seems to not even
consider the notion that anyone would possibly want to run “legacy” versions of
their most tried and trusted products any more. “Why” they seem to suggest,
“Would anyone want to use these ‘older’ products anyway…? And look, here’s a
nice shiny new pretty thing you can buy instead to play your music on and
everything, dude…”
To me it is an act of supreme corporate arrogance to not
only make it impossible for things to run at all on your new systems, to not
even include older (“Rosetta” or “Classic”) versions of the software in the bundle that will launch when you need
to use these particular items to do your job, and to not even make the option
of having them available to anyone who might really need to actually open these
older files for whatever reason just seems plain ignorant of how the world of
work and design actually functions in the real world and not just up in the
“Clouds…”
“I’m sorry, Client, but I can’t open all those files that
we worked on for you last year in that massive account that you paid all that
money for because our computers no longer support it. Hey, you think you’ve got
problems…? None of the games I bought with my own money will play either… Well,
I’m sorry you feel like that, Bye, Bye…!”
The ridiculous thing is that they’re so protective of
their patents from all the various corporate buyouts that they won’t even
release the codes so that someone who wants older version of the packages, or
just to run a few of the old packages that they used to regularly use, might be
able to find a way of doing so. Instead we just have to “accept” that all that
massively expensive software that we once bought is now just so much junk (“Tombstones”
I believe is the hip and trendy term which seems to be beautifully derogatory
to anyone still wanting to use it) and we
should just “embrace the future” even though the future doesn’t do the job half
as well and takes far, far longer to achieve less satisfying outcomes…
On a completely unrelated note, when it comes to the
future of Graphic Design being in such safe hands, I saw a van as I was driving
home the other night with the slogan “Where Number One” emblazoned in huge
letters on the side.
I’m assuming that it was a post-modern joke of some kind
for a TV show, otherwise, well, maybe the handcart has finally delivered us to
hell…
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