Thanks to your taxpayer dollars, we recently purchased a new Power Mac with upgraded twin 3.0 quad-core Xeon Intel chip. This machine is so fast, it's quite amazing at what it can do! With this machine, you can open a 100mb Photoshop files in seconds – and doing so while ripping video in the background too. Complicated Illustrator blends/shadows and Final Cut Pro movie rendering is a breeze. It can do so many tasks simultaneously, there's practically zero waiting for anything. This could make my job so much more efficient...But it won't.
You see, this machine goes to the Major. The Major's Dual 2.5ghz G5 recently died (coolant leakage) so we needed a replacement. Instead of giving the new machine to the people that actually do the intense work (the designers), she decides to keep it for herself.
The Major only uses three programs: Safari, Entourage (Outlook) and Word. Her idea of multitasking is sipping tea while reading email, or twirling her shoe while talking on the phone. She says the new machine is faster because Word launches in 2 seconds (an improvement over the 6 seconds it took in her old machine). Unbelievable! This is like buying a Ferrari to go grocery shopping when you don't even know how to cook!
In any other company, this would be wasteful, idiotic, even comical. But around here, it makes perfect sense. We suggested the top-of-the-line 24" iMac at half the price, but she still wanted the 8-core processor. She's the boss. She gets the best. She even complained that at only 3ghz, it wasn't truly the top-of-the-line. Sheesh.
So instead of a screaming machine, all we have are screaming designers. Think about it: a $4700 computer for email and word processing... Your tax dollars at work. Literally. Oh, and it also serves as a snack tray to hold her bag of pretzels.
Unbelievable.
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