Today, I got the following call from my boss:
Boss: At the all-hands meeting today I want you to discuss {big proprietary feature that was just completed}.
Me: I thought {co-worker} was going to discuss that?
Boss: She’s not in today.
Me: Oh. So this is for the meeting in [check clock] 16 minutes?
Boss: Yup. But it doesn’t need a big production, just a quick explaination.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know {big proprietary feature that was just completed} inside and out. I have absolutely no problem yammering on and on about it at our all-hands meeting. After thinking about it for a couple minutes I decided that I’d want to be sure to get the syntax right. So I copied the syntax into a .txt document that I planned to put up on the projector. Without the correct syntax I’d be just yammering and waving my hands randomly (not as impressive as {big proprietary feature that was just completed} should be).
I’m in my office. The “presentation” will be in a conference room on the same floor. It’s a little tiny text file.
It’s proprietary information.. so I didn’t want to upload it to my personal web site. It’s a little tiny file. Frankly it seemed like overkill to upload it to anywhere.
“Ah-ha!” I thought to myself, “I’ll save it to a 3.5 inch floppy disk. They’re ubiquitous, work everywhere. And, it’s a little tiny file.”
I went through all of the drawers in my office. At the bottom of the last drawer, I found one 3.5″ floppy disk. It hadn’t been used in years. I hoped it wasn’t corrupted.
I copied the file to the diskette. I also emailed a copy to the manager of the east coast department so her group could follow along. I arrived 3 minutes early to the meeting so I’d have PLENTY of time to setup the projector to show my little tiny text file.
It took a good minute of looking to realize that the computer in the conference room had no a:/ drive. No diskette drive at all.
When did 3.5″ diskettes become the 8-track of the digital world? Even that comparison is misleading. 8-tracks were replaced by cassette tapes which were replaced by CDs which are still used. 3.5″ diskettes are just obsolete. Nothing has taken their place (at least not in my world). The concept of saving something onto a hard medium for transport to another computer has been replaced by uploading and downloading.
Not to worry. I logged onto the online interface to our email system and retrieved the .txt file from the email I’d just sent to the east coast.
