Once upon a time in the late 20th century, I was an assistant professor in the behavioral health department of a major university. The university had standardized on Microsoft Windows 95 for an operating system and Microsoft Word for word processing.
By that point, for over a decade, I had been using Macintosh computers and found the Windows machines of the time vastly inferior. I was writing academic research papers and serious grant applications, and I relied on Nisus Writer for my word processing. Word couldn’t hold a candle to Nisus’ feature set, and I owed a lot of my success to having such a capable tool. At that time, most faculty relied on secretarial staff to do a lot of what Nisus Writer did for me — but academic departments were sharply curtailing the availability of secretarial support due to ever-present budget shortfalls (that somehow never seemed to affect building and administrative budgets) and new, junior faculty really didn’t have effective access to such perks.
In addition to the papers and grants, there were the inevitable reports to write and send in to the department’s administrators. The person who processed these reports would invariably complain that she couldn’t read my reports because they were written on a Macintosh. (These were the years, by the way, when the “Mac vs. PC” religious wars were in full swing.) Never mind that they would open just fine on my office Windows machine or that notoriously-picky academic publishers and grant makers had no problem with my documents. Nisus Writer, in fact, was renown for their Word compatibility and could sometimes even open and fix Word documents that Word itself had corrupted and could no longer open.
My home was very near the hospital campus. Much closer, in fact, to where I actually did most of my work (teaching and doctoring) than my office, which was a closet in a distant annex that I shared with another faculty member whose organizational and tidying skills left much to be desired. My home also had better internet than my office. In short, using my office computer was a serious inconvenience and a drain on my personal and professional resources.
The administrative assistant kept whining to the department chair. When I asked what was wrong with the documents, she’d say “I can’t open them.” When I asked what happened when she tried to open them, “I CAN’T OPEN YOUR DUMB MACINTOSH FILES.” I never did find out in what way the files “didn’t work.”
Reluctantly, I bought and installed a copy of Word for Macintosh, but she still “couldn’t open” the files. The department chair called me into his office one day and told me that I had to start using my office computer with its official Word installation to generate my files. Yes, he said, he knew that the files I was sending in were supposed to be compatible, and he even admitted that he had been able to open them just fine on his computer, but please just to make everyone happy please start using the Windows computer.
So I did.
But apparently nobody thought to tell the administrative assistant that I was no longer using a Macintosh, and she continued to complain to the chair that “I can’t open his stupid Mac files.”
After I explained to the chair that I had followed his orders and had been using my official office Windows computer for several months, he told me not to worry about it anymore and the complaints stopped coming.
—2p
PS: I did eventually grow tired of having to make the 20 minute trek to my office and clean out the detritus that blocked the desk and computer, and switched back to using Nisus Writer on my home computer. Nobody seemed to notice.