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February 22, 2004
nightmare user
i dreamed last night that i went to a hospital to drop off a sample for testing. there was a window with a person in it that i had to give (and explain) the sample to, but there were things blocking the window, making it quite difficult to get to that person. i was also embarassed about the nature of the sample (still am, actually, which is why i'm not putting that in here :) so i didn't want to have to yell the information out.
then there was a man also at the window, another hospital customer. he had a laptop that he needed to connect to their network for some reason. the person in the window kep trying to explain to him how to connect, but i could tell neither of them were very technical and they were miscommunicating. she asked him if he had a data card in his laptop, and he said no. he kept asking if he would be connected to the "comptron" (or something like that) which i intuitively knew must be a dialup provider. i said to him, "do you have an ethernet card?" and that he understood better than "data card". then i saw that he had an ibook, and i told him that it would be easy to connect his laptop to their high speed network.
i sat down with him to help him connect. he had a strange additional UI installed on his machine, something to help the very novice user use OSX. it had some extremely novel properties which i want to try and describe.
it seemed to have the concept of the entire screen being a physicall object that was floppy. it would flop down, but you could literally catch it with your hand and sort of flip it back up.
the dock was very strange. it would bend in an exaggerated manner, like a roller coaster, which i found made it quite difficult to use.
the colors were bright-- windows XP colors, actually-- and there was a set of extremely cartoony icons. in the dream, i recognized the artwork-- now i think they may have been based on 'nightmare before christmas' style artwork, but with bright, primary colors.
this guy would periodically step out into the hall and get into huge arguments with people. he was very agressive and dramatic in the way he would speak to them. stuff like, "YOU. CAN'T. TOUCH. THIS!!!!" but he was pretty nice to me. still, i was having a hard time getting him set up, and was afraid i'd have to endure one of his outbursts if he got frustrated with me.
after trying to figure out his computer for a while, i realized that i simply needed to bring up the network control panel. however, i couldn't navigate his computer well enough to do it myself, so i had to try and describe to him what we were looking for and how to find it. i thought i had seen it flash by on the dock, but it wasn't there.
just as i realized that we should look under the apple menu, i woke up.
Posted by lisa at February 22, 2004 12:05 PM | TrackBack
ok, so a) your comment won't post right away because i have to approve it first and b) you might get a server error but your comment probably posted anyway and c) previewing doesn't work so i've removed the preview button.