Off and on for quite a long time I have had trouble both with not having a steady broadband, instead it kept crashing when I was half through ordering online, which turned out in the end to be expensive because I was ordering twice. By the same token, I was getting what some people refer to as death messages, those little windows that suddenly appear and start ordering you about. I obtained the services of a self-styled ‘Specialist’ who had a strange approach. I had put together a couple of computers and all the etceteras that one gathers, it was rather like Mecano, and I thought it was simple. He however said he could not understand it at all, he would strip it all out and reconnect it, and only then be able to understand it and able to fix it. At the end of this session which took two days I discovered I was little better off than I had been originally, because he hadn’t fixed the thing which was originally the problem, the broad band. Running a blog means that you need to be able to grab the moment, or what you write will be out-moded. Fortunately I had a White Knight who came to my rescue, a man who could actually diagnosis what was wrong with the computer in another country, just with his mobile. Now I’m on the Internet, about my life back, and all is bliss
You can imagine that I had a lot of time to sit and think as I could do little else, and I started to relate the professionalism of the computer specialists with specialists in other media, such as medicine, engineering, scientists; the list is almost endless. Every specialist needs training. In the days when I started training,1940, it was often a mixture of evening classes, a correspondence course, and working for a firm, starting at the lowest level, and this of course was called indentured, or articled, and was not cheap. In the trades, it was and still is very similar; one became an apprentice, more like a dog’s-body, or started in a technical school, or college. There were differences in the way in which different trades and different professions ensured that the trainees, when they left their place of learning, were of the standard required by the governing body of that trade or profession. Prior to 1939, the standards were not only high they were rigorously enforced. Today of course, more people go to university to learn their occupation, but this does not mean that their degree is the end product, there will be a governing body that will require that later they will spend a specific number of years in further training in their occupation, and possibly a final examination before they can be said to be what they purport to be. This applies equally to medicine and, engineering etc., and the regalia of the Masons points out the fact that this system also applied to many of the trades.
I’m sorry if this has been tedious, but when I saw what the White Knight who rescued me knew and was capable of, it made me consider that as people who know nothing whatsoever about computers are in the hands of people who may or may not have a degree in the subject, but more, it is a question of whether they have the experience. The way in which the governments and practically every other concern considers that our houses are universally equipped with a computer, shows the level at which the computer is now used. It is a highly sensitive, and overall, an expensive piece of equipment. There are those who have arbitrarily offered to repair them, in the local press or the Yellow Pages. This expertise should have the same principle of training as the professions and the trades. It is time that there was a governing body overseeing the experience and expertise of the people we are trusting, and are paying highly, to repair our equipment