An employee perspective on Productivity

Thrugelmir

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Yebbut they would have repaired and serviced it every few weeks. I am old enough to recall that when you went on holiday, which of course was a long drive down to Devon where horses were waiting to tow cars up steep hills they couldnt manage, it was necessary to give your car a full service before setting out on that 250 mile journey.

Nowadays its one service every 10k miles, not 40 !

Never serviced my Spitfire or GT6 every 40 miles. Cars were far less complex to fix. Reliable too. Never once broke down.

I still see plenty of not very old cars parked up on the side of motorways on my travels.

Thrugelmir

Malthusian wrote: »

I do like this brand of nostalgia.

"Computers were so much better 2,000 years ago. They never crashed or caught viruses and they booted up instantly."

"That's because they consisted of a bunch of beads on little wires."

"They never crashed though!"

"Are you typing this post on an abacus?"

"No, it fell apart from woodworm in 1992. Ah but twas a fine abacus so it was."

Reminds of the response of the CEO of General Motors to Bill Gates some years back.

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics -

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought "car NT", but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light.

10. The airbag system would ask "are you sure?" before deploying.

11. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

12. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the cars performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Dept.

13. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

14. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

PixelPound

PasturesNew wrote: »

In 10 years' time you'll press a button on an app and a robot will turn up and wash it, wherever it is - and you'll pay instantaneously with an online currency.

Or, in 10 years time you will press a button on an app and an Uber taxi will zoom round the corner with 6 Iranians in who will jump out and clean your car wherever you are.

Malthusian

Thrugelmir wrote: »

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics -

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

General Motors cars do that anyway. (And also 3, 4 and 11.)

buglawton

nic_c wrote: »

Or, in 10 years time you will press a button on an app and an Uber taxi will zoom round the corner with 6 Iranians in who will jump out and clean your car wherever you are.

Nah, the dirt will drop off the nano-molecular coating when wind brushes the car.