as the person who programmed them. Usually this would read "the person using them," but nowadays there's software for darn near everything, and almost nobody will mess with command line, which is where that particular phrase originated.

Computers are like that friend of yours who has tons of logic but no common sense or creativity: give them numbers and data and they can correlate it and do what you want within the terms of what they're told. If you tell them the wrong thing to do? Well, not their fault, is it? And with how opaque the layers are for what a machine's actually doing when you give it a command, there's no way to tell where a mistake originates, or from whom along the line.

I love computers, but dealing with actual productivity on one when you're looking for anything more than basic clerical work can be a real pain if you haven't spent years training on how to handle situation like Maddy's.

Melanie E.