Friday 1 November 2024

The Tabs Story

This week in Colorado....the chief person in charge of the automation voting machines....goofed up and gave out a Excel spreadsheet, which had the passwords to each individual machine in the state.  For  a while, it was public knowledge....at least until they changed the passwords.

How she goofed-up?  Well...in Excel, you can have tab, after tab, after tab....in one single document.

I worked once with a female contractor (over 20 years ago)....who had gone off to a Excel class or two.  She came back in this Jesus-like manner....being a wizard at using Excel.

I needed some data one day, and she came to give me a copy of some document.  I noticed right away.....there were a dozen tabs to the document.

She had gone way beyond the expectation of our gov't agent (the boss)....having  literally thousands of bits of information built into this document and the stupid tabs.

It came to me one day....that she was just one of hundreds of thousands around the globe....who were inserting tabs, and doing massive calculations with sometimes marginal or useless information.  

Did this Colorado gal even know what this tab was or the significance of the passwords?  I doubt it.

It's just funny how technology has become some 'pain-in-the-ass' for society.  

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