It is not the spoon that bends
For those of you not familiar with the situation, in the latest release of Mac OS X, Apple reversed the scrolling action. Your scrolling wheel or your two-finger trackpad drag go in the opposite direction. Cruel joke, right? Did they swap the left and the right buttons on the mouse, too?
This reminds me of a story.
I was summoned to the CEO’s office to help with some kind of issue she was having with her Mac. Probably something fairly difficult, because she was already a ‘power user’ and a programmer, not to mention a self-taught mechanical engineer.
As most of us with any kind of technical skill know, the temptation in these sort of situations is to simply take over the mouse and keyboard, because you know you’ll be able to solve the problem so much faster. But I find it’s always valuable to keep your own hands off the computer, and instead relay instructions verbally (and by occasional pointing at the screen), while explaining what’s going on and your own thought process, each step of the way. Even if the other person doesn’t want to do it this way, even if they say ‘why don’t you just do it for me?’, you should still have them perform the actions, because it empowers them, and they will almost certainly benefit from having done this in the future, even if not in a way that either of you expect.
But for whatever reason, in this case, I did the wrong thing and took over the mouse and keyboard.
I clicked around for a few seconds confusedly, feeling that something was wrong. Context menus were appearing out of nowhere. The computer wasn’t doing what I told it to. Finally, I figured out that I needed to left-click on the right side, and right-click on the left side - this despite the fact that the user was right-handed, and the mouse was on the usual (right) side of the keyboard. But even after figuring this out, I still found it very difficult to continue, and kept clicking the ‘wrong’ side by accident.
Finally: ‘Your mouse buttons are backwards’, I somewhat stupidly informed her of something she obviously already knew.
Having been watching me, she quickly responded: ‘No; you’re backwards.’
It has taken me a while to realise that the people who are best to work with are those who do not hesitate to make drastic changes to their habits when they discover a better way.
Think different.