Or when the project management consultants ask to see your requirements document and you send it to them in troff and they write back, "I can't open this in Word." Sigh.

One of my pet peeves when I got my first job outside of a university environment was that I was expected to drop all of the tools I'd been accustomed to using and start using "the standard", which basically meant something Microsoft based. Even though I was running FreeBSD on my workstation, and not Windows NT. It was somewhat maddening; whenever I tried to use Windows I felt like I was typing in jello because it was so unfamiliar.

I finally gave up MH for email (and acme Mail under Plan 9) when I realized this whole "web" thing was here to stay and that GMail had acquired a somewhat reasonable user interface, that email attachments were now the norm even within a single organization, and that I wasn't going to get away from any of it. The world moves, even if not always forward. But I still somewhat resent the idea that the "cloud" is forcing me into a specific model of working that requires I learn a mandated toolset that I don't really care for: I'd rather be able to pick and choose the tools that best suit the problem at hand and my style of working and combine them in ways that are useful to me, but that weren't anticipated by the original authors. I think that's sort of the essence of the Unix tool philosophy, but something that's fallen by the wayside, even under Unix, and I think that's a real shame.

        - Dan C.