Yes, this really is OT ...
The problem is too many American',
(particularly younger ones that experience our 'excellent' educational
system), have often never travelled that much and experiences other places,
cultures or social norms.
This is very true. I discovered this when, at the age of 18, I came to spend
a year studying in Israel. At that point I realized that Americans are
terribly parochial. ("Whaddaya mean you don't speak English?!? Whaddaya
mean I can't get a hmaburger here?" etc.)
Which brings me to >>my complaint<<. We,
as American's, project so much
about 'us' via TV. The said truth is most Americans are not like what they
see on TV
It's worse than just TV (and movies). It's huge parts of the culture. We
moved to Israel 20 years ago, and on the highways are signs for: Ace
Hardware, Toys 'R' Us, Office Depot, McDonald's ... UPS and FedEx trucks
are common sights. As well as the culture, many of the values (that
I personally moved to Israel to get away from) have seeped in as well.
"Cultural Pollution" wouldn't be too strong a term.
When I run into things like what you just described
(and I seem to run into
then most often with MicroSoft based tools), I think to myself, it must
have been a cold day in Redmond, WA and some programmer did not want to
make an effort to do make her/his solution really general ;-)
I suspect that said programmer didn't even know enough to think about
making it general.
FWIW,
Arnold