Real life story in 2019!

The secretary came up to the employee in order to ask for his email address and said:

"We will be moving to paperless payslips!"

"No problem," he replied, "I'll bring it in tomorrow!"

Overheard in a small business in the Vendée, January 2019.

As a webmaster, I was surprised by several elements of the conversation:

• Paperless payslips are not yet in place!
• The company doesn't have its employees email addresses!
• The employee didn't know his email address!

The Background

Let me give you a bit of background to better understand my surprise.

I grew up with a computer on hand. We got our first computer at home in 1979. It was (if my memory serves me well) an IBM 5110. This was two years before the first PC entered the market and 5 years before the first Mac. My father was a computer engineer and he encouraged me to "play around" with the computer because he could fix it if I ever did anything to cause it to crash. As a result, I had fun programming the machine by trail and error, discovering the logic of programming languages.

I had my first email address in 1997 and launched my first website in 2000.

What's more, I come from England where most things have been paperless for a number of years. In fact, for about 15 years, most bills and other administrative letters have been sent electronically.

What to do ?

The conversation I overheard last month (quoted at the beginning of this article) helped me realise that a lot of people do not necessarily understand the language of the Internet. In fact, not everyone had the chance (?) to grow up with a computer on hand.

So, to help as many people as I can to find their way around the web, I have decided to publish a number of posts to explain the vocabulary used around the internet that not everybody necessarily understands.

Up to you now !

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