Edit: I still cannot land a plane.
Originally posted July 1, 2014 on AIXchange
As I’ve noted previously, I work with Boy Scouts. Recently I took a group of boys to an airport to work on their aviation merit badge.
We found a pilot who was willing and able to spend time on a Saturday with the troop. He invited the scouts to visit a maintenance and training facility and spend time on an airplane simulator.
Although he had interesting information to share, I quickly figured that, as a pilot, he hadn’t spent a lot of time creating PowerPoint presentations. Prior to taking the scouts to the hangar so they could learn how to conduct a pre-flight inspection of an aircraft, he showed them a presentation covering the merit badge requirements. At one point, he clicked on what he hoped was a link to a video, but it turned out he had inadvertently made a screen capture of the video rather than an actual link to it. (Not that this issue wasn’t easily addressed; he ended up going directly to YouTube and showing us things like this.)
But indeed, our pilot guide did admit that he hadn’t used PowerPoint in years. On top of that, during the presentation, the overhead projector had an issue. For those of us who spend our time in meetings and conference rooms, fixing projector issues is second nature. Once again though, he wasn’t immediately sure what to do.
All of us — even the scouts themselves — were pretty smug about our computer and projector knowledge at this point. Then we went into the next room and got into the simulator. Long story short: I’m not cut out to land an airplane, or even to keep one riding smoothly through the air. So we all have our different skills. Frankly, as long as my pilots are experts at flying, I’ll excuse their shortcomings when it comes to using software programs and projectors.
Of course the scouts, most of whom have considerable experience with computer games, made me feel even more inept on the simulator. A lot of those kids had a pretty light touch on the airplane controls and managed a reasonably good landing on the first try.
As an AIX pro, I’m generally surrounded by others with similar professional backgrounds. Quite possibly, it’s the same for you. But we should all keep in mind that while most people need computers to do their jobs, they don’t live and breathe technology the way that many of us do.
Ultimately, my day at the airport reminded me that, even if most people don’t know computers like we do, we’re far from the only smart folks out there doing challenging, technical work. And thank goodness for all these people and their unique specialties, because you really wouldn’t want to see me at the controls of your plane.