Share thisMy goal in writing this article is to attempt to make some folks, possibly quite a few, uncomfortable – hopefully in a good way. While this is being written for the lab animal community, I submit that it may have much broader application.
A book I read some years ago said there are basically three types of people: those who can help you, those who can hurt you, and those who don’t make any difference. After more than twenty-five years of dealing with computer technology, both in and outside of laboratory animal medicine and biomedical research, I have come to the conclusion that software applications fall into those same three categories – they either help you, hurt you, or they have little or no impact one way or the other.
In the case of software applications, the category they fall into is often more a matter of perception and attitude than that of reality, and it is the differences between perceptions, attitudes, and reality that determine whether we are happy, unhappy, or indifferent to what computer technology (or anything else) brings to life.
It is attitude that either facilitates or impedes worthwhile outcomes. A negative attitude can make an objective, even a worthwhile one, difficult or even impossible to achieve. There was a famous cartoon strip called Pogo that ran from 1948 to 1975. A now famous quote from that series appeared in a 1971 cartoon satirizing environmental problems. It states, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”