Computers make perfect slaves. They do exactly as they’re told, with near perfect reliability. They are so obedient they’ll even carry out instructions that are harmful, like deleting files you didn’t intend to.

I had a user recently send out some Word documents with tracked changes that weren’t accepted, resulting in receivers getting document with the changes highlighted on the screen. They had turned off the display of the updates on their machine, and were unaware that the changes hadn’t been properly merged. Of course, they’re insistent that the computer is at fault.

Mistakes do happen when users and computers work together, but they’re always made by the one with the brain.