Recently, I suffered a slight humiliation at the office of my client. I took advantage of someone’s absence to update a document on his laptop instead of doing the work at home as I normally do. What I hadn’t counted on was that IT had just installed the newest version of MS Office on his computer the day before. The interface was almost completely foreign, and very few of the normal keyboard shortcuts worked! I ended up taking twice as long to complete the work as I might have.

But, the really embarrassing part was when I tried to save my version on the desktop. I searched high and low trying to find the “save as” function in the alien interface, and finally staggered into the hallway and pulled an unsuspecting support person in to help. She didn’t know either, but between us, we figured it out.

The fact that I’d earlier had to help an officemate who couldn’t find the “undo” icon gave me small comfort.

I learned some very good lessons from this experience: one, don’t change things for the sake of change (sounds a little like, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”) and two, be prepared for change.