>>Ya know we could write a very humorous book on all our experiences with end-users. But it would probably not sell because the only ones that would appreciate it would be all of us developers, geeks, and computer nerds. Ellen (elsewhere on this particular thread) hit me with a good one as well with her "WinZip is beyond the abilities of most of my users...." quip.
>
>Yeah, I saw that one (good one, Ellen). I don't know how humorous the book would be, however. Might bring up bad memories of dealing with users.

Well, we'd have lots of fun stuff as well. I may remember some good cases, like when a guy travelled half an hour to twist an user's hand (the guy moved the machine from right side of his desk to the left, and had a vertical 5.25" floppy, and inserted the floppies wrong way...).

>When someone does try to design the application interface for me (and is going about it wrong), I usually say something like, "Since you're trying to do my job, do you want me to try to do your's?" with a big grin on my face. That usually gets the point across.

You're just lucky they respect their own jobs - mine usually don't, and (being mostly accountants) they do expect me to do as much of their job as I can. I must apply a different strategy - tell them a list of reasons why their suggestion doesn't look as good as it does at the moment, starting with some obvious reasons like "you need that in this case, but it will be an obstacle to you in all other cases", and (if they don't seem convinced) go into confusing concepts of "overall system stability", "consistency of data", "potential holes in the system" until they begin pretending they understand.