Once upon a time, not too long ago, a sorcerer who lived in a castle with three guided tours a day, decided to automate his business. He read all the current computer literature. He went to visit one store after another for demonstrations of the latest in modern technology. Finally he made his choice and ordered a system.
It was a big order. The dealer threw in free installation and training for the sorcerer's staff. The fateful day came and three huge trucks bearing the dealer's logo pulled up at the castle gate. Three lackeys in livery lowered the drawbridge and the trucks drove inside. The dealer's staff worked long and hard. By the end of the third day, the system was installed. From his office, the sorcerer could control everything that happened in the castle. He could raise and lower the drawbridge, make the ghosts appear and disappear for the guided tour, conjure up demons and dragons -- in short, do everything he needed to make his guests' tour an enjoyable one.
Automation made everything work efficiently. Everything that is, except the sorcerer's apprentice. The apprentice could not keep the command keys straight. He would confuse Shift + F9 with Option + Shift + F9 and the guests in the pantry would be turned into toads instead of being presented with a complimentary beverage by a ghost in period costume.
This was very disconcerting for the guests and for the sorcerer as well, because he did not figure out what was going on until the third group of guests had been dispatched to the moat by the cleaning subroutine that was programmed to deal with toads in the pantry. The sorcerer had to go out, wade around in the moat to find them all and turn them back into people again. Some of the guests thought that it was part of the tour of the sorcerer's castle and acclaimed it as a unique experience. There was, however, one New York businessman in the first group who kept on saying things about time is money and how much he had lost waiting interminably in the moat to be changed back and threatened to sue. That simply was not good for business.
The sorcerer could not understand what the problem was. His apprentice could easily memorize endless incantations in Latin, Greek and Amharic; what was so hard about a few simple key strokes? The dealer's training people said that this was not a problem, that they dealt with this kind of thing all the time. All that was needed was a short cheat-sheet with all the commands in Latin and the command key equivalents next to them. The apprentice could then just look up what he wanted to do and enter the key strokes.
The sorcerer indexed the list in Latin, and in Greek too for good measure, and gave it to the apprentice. In training, things went well enough: the apprentice only turned two of the dealer's training people into toads by mistake, twice. The apprentice was getting very discouraged by all this and threatened to go work for a less modern sorcerer. The sorcerer really hated to lose his apprentice because the apprentice was so good at Amharic, which is a really hard skill to come by these days, and convinced the apprentice to stay on.
They called in a man-machine interface guru, who studied the problem carefully, calculated the theoretical limits of short-term memory loss under stress and worked out a training program that would have taken the apprentice longer to complete than he had left to serve with the sorcerer. After they got the guru back out of the moat and changed him back into a person, he presented a bill for almost as much as the system cost in the first place and left in a Huff, which looks a lot like a '49 Packard.
They were right back where they started: "Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble" was no problem, but Option + CapsLock + F2 was. That command released a swarm of bats from the belfry instead of having the bells chime the opening bars of Die Fledermaus, which was Shift + CapsLock + F2. As far as the apprentice was concerned, the command keys were worse than Farsi texts, which he only read with great difficulty and after which he constantly had to call off a plague of locusts, because he put the wrong accent on the Farsi word for eye of newt which changed the whole incantation.
Business, on the other hand, was booming. People came from far and near to experience the new castle tour. The unexpected appearances of the castle ghosts, the exotic content of the complimentary beverages, the side trips to faraway places, the attacks by vampire bats and fire breathing dragons seemed to be exactly what the public was looking for. The sorcerer put in a new parking lot; expanded to eight tours a day and was taking in money as fast as the last time he had an alchemist working in the dungeon.
The sorcerer decided to leave things like they were, except that he put a logging printer on-line between the apprentice and the CPU. That way, when a tour group did not arrive at the exit at the prescribed time, and the apprentice said: "I don't know what happened! The computer just went crazy!", the sorcerer could go check the logging printer and find out what they had been turned into and where; change them back into guests and send them on their way.
