Save me from software that tries to outsmart me!
Here I was working on a long document that contains a lot of numbered headings. The author not unreasonably wanted the meat of the headings, but not the numbers, to be underlined. MessyWord knows better: if the content is underlined, the number must be underlined. As I am not yet an expert on MS Word 9x (having used WordPerfect 5.1 for the last dozen years), I gave up and took the underlining out; I never liked it anyway (particularly when, as in one of the headings, it covers more than one line of text) and bold ought to be enough.
Meanwhile I got a plaintive call from my employer (a temp agency) begging me to round my time to quarter-hours. What kind of brain-dead system can’t handle numbers other than multiples of 15? Later it occurred to me that the problem was not so much a lack of resolution as an incompatibility of base: the data entry clerk had to translate manually from m/60 to n/100. But that can’t be the whole story; a few weeks ago they misunderstood “37:20” as “37.2 hours” and still ‘rounded’ it to .25. (Later: “We bill in quarter-hours.” “That’s funny; the lawyers I’m working for bill in tenths.”)
So I’ll write it up with ¼, ½, ¾. And next week I suppose they’ll insist on the bogus precision of “:15” or “.25”.
As a son of a physics teacher, I have just enough science education that this bugs me. Never write more digits than you know! And to a former programmer, accustomed to squeezing out every spare byte (can you tell how long it’s been since I was in the trade?), it’s also wasteful to use two digits for less than one digit’s worth of information.
In illustration of the thesis here, WordPress’s “smart quotes” outsmarts itself: the closing mark of a quoted string that ends in a digit is changed not to “”” but to “″”.