Destined to ?

The Lime Green Project Manager has struck again. He used to be the Lime Green Knight but apparently got tired of jousts and horses and whatnot and promoted himself to Project Manager. Yesterday he arranged a conference call to with Follay to "get answers to our questions." At least that's what the Dots thought. However, instead of arranging a call with someone who actually had answers, LGPM called the Follay collective. "We are Follay. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." The Dots managed to escape without being assimilated. They weren't sure about the LGPM. Maybe he's already been assimilated. Today the LGPM had arranged a "training" for the Dots. It probably would have been more like a real training if LGPM had made sure all of the equipment worked beforehand and had forwarded the training workbook to the trainees, like he was supposed to. Methinks the LGPM needs to go back to being a Knight. After all, Knights have Squires to take care of the horses, polish armor, print out workbooks, make sure the equipment works. When the Dots do training, they make sure the equipment works the day before the training. Of course, they also have a contingency plan because in the Duchy equipment that worked perfectly yesterday doesn't always work today. When Gold and Silver did training they always made copies of the training workbook ahead of time. Maybe LGPM was assimilated long ago.
The Dots did learn something really useful today. With Destiny and the Z39.50 magic ray, you can search the Duchy records and the Library of Congress, all at the same time. And when you find the record you want, you can just save it, instead of the usual sequence of download, count to 100 while Windows hides the file, hunt for the file, and if you can find the file, you get to import it. With Destiny it's just one mouseclick. Wow. That is, in the Wild World it's one mouseclick; in the Duchy, the laws of physicks (and magicks) are different. In the Duchy, electrons don't travel at the speed of light, they travel at the speed of dark. (In case you don't know the speed of dark, it's very slow and falls over things a lot.) In the Duchy, the Z39.50 magic ray can't go through the Duchy walls. Why does the Duchy keep buying technology that they won't allow to operate? We didn't have to pay nearly 1 million dollars for software that the Duchy doesn't want to work. You can buy really cheap library systems that don't have Z39.50. (Actually, you can't. Even free library systems do Z39.50 these days!) Bureaucracies never seem to understand that if you don't want the system to work, you don't have to pay money for it. Since it's not working, you can just pretend that you bought it. A system that doesn't work can be absolutely free, require no power, no floor space, and completely invisible. That would be so much more efficient than paying a lot of money and then having to spend all that time trying to keep the system from working.