Ignorance is no excuse

You know what I find more aggrivating than a lot of things in the world? Having an argument with someone over something that they (admitedly) know nothing about. I'll give two examples:

During the design process of this new site we're working on, there was a huge dispute over what the new site would look like. The higher-ups and people who (admited) they had no graphic design taste demanded that we use a certain design. However, I argued that this was NOT a very good design and we'd be much better off with something more professional looking. And guess what? I got shot down. Now, I don't claim to be any kind of god of web sites, but for heaven's sake, I've been building web sites for 6 years now and I know in my heart that they were making a wrong decision. No voice. They were the experts and nothing I (or other web experts in the company) could say would convince them to change their minds.

Today, I emailed one of our managers the basic template file for this project that I'm working on. You see, there's another component of the site that a freelancer is working on and he needed a template to work with. So, I made a template (and this is where I'll lose all of my non-geek friends): The template included 3 things: A header include statement, a comment tag that says "Content goes below here", and then a footer include statement. Using that template, this guy can make an infinite number of pages and they'll all look the same. This manager wrote back and said, "I don't understand that file. It doesn't work in my browser." Duh. It's not ON the server. You're looking at a local copy on YOUR computer that i emailed you. You're supposed to forward that email to the freelance person so that he can use it to create his portion of the site. She argued that he didn't need the template files, but rather that he needed the actual include files. Wait. What? Why would need the actual include files? There's absolutely NO need for this guy to go in and edit my include files that I spent hours to line up just right. He's got all he needs in having the include statements. She continued to argue that he needed the include files. I tried explaining what an include file was and how it worked and she seemed to understand, so she went away. 15 minutes later, the freelancer guy came and asked for the actual include files. Fine. So, I sent them to him with a message that if he makes any changes to the actual include files that he needs to send me back a copy of them. We'll see what happens.

I'm officially burnt out on doing web stuff for now.