Now *that* was strange...

[John Esak]

We
We were talking in the room the other day when up pops some Arabic script on
the participants list. Then we hear the most broken English ever spoken...
I said the only couple words I know in Arabic (which amount to Welcome and
we are happy to have you...") and the guy takes off in more broken English
... but obviously laughing at my terrible pronunciation.  it was so strange
seeing the Arabic squiggles come up on the user who was typing... that I
wanted him to stay around for a bit... so I called our plant in California
where I know there are a couple guys who speak Arabic, and one of them
logged into the room quick. Boy, you should have heard this guy then ... he
talked for about 10 minutes in 100mph Arabic.. and then the other guy did
likewise... this went on for about 10 minutes.... Then the guy who I had
determined earlier was from Saudi Arabia  thank me a couple more times in
broken English and broken typing... then clicked off.  We anxiously awaited
the news from our translator  that this guy had been using filePro for 25
years  in Saudi Arabia without anyone to talk to... not even a Radio Shack
manager... :-)  ... IN comes the news that the man was sorry but he entered
the room by mistake. He was looking for a real room... he wanted to rent one
somewhere in Los Angeles I think.  Too bad... mark this one off the Worked
All Countries list for filePro. :-)

Still, for those of us in the room it was pretty exciting to hear what was
obviously well educated Arabic flying back and forth. The most exotic we get
is a couple of Aussies and a guy from Denmark about once a week. Oh yeah,
and Rafael Bromett from the Caribbean (now in Norway... once in awhile.
Well, then there was the guy who spoke mainly Spanish last Saturday who used
MS-DOS FilePro which had been installed on his computer in 1995 and he was
using only it since then... he had 3 choices on his menu. It worked all the
time to store his clients and some comments... and when I asked him what
version of filePro he was using... he said, "What is filePro?"  You can
imagine how the next two hours went. I finally got him working again and he
thinks I'm a miracle man because I got his file re-indexed on his new XP
machine....  I thought MS-DOS was NOT supposed to work on XP... but it
was... it did... odd, huh?


Those of you who haven't tried the FP Room yet... give it a whirl. Usually
the morning from 7am to about 11am is very active and then about 5pm through
'til  11pm and longer at night.

      www.tinyurl.com/97y9u

John Esak

P.S. Once you have been in the room at least 1 time... thereafter, if you
want to put a shortcut to it on your desktop, put this:


     iv4:\\server=12.44.56.168&room=5ace66b2&user=YourName&pass=/

Then, you are just a click away from talking with other folks about filePro,
your problems, your ideas, the history of Mars, food, children's toys, food,
new technology, food, and other stuff, but once in a while even processing
tables. If you catch me there, I am usually willing to throw up a processing
table which you might need... or work out a routine with you that isn't
working too well, etc. Everyone who frequents the room is willing to do
this.. and there are some real experts always on hand. Jim Asman, for
example is there a lot... and he is a world class HP PCL guru... need a
special form printed through filePro?  Really special? Talk to Jim. Bar
coding, talk to Jim.  Other filePro types like Tony Ryder and Richard Kreiss
hang out a lot.   Didn't mean this to turn out to be a plug for the  FP
Room, but like to keep everyone up to date