A colleague’s computer crashed, and he’s having the IT department wipe and reinstall the operating system and the software on it. But the Microsoft Office suite is old (2002), and they want the recent package … but not too recent. They’ve standardized on Office 2003 but are about to move to Office 2007, so I was instructed to buy Office 2007, with a downgrade to the 2003 license, so they can install 2003 and upgrade to 2007 when the time comes. (Confused yet?) Since he already had the 2002 software, this was like Stokes scattering (a kind of Raman transition). Upgrade 2002 to 2007 and immediately downgrade to 2003. If we weren’t going to upgrade later, the intermediate state didn’t have to be a real product.

“Do this through Dell,” I am told. (Oh, frabjous day. I love Dell) So I tried to find this on their website — no good. I find out that there’s a special phone-ordering process: I have to call a number and choose a particular option, The, type in the extension of a particular customer rep, at which time I will be told that the customer rep is on maternity leave. At the end of that message, choose a particular option, that will take me to the customer rep who can help me. The only things missing were a red flag in the planter and a dead-drop.

But that’s not the whole story. Software and hardware have to comply with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which means that it has to be accessible to those with disabilities. So I check the government’s compliance database, and Office 2007 isn’t listed. I have to go to Microsoft’s website and find it, and each of the programs in the site are listed separately — they total about 30 pages, which have to be printed out and included with the order paperwork. Every time someone orders the software. You’d think that for standard software, there would just be a master list that’s stamped “approved,” just to save everyone time and paper and toner, but you’d be wrong. That would make too much sense.

I read the fine print, though, and it turns out the software isn’t fully compliant. One of the requirements to allow people with certain vision-related problems to use the software is “Software shall not use flashing or blinking text, objects, or other elements having a flash or blink frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz.” Microsoft’s response is

Minor exceptions in Office Excel 2007 involve minor flickering issues within components such as: formula bar, charts, text boxes, the Page Layout View (PLV) mode in Office Excel 2007.

Additionally, some dialogs in Office Excel 2007 have display issues when loading in a Windows Vista™ environment.

That’s right — there are more problems when running in Vista. At least I got a laugh out of this whole episode.