How Pimpzilla Saved the Day!
Among my variegated responsibilities at work, I am in charge of maintaining a productive network environment. At the top of the corporation's priorities is a clean, uncompromised desktop for all employees, which is made excruciatingly difficult to maintain due to widespread usage of AOL, Internet Explorer, and a host of insecure browsing habits.
I was given the go-ahead for migrating to FireFox. It was initially heralded as the best thing since Adware; far and wide you could hear the "Ooos" and "ahhhs" especially in reference to how fast FF rendered corporate sites. The first week of zero malware on the 50-odd workstations was cause for a company-wide paid lunch by the boss.
Yet all was not well. One of the more vocal employees was hell-bent against FireFox. This vivacious female managed to convince fully a fourth of the employees to pester me enough to migrate them back to Internet Explorer. Why? Well, no reason after I added the Mozilla ActiveX extension. She just didn't like change.
I resorted to an arguably false-flag tactic: the Internet Explorer Theme. The vast majority of our employees never change preferences, and thus would be unaware of the change. But not our rebelrouser. She was constantly trying to pin on FireFox every single website error any one would ever have. Site being DDoSd? FireFox did it! Computer crash? FireFox did it! She seemed to spend more time running around the company talking smack about FireFox than she did answering the phones, lol.
Today she started talking to me about burning CDs for her. She mentioned the word "pimping" when viewing a site and I jumped at the opportunity! The other day, Mark introduced me to the a certain theme. You can jump to the spolier post here. I went, "Hey! Do you want to see FireFox's Pimping theme?!" She goes, "YA!" and immediately fires up FireFox -- this shocked me.
I proceed to install the FireFox Pimpzilla Theme. She *loved* it. I mean by love I mean jumping up and down, hands on face, calling her friend on the cell phone, love. That was just the front page :p When I showed her the preference page she exclaimed, "IT'S A BENTLEY!" While I knew this was a car, I had no idea what a bentley actually looked like until this exact moment, heh.
While I always considered fixed-position/content 'themes' to be a novelty item -- as opposed to Winamp 5's dynamic themes -- this week has decisively corrected this flawed notion in my mind. Some people *really* love themes. That said, I think I've created a monster :o When I started typing this, she asked me where she could get more themes, so I pointed her to mozdev. Now i'm getting questions like "How many themes can I put on my computer?" heh.
hope