Are office people really that, umm shall we say...slow?

Too true... my brother-in-law was doing a C++ course earlier this year and sent me one of his assignments to have a look at. Imagine my horror when I looked at the bit of code his teacher had given him to work from and the first 5 lines were "#include <whatever.cpp>" ... There have been an alarming number of interviews where I've asked a graddie (who's supposedly been studying Java for a year) what the significance of java.lang.Object was, only to be greeted by incomprehension. What do they teach these people? At least they've moved towards Java now, 5 years ago I used to ask graddies who "knew C++" what a pointer was and get answers like "it's that arrow thing on the screen that you move around with the mouse". And Tony Blair wants to make us a nation of IT excellence :-) Hmmm. -al