Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Working with Change

I have been defeated by Microsoft Word 2010.  Specifically whatever they changed about mailing labels since the last time I had to enter data in for mass mailings.  This isn't even for me.  I was trying to help out the outlaws with some golf course promotional thing because they basically finance my life and I am a strategic nice person.

I spent an hour sifting through Googled pages of list in the teensiest fonts you can think of which made me wonder if I am on the edge of needing reading glasses.  But I entered them into the wrong label template and I'm not exactly sure what in the world you have to do to convert one label format to the other but whatever it is seems to be beyond my technical capabilities because ohmygod I still haven't figured it out and I'm probably going to have to cut and paste all this crap into some stupid Excel spreadsheet and do a mail merge which I never remember mastering from my  9 to 5 days and if I had the envelopes in front of me I would actually rather address all 90 of them by hand because cutting and pasting that much information between applications is tedious as hell and the five phone calls I ignored from my mother in law last night inquiring about my progress didn't help calm my frustrated feelings of complete incompetence even though I don't have to do any of this and I'm just trying to be helpful because the more money the golf course brings in the less they guilt me about everything under the sun and the one hour I spent entering information turned into four more hours of editing and I went to sleep last night still trying to puzzle this out as my head hit the pillow.

And I haven't figured it out yet.

And I can't talk to my mother in law about it because she's just going to hover with all sorts of unhelpful suggestions and absolutely no specific nouns or verbs because the reason I even took this project on was that I tried to talk her through Microsoft Word over the phone and she couldn't figure that out.  Not talk her through data entry mind you, talk her through simply opening the program and starting a new document.  Sometimes it amazes me that this woman runs millionsomething dollar companies.  "Oh...Silverrrrr... can't you do that thing...where you make that...you know...and then just...what if you take...shit, I don't know dick about none of it...I'll let you figure it out." and she flits about my kitchen in an ineffective melodramatic panic, making distracting tear-her-hair-out motions as if in sympathy when all I really want her to do is just be quiet and let me try to solve this problem.

I will not be defeated by stupid Microsoft Word 2010 dammit.  this is ridiculous.

In other news, I tried to go browsing around the home improvement store looking for stuff for the Tween Dream room.  I realized shopping is much less of an adventure when you know exactly what you want.  Very many less daydreamy "ooooh...what if...maybe" moments and a lot more flat out No's.  Carpet: blue.  Ceiling fan: one without all the "walnut" and antiqued brass filigree that I can change the light bulbs without dismantling the whole thing.  Paint.  Paint is the only thing I got daydreamy over but that was more because I was shopping for my space (the Vault?) rather than the boys' new room.  I think I'm going with yellow but with the same saturation as the salmon in the kitchen so it's more of a goldenish color.  Japanese Koi is the name.  I'm not in love with the name.  but I figure if I could get past painting my bedroom Sassy Lilac I can certainly stomach Japanese Koi.  I'll equate it to my newly discovered acceptance of sushi as a food group.  There has to be some symbolic significance there. 

Oh also, I have a lovely opportunity to combine remodeling adventures and my outlaw-related frustration: I get to knock out plaster walls with a sledgehammer.  sweet.

5 comments:

JayRo said...

I once went to my Mom's office to help her 'make a CD' from some pictures she'd saved. At the end, I told her to reach down to eject it from the tower-thingy and she said "don't I have to rewind it first?"
:) I laughed till she actually told me, in her nicest North Carolina southern-belle voice, to SHUT UP.

Silver said...

Priceless. Yes, this is exactly the mentality I'm dealing with. and she just called AGAIN to see how it's going. ugh.

Anonymous said...

I'm hoping the apocalypse will arrive before I have to switch over to Office 2010 at work. It's bad enough that I have to use it at home. Thank god the survival of our species does not depend on our ability to outwit the machines. I've seen Terminator, that scenario does not go so well for us.

Silver said...

Yeah, consider me Sarah Connor at this point. I'm on my way to a padded cell.

Kevin McKeever said...

2010! I'm still trying to figure out the changes they made in 2007 and I've had it for three years.