Monday, October 04, 2004

Microsoft Word Can Kiss My Ass.

My, but it's Monday…

First off, I actually make an effort to be on time. This is foiled by the incompetent fools working in the parking garage where I park my car. Remember, it's valet parking. (Shudder.) This week is jury week at the courthouse, and the courthouse is very near the parking garage. Therefore, all the people who never come downtown and have no idea what they're doing are trying to park in my garage. The attendants in said parking facility are way too busy smoking weed (seriously…one of my co-workers found a pipe in her car) and talking to each other to possibly be bothered with doing their jobs. The cars are backed up down the street and around the corner….so I am sitting in some deluxe gridlock for at least 20 minutes. (This is to go LESS THAN A BLOCK.)

So I finally make it upstairs to my office, and I just have a few little edits to make on some documents which can then be printed and distributed. As I'm finishing the last table in the last document, I get some stupid error message saying that "the table is corrupted." The document was still open, though, and it appeared to be fine. However, it was not fine. When I went to print it, the table decided to re-format itself and replace a large amount of my data with mumbo-jumbo.

Let me backtrack for a moment here and mention that I'm usually the unofficial "tech support" at the office….everyone calls or e-mails me when their software is not behaving. I can usually fix it, too. Not today, kids.

After closing the document (without saving the jacked-up Word-inflicted changes, that is), I rebooted the computer. Document is still fried. I attempt to reformat the table. Sure, it reformatted….but not the part I told it to reformat. We then tried the old "cut and paste data into a new, properly formatted table." Nope. It just put the jacked up formatting in the new table, too.

Time for retyping, friends and neighbors. I hate retyping things. And I hate it even more that the last printed version I have of this document does not contain the stuff I spent all day Friday entering. Can I get a "fuck you, Bill Gates" from the congregation? WordPerfect never does this shit. You can always fix things in WordPerfect. Unfortunately, the WordPerfect makers did not ensure compatibility with Outlook and all the other programs that Microsoft's monopoly forces you to use, so people are switching to an inferior word processing product.

Of course, in the middle of all these technical difficulties, we get an e-mail from our supervisor saying that we need to review all of our data (we review medical records for a class-action lawsuit, and each person doing this job has about 50 people) to determine if they have had a particular type of surgery. We get this communiqué at 9:12 a.m. She wants our answers by 9:50. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, this means reviewing at least 250 pages of documents in 38 minutes. So, of course, I drop everything and do this project, hoping against hope that my document will be mysteriously returned to normal after I close it again. Don't be silly, little girl.

Therefore, I decided to type a brief rant in hopes that it would diffuse some of my feelings of frustration. It's not working. I'm still irritated as hell. One more time, worshipers…"FUCK YOU, BILL GATES."

A postscript: I usually type my entries in the evil program, then cut & paste to post them. I go to post, and diaryland is not working either. I don't even get to officially vent. Grrrr. Can I go back to bed now?

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