Wednesday, April 4, 2018

I might as well have a job


           
For the second day in a row it is early afternoon, and I am so tired I am losing words and thoughts. I don’t like this state of mind.

I went to breakfast today with a friend, who texted before I left, “Put weights in your pockets!” It did rain all day yesterday, and stormed all night. The forty mile per hour wind advisory remains until eight tonight. When I got to the restaurant, the sun was fighting through. When I left, the snow was pouring down.

Breakfast was good old laughter stuff, and I left girded to tackle three jobs when I came home. The first, assimilating the changes in Excel commands in order to straighten out a couple of file transfer errors. Frustrating!  I’ve used spreadsheets since 1979. Why don’t they get easier!

I spent a good deal of time searching Google for my problem and its solution. Once I threw my hands up, gave up, and told my computer wizard I could not drag the job across the finish line. But before he could answer, there was an Ah Ha moment, and I texted “Never Mind!”

Job two was a trip to the phone store, to tell the nice Verizon guy that I owned my last two phones for five years each, and brought each into the store once, to buy the next. Here I was, back with a problem for how many times now? He hadn’t counted, either.

My phone gratuitously butt dials. According to my friend Google, Motorola Moto’s butt dial. There was no solution on Google. I’d at least traced the problem to knowing that when opening the contact list to select someone to call, the list opened to the last call, and sometimes, though not always, called the last person again. Well, he’d never heard of that!

We tested my theory several times, to no avail, of course. But I was not closing the app properly, he said. I was hanging up and returning to home, leaving the last call “open”.  In fact, I should hang up, go to the overview button, clear the call, then go home. This is just stupid. As stupid as the solution to my Excel problem.

Back there, I could not insert a new sheet into a multi-sheet file. Actually I could insert the sheet, but not where I wanted it. The Ah Ha solution was to drag it to where I wanted it. To all you folks out there writing code, this is not the easiest way to get the job done, and not intuitive.  But, who’s listening?

I ran the phone call business past Laura when she came in. “When you hang up and go home, you leave the call open. You should use the back button before home.”  That’s not intuitive, either, but one less step.

Job three was to review the new one year lease management wants everyone to sign. I have twenty two pages of lease, well annotated in red, to present to the office. That will be fun.



26 comments:

  1. You certainly went to battle with multiple issues! It is exhausting for I, too, have taken my wooden sword and charged into computer battles.Congratulations on victories won.

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    1. I never thought of it as flailing a wooden sword. Wonderful metaphor!

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  2. I think i would be all right with the lease...but not with the 'phone...

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  3. No wonder you’re tired. I’m tire just reading this,

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  4. So you're suffering weather too. Your tasks sound damn near impossible to me, not that I have ever been any good on computers. But spreadsheets, give me a break....

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  5. If you can figure out all of that stuff, then you have the IQ of a genius.

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  6. hari Om
    It's why I still have the flipfone; anything else is NOT a phone, it's a phlipping nuisance...
    Will just have to leave you to your spreadsheets. Been a quarter century since I did anything serious with those and I hate to imagine the process now! YAM xx

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  7. Good luck on the lease front. Love the image of you heading into battle that I got from Susan Kane's comment. Spreadsheets (and phones) defeat me often.

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  8. I just want to hang up my phone and be done with it. Maybe I need to get a landline and an old, black rotary-dial phone. That might be exactly right.

    Love,
    Janie

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  9. No, not fun but you got it done. Hurrah. Do I see any trees in your neighborhood?

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  10. Have you had a haemaglobin blood test recently ?

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  11. they expect you not to read the new lease I expect. woe be to them. all you problems are why I stick with Apple even though it is more expensive.

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  12. Should be fun indeed! You had an interesting day, Joanne.

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  13. Soon the warm days will come and all will be well Joanne.

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  14. How I wish I were a fly on the wall when the office gets your "well annotated in red" copy of the lease :)

    Well done on solving the Excel and Moto problems. I think the Excel tends to get more complicated with each new version because they're trying to add features. I never asked for those features and I don't bloody want them! And what is "intuitive" for the coder isn't necessarily intuitive for the user. Not this user, anyhow :)

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  15. My goodness your life is certainly involved in one way or another!

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  16. 22 pages of lease? Holey doughnuts!
    I've never had anything to do with spreadsheets and I'm grateful for that. I think I'd go crazy trying to work them out. At least you had a nice breakfast.

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  17. I put an ad blocker on my computer and now I can't remember how I did it and cannot disable it to view some videos? I've looked for a solution but haven't found one to work yet. lol oh well, 22 page lease omgoodness

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  18. Joanne, it always seems to me that you never have time for a dull moment.

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  19. Having worked on software development I found its benefit is also its problem - modifiable - good that features can be added but bad that the process/interface changes and confuses.

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  20. Lovely post! I'm glad I found your blog via Weaver of Grass.

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  21. Somebody came to the door the other day and offered to "update" my computer. No, it's alright I didn't let him in ... but was very tempted just to give him the damn thing, after battling with some archives.
    Good luck with the landlord!

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