Hey, lady.
You’re really very nice. I appreciate the levity you bring into the office, you seem to be a good and interesting person and all that.
BUT, your adamant refusal to contemplate learning anything at all about how to operate your computer, combined with your grand ambition to have your document appear on the website exactly according to your particular wants, is causing me an enormous headache.
It’s a big job, yes, and I’m very happy to help you with it. But I think both your time and my time would be better served if you would just open your mind a teeny little bit.
Hyperlinks are very easy to make. Hilight the word, right-click, pick ‘hyperlink,’ paste your link, click ‘Okay.’ This strikes me as substantially easier than hilighting the word in yellow and underlining it, pasting the link beside it along with the text “cowgirl, insert this link,” and then me creating the link, then removing the text, hilight and underline. Dontcha think?
I think, no, I am certain that if you spent even half the time you spend talking about how you don’t know how it works, and you want it to be user-friendly, and this, and that, and the other, and how you don’t know how to do it, and you want this, and the other thing, and blah blah blah, and can I clarify this, and can you get back to me on that, and so on, if you even spent half that amount of time learning how to do it yourself, this thing would have been done weeks ago. I’m quite happy to help you with the more difficult things. But 'know what? You are making things far, far more difficult than they need to be.
And if I tell you that a link in your document isn’t working, don’t you think it’s easier to find the correct link yourself, than to ask me to find what I guess might be it (since it’s your document, after all, on a subject I know almost nothing about), which involves pasting the phrase into Google, bookmarking the result, waiting for you to come round and confirming that it’s the page you want, and then replacing the link?
Also, and this isn’t really about your computer skills necessarily, if you give me thirty or so documents to link together, I’m not likely to see a bit of hilight at the bottom of one of these pages, with a correction you think should be made, if you don’t tell me that it’s there. It’s pure luck that I found it and I hope there aren’t more.
Now, I know that you want the document to be user-friendly to people ‘like you.’ Well, I don’t know how to put this gently but I fervently hope and pray, and have good reason to believe, that there is nobody in this organization with lower levels of computer skills than you. Nobody. Not even the people who call me to ask questions that are answered with ‘Follow the link on the first page of our website;’ not the people who still use WordPerfect because they’re scared to learn Word, requiring me to create and post documents that I can’t even read because I don’t have WP; not the people (yes, more than one) who called me because they couldn’t print the attachment I sent them, because it was on legal size paper and their printer defaults to letter; not the woman who messed up the letterhead template I made by saving her own stupid efforts at a memo on the .dot file instead of a regular one, repeatedly. Most people know how to print picture files; if they don’t, they should (a) not have the job in the first place, or (b) ask just about anybody else in their office. I do not want to spend the day trying to figure out how to change the printing properties for this one insignificant picture just in case people don’t see the ‘Fit to Page’ button on the printing screen.
Finally. I know it’s much easier to navigate the document when it’s in HTML. Problem is, with my capabilities combined with my software’s capabilities, it looks freakin’ ugly. Acrobat files are much prettier, and smaller, and easier to print. And, since you want people to be able to print at the click of a button, I have posted your entire document in .pdf, so it’s there already. But you are worried that when someone clicks on a link they will not be able to find their way back to where they originally came from, so Acrobat is not an option. So now I have to make 3 (three) copies of each and every section of your document, and with each tiny correction (which are numerous, considering that you don’t tell me where they are, and let me find them myself) requires me to re-save, twice, each section that I change.
Gah ! This is doing my head in. I am not a computer person. These tasks are not in my job description. I am hopelessly unqualified to do this; unfortunately, with the calibre of people in my office, I am the most qualified one here. I do appreciate the learning opportunity, though (and I really appreciate the help of the IT people, whose job I know isn’t to provide me with help on this kind of thing), and I can’t figure out a way to put all this trouble-shooting and problem-solving I’m doing on my resume !
Well, nuff respect to you people who have to do this kind of thing every day. As of this afternoon (touch wood), when the document goes up on the site (again, touch wood), I should never have to do this again.
I see things that I don’t know as a challenge, not something to be proud of not knowing.
I can use Acrobat.