AAAAAARGH!!!!!

It's days like this when I can truly appreciate Dilbert.

I had to create a new document today (one of those documents I have to sign with the fancy pens that I mentioned last week), and I opened up the most recent one I had written so I could use it as a template. These things have a specific format you have to use, and a lot of biolerplate language, so it makes life a lot easier if you don't have to start from scratch.

So anyway, I make a copy of the old document, and start to go through it to cut out what I'm not going use, and I notice something weird - the pagination is all wrong. There are page breaks where there shouldn't be any, and no page breaks where there should be. Gah? What the hell? I realized that my secretary had, for some unknown reason, gone in and changed all the page breaks when I had only told her to make one other, unrelated change.

The worst part is that I didn't check through it before I signed it, because it didn't occur to me that she would ever do such a thing. It's not fatal - probably the worst that will happen is that it will get rejected by the office it was submitted to because of improper format, and we'll have to resubmit it - but it makes me look like an idiot, because it has a little table of contents at the beginning that says "section X starts on page A, and section Y starts on page B, etc.," and it's totally wrong.

Also, she's out sick today, so I can't tell her that she probably shouldn't be making substantive changes to anything without telling me, and it's just making me more and more aggravated the more I sit here and worry about it. It's not really her fault, since they actually changed the required format of this type of document, and she probably assumed I had done things wrong, but the idea that she would make the changes she did without telling me is the truly irritating thing.

Aargh.

On top of that, I've been agitated all day because my company unveiled their new website today. They touted it as this wonderful, glorious thing, and a vast improvement over the old site. Except, it totally sucks, in so many ways. Without getting too specific, it's the kind of site that is so poorly designed that it actually makes you angry as you try to navigate it. You'd think expensive marketing consultants would know a thing or two about design, or at least that they should have enough sense not to create a site that is so aesthetically offensive that it pisses people off. But I guess not.

The great pen controversy

It was much to my great chagrin that I discovered recently that my company has suddenly stopped ordering all the various pens we used to stock, and replaced them all with cheap stick ballpoint pens, in order to save money. I don't know about you, but I am very particular about the pens I use. I detest anything larger than a fine point, don't like very heavy or very light-weight pens, don't like those rubberized grip thingies, etc.

However, more importantly, the work I do requires a lot of signatures on various documents, and we have to keep photocopies of every one of these documents, and the copies have to clearly show the signatures. So here's the problem - ballpoint ink just doesn't photocopy well at all. Also? I've lost nearly all my good pens (at least, all the ones with blue ink, which is the color you are supposed to use for original signatures, so they can be easily distinguished from the copies).

This was very upsetting to me. So I bitched to the office manager, and amazingly, he actually agreed to buy me my own special box of rollerball pens to use for signing. But of course, it was all super-secret-hush-hush-don't-tell-anyone-else-or-they're-all-going-to-want-the-special-pens. And I better hope no one steals them from me (as I suspect has already happened, since I used to have, like 15 of the good pens, and I now have only two, and I know I lose them sometimes, but I don't think I've lost that many), because I doubt he's going to buy me any more after this one time.

He also told me how much money they saved by buying the cheap pens, and told me how much they'd spent in total in the last year. It works out to approximately $200 per person. Do you know how many pens that amounts to, especially when the pens are bought in bulk, not retail? A whole fucking lot of pens, is what. Either the office manager is lying, or there are a lot of people here pilfering pens, because no one could possibly go through that many pens, no matter how much work they may claim they are doing.

In other news, I made a new food invention. I decided to just get a small soup for lunch today, since I'll be having a big dinner tonight at my parents house. It's kind of a pre-Thanksgiving family dinner, since regular Thanksgiving tomorrow will be a huge extended family affair with all sorts of aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot. So anyway, I'm eating my small soup, and I finish the crackers that came with it, when I remember that I still have that bag of Cape Cod potato chips in my desk from yesterday's lunch meeting that for some reason I hadn't eaten yet. I know, hard to believe, that a bag of chips could just sit in my desk without being eaten, but it's true.

I didn't really feel like eating the chips on their own, but instead decided they might be tasty in the soup. It was minnestrone soup, by the way, and actually wasn't too salty, unlike most restaurant soups (because if it had been really salty already, it would have been a little too much to add the salty chips too). And let me tell you, chips in soup? Really good. I know people who put chips in sandwiches (which is just weird), and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has put chips in soup, but it's no one I've ever heard of, so I'm claiming it as my invention.

Feel free to use my brilliant new idea to your heart's content. Just remember to send me any appropriate royalties.

Aaargh!!!!

This will teach me. From now on, compose important entries offline and then post into Blogger.

Why does this happen again and again, and yet I don't learn?

I had this whole entry typed out about the great irony over the fact that I had posted this ridiculous entry the other day, and then today ran into the last guy I had dumped, and how it was hysterically funny.

I just couldn't get over myself about it, actually.

Perhaps you had to be there.

Anyway, I go to post the thing, and Blogger craps out on me! And I lose the whole thing! Bastards!

Yeah, yeah, I know I don't pay for this site, and I should be grateful I have it at all. But shit, man, I want to whine about it, and I'm going to, dammit.

That is all.