Some Days in the Life - April 29, 1999

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On the other hand, the athletic department is loving this. No games rained out and the students aren't tearing up the fields by running. Which just goes to show that every curse and every blessing has the seeds of its opposite within it.

This is being typed up a little later than usual. My 8:30 am 1-hour-long meeting took me to 11:15, and I've spent "lunch" actually doing my morning work. So, now's the chance I get to actually assemble and produce the journal. Fortunately, a certain amount of the journal got typed up yesterday afternoon -- I try for a single point of "publication" in a day, so people don't have to flip back and forth to see updates. Mostly because I assume people won't flip back and forth, so why bother doing updates to existing pages in the first place?

The meeting was an exercise in restraint, involving both a foundation that gives us money and two parents of students. It went as well as a meeting of "agendas" can possibly go. As I told Eileen and Alan after the meeting, I feel like I've run a marathon, which is better than feeling like I've been in a prize fight.

There is something about computers that makes people believe they know the truth. Especially people who aren't in the Information Technology field. It's Monday Morning Quarterbacking at best -- if they were the coach, this stuff would be done right, by God. Especially people who actually have a computer in their business. They then know this is the right way to do something, because that's how they do it, and their Insurance Company with three workers and the Internet Connection would obviously work the same way as a school with six hundred computers running its own domain and networking services. Clearly. They know this to be true. Period.

I have more conversations like this....

Yesterday was a productive afternoon involving far too many pieces of paper. I got that weird "dry fingers" feeling you get from handling particularly absorbent paper, like our school Requisition forms.

Our req. forms are three part carbonless paper. (Which, for reasons that were never fully explained to me when I worked at Kinko's, are called NCR paper. NCR? Non-Carbon Receipt? Not Carbon Record? No Current Relevance?) These are very dry to touch and work with and fill out. Now, I have a computer and a very powerful computer network, so I've rarely if ever written notes on paper since I got here. I just don't see the point of it. I have a computer. Forms are simple to develop on computer, and keep better records. Every employee of this school has access to a computer, generally with Filemaker Pro on it.

But to buy anything, we need to fill it out on NCR paper.

We're putting in the orders for next year's Powerbooks, plus other Apple products and the like. I can't just write the total on a req. and attach the spreadsheet to it, though. Even though it's all one order, and it's all written out coherently there, and all the data is correct, and I can make multiple clean copies of it, that's not the form.

To do the form, I need to rewrite every bit of information on a req. Broken down by "office" that's getting it. So, despite the fact that we're ordering faculty powerbooks and "sustaining" powerbooks for next year, at the same time, in the same budget, I need to fill out two forms detailing all the costs and specs. One for faculty. One for sustaining. In three parts, I'd add.

It gets worse. I need to do a req. for each class of students. Freshman, Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors/Post-Graduates. So, that's four reqs that all get submitted for things ordered at the same time. In addition to the two reqs for the faculty and sustaining.

We're ordering 20 iMacs. 10 for the Journalism lab. 10 for the Business Office as part of a project. Two reqs.

We're ordering four identical minitowers for four different offices. Four reqs., identical except for the name at the top.

My hand still hurts.

This is my first day of actually "composing" in GoLive -- typing this page up in the program from "scratch." (Off the correct template, that is). It's nice and smooth and unobtrusive. We have a winner. I ordered GoLive on yet another req. yesterday -- multiple copies. I can't wait to get it on other peoples' machines. Some people will love it. Some people just won't care what they use, so they'll use it. Still others will demand it and then never touch it.

All of these people make up the tapestry of my world. I like pleasing that many people for that many irrelevant reasons. Sort of like posting this journal. Gary said it was nice that old friends of his were keeping journals -- he felt like all of a sudden, he was a part of their lives again. Some people like these things because they're judges of mood for folks. Still others like the sheer voyeurism of peeking into someone's thoughts.

That's right. I see you. Cheeky monkey.

Some of the folks in the office are going shopping this afternoon. If I weren't so behind from that meeting, I'd join them. Buuuut today I need to make sure all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted, so I expect I'm going to stay. Which really means I should close this up and get back to it. So, until tomorrow....