W r i t i n g Diary
Dedicated to friends who inadvertantly teach me about life.
February 29th, 2004. Sunday. stories/novels set in the early or pre-history times of Mesopotamia Sci-fi basis for future history historical planning similar to Asimov's Hari Seldon (psychohistory)Links for some factual basis http://www.minervamagazine.com/exclusives/jme_iraq/jme_iraq_02.html
February 10th, 2004 Far Rockaway Leffert South Ozone Trinidad Trinidadian Professor of Anthropology
January 9th, 2005. Processor Help Desk App support 'scraper Telemarketer Answering phones, e-mails about software support in a global law office. Scanning documents, typing up hand-written notes, scheming documents, testing new software and hardware within the scope of current work. Supporting people in the local office; supporting people in american offices; supporting people in overseas offices. Learning how to Egdarize documents for posting to the SEC's website, teaching others how to Edgarize. What does it mean to "Edgarize"? What other types of conversion for submitting documents to official government websites? Converting via PDFwriter for bankruptcy and federal courts document filings. Commuting to work in Wheeling, West Virginia. No high-speed commuter rail, no public transportation from home to work, driving 72.5 miles each way in sun, rain, snow, sleet...and dark of night. Coffee at Starbucks, stressful road-rage at high-speed tailgating, pumping gas at all sorts of gas stations (keeping an eye open for bargain-priced gas stations throughout the commuting corridor. Being wary of deer crossing the roadways (bloody carcasses, remnants of car vs. deer, or truck vs. deer encounters, litter the highways of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio). pan4au "G.O.C. Document Services, Damon speaking, how can I help you?" I said, with my stock greeting. "Hi, how do I turn on spell-check for an Italian docoument?" was the question. I hesitated momentarily. As there is a separate Help Desk for all computer related questions, and we technically only actually work on documents, I paused while considering telling the caller this....the question, while pertinent to what I do, was more of a how-to, "please train me" type of question....but since I don't like to turn someone down, and this seems like a quick and easy answer, I responded. Assuming that the caller meant a document in Microsoft's Word program (and we are still using Word 2000), I responded, "Italian is one of the supported languages, so, select all of your text, go to the Tools menu, select Languages, scroll down through the list of languages, and select 'Italian (Italy).' Then click on the "Set as Default button," and click on Ok. Now when you run spell check, it'll using the Italian dictionary." "Hey, wow, that works," the caller said, after following my instructions. "Thank you, Damon!" "You're welcome. Have a nice day." I said, before hanging up...and belated realizing that I hadn't asked what his name was. So that we can document how many and what kinds of calls we take in, we like to document the details of our various calls. Although I'd label this as just a "help desk" call, it's still a call that I could have logged...even though the act of logging it would take as much time as answering the call. "Damon," one of my co-workers called. "Can you talk to the lady about mail-merging?" "Yes," I replied. Why nobody else liked talking someone through mail-merges, I'm not sure. It is a strange process...and it's the closest to actual multi-application programming than most people like to go...but it's pretty simple once you play with it a few times. But, alas, most people, both end-users and help-desk personnel alike cringe at the sound of this document-combination, mailing-label creation process. "Who's calling?" I asked. "It's LoRita, in San Diego. Pick up the 8701, please," Betty said. Betty is our "intake coordinator," answering all inbound calls, answering simple questions (other than mail-merge :-), logging calls in our web-based job-ticket generation program. She's really a smart girl, having recently graduated college in Business Admin....but coming from a small town in the Ohio Valley, without grad school, her current choices are limited. The 8701 line is our main line at the G.O.C. for firm-wide document services. Even though our "global" service is only about two-years old, everyone knows firmwide our line...and some even prefer it to calling the Help Desk for application specific questions, because we don't have an automated phone menu, and we usually answer questions pretty quickly. "G.O.C. Document Services, Damon speaking, how can I help you?" I said, picking up the phone and punching the 8701 line button. "Hi, Damon, I'm trying to merge this form letter with an Excel spreadsheet, and I'm getting error messages. We need to send out this mailing to 8000 clients in the next 15 minutes and the mail-merge is not working right. The partner I work for is standing right behind me...a secretary should be doing this...but they're all at lunch now. Can you fix this?" "Well, let's see. What's your four-letter usercode?" I asked, attempting to establish basis for starting a web-ticket, so that I could link to his personal information more quickly. "M A C R," was the response. "Macr" meant that this was Rob Macgregor, one of the more computer-literate associate attorneys I've dealt with, and actually quite a personable guy...although times of business pressure make anyone anxious to get the job done. I typed his initials into the usercode field on a new web-ticket, and pressed the tab key. As the cursor tabbed over to the next field, his full name, office, office phone, primary field of law and a host of other auto-fill information popped up. I clicked the radio-button for "Word" and the next button for mail-merge (certain parts of the form auto-load as radio-buttons are selected
