Posted by Racer on June 24, 2004, at 11:03:44
In reply to Re: Venting frustration about a computer issue » Racer, posted by NikkiT2 on June 24, 2004, at 2:23:09
There's two kinds o' peeple in this world, my girl: them as can program, and them as can write...
Problem is, they can't seem to get the two skills together very well!
When the Computer Center shut down -- and don't tell me I wasn't irreplaceable, they gave up and shut down when I left -- they let me take any of the reference materials I wanted, as well as giving me copyright on all the class handouts I'd written for them. I've got a TON of Access material, because we had so many requests for classes in it. I could never come up with a way to structure the class that would fit our program, although I did offer privately arranged classes in special cases.
When my husband gets his own monitor and I can have this one back; and when I get my computer fixed -- if it can be -- after one of his finest moments that still REALLY upsets me; I'm going to reload my Corel Office Suite, and pretend that this whole thing never happened.
(By the way, if the whole MS Office thing sounds personal to me, it goes WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY back. In another life, I was an accountant, and used first VisiCalc, then it's daughter product SuperCalc. I loved those programs, and didn't particularly care for Lotus. Ancient history, huh? Anyway, we got a new Controller, who had SuperCalc removed from all our computers, saying that, no matter what we thought, there was support available for Lotus that SuperCalc couldn't provide, and therefore we were dropping it.)
(Last part, funny story about the result: I was transferring my payroll spreadsheet to Lotus and ran into a problem. I called Lotus support. The first guy listened to what I was trying to do, said, "Lady, our program doesn't do that." I said, "Look, I'm trying to do A, B, C." He said, "But our program doesn't do A, B, OR C." I told him, "I've got it doing A, it's almost doing B, but I can't get it to try C." Him: "Oh, yeah, right: I'm telling you, Lotus doesn't do A, let alone B or C. If you say it's doing A, tell me how? Huh?" You can imagine the tone, right? So I tell him how I've gotten A to work, and his tone changes -- "Huh, yeah, that *would* work, wouldn't it? Hang on a sec -- Bob, get over here, you gotta hear this one!" I ended up on the speaker phone with three support guys at Lotus, explaining how I was getting their program to do what I needed it to do -- and I mean formula line by line, macro line by line, etc [pre-internet days] -- and the three of them sounding stunned that they hadn't thought of these things, and "wow! That really would work!" The end result was it couldn't work on that computer with that program, because there just wasn't enough memory available, nor could it handle the calculations with that processor. Mind you, it had worked just find in SuperCalc... That *was* a funny experience, and once they were all on the telephone it was more fun than frustrating for me. And man I felt vindicated when I got to tell that controller that the working SuperCalc routine was impossible on Lotus!)
Good luck with your new project, Miss Nikki. I am in awe of anyone who can truly manage a relational database. I can do the basics like creating mailing lists and billing cycles, but the real thing has always been beyond me. I tip my hat to you.
poster:Racer
thread:359515
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040619/msgs/359767.html