I got lumbered with a really boring, dense job this week. I have to take a bunch of files, convert them to other files, open them up, make niggling superficial corrections to them, cross-link them to each other, index them and save the lot to a shared drive. Sounds like a job for Super Batch File, right? Well, no, it needs eyeballs. Doesn’t have to be human eyeballs. Monkey eyeballs would do, if we could keep the hairy little pervs from touching themselves while Human Resources is watching (we’ll keep submitting monkeys until SOMEBODY shows a little restraint).
What really chaps me about repetitive scut jobs is the extra keystrokes I’m forced to make by badly designed software. Extra steps of the “are you sure?” variety. Over a career, I have wasted a thousand times more of my life clicking “yes” to “are you sure?” than I could ever possibly have done by not, in fact, being sure. When CTRL-Z was born, “are you sure?” became the Eater of Time.
It isn’t big problems that shave the years off your life, it’s the irritating little ones repeated ad finitum, minute after hour after day after year.
Remember what George Jetson did for a living? He had this one button, and his job to push it. Over and over. All day long.
That was the gag.
“How was your day, dear?”
“Ow! My button finger is sore!”
Ha ha ha! Idiot! All he has to do is push a button all day, and he’s complaining.
Well, you know what? I’m sorry. I apologize for laughing. I’ve been poking a left mouse button all day long for decades and it’s a damn sight harder than it looks, I tell you. George Jetson did it without cable or an MP3 player or nothing.
The man deserves to be bronzed.
S. Weasel 
2 Comments
Hee! This sounds like one of my jobs that I get to do every few months. What a pain in the ass. Fortunately a large chunk of it is done with MS Excel and I was able to write some programs in VBA to speed & ease the process. You can do things there that normally would prompt the “Are you sure?” button but you can turn it off. Is any part of your process done with any MS Office applications?
Just the beginning. I’m going from Word to .pdf. There are ways to automate parts of this, but they involve expensive software add-ons and don’t save me that much time. It’s a first time for this collection of documents, so I have to make up the naming conventions and change them on the fly if that’s not working and…human being stuff like that. Not very clever human being stuff, but human being stuff all the same.
Ach! There’s another one! Wifi opens a little “I’m connected!” bubble covering the right end of the tool bar that won’t go away until clicked. As my wifi is a little flakey here, I have to poke that sucker all morning if I want to see my system tray.