June 5, 1997
Dear Everyone:
Things have been relatively non-hectic at work
lately. I’ve actually gotten
some things done that have been sitting on my To Do List for months,
even years. For instance,
there is a form that people fill out when they send boxes in to be
stored. The form is commonly
referred to as a “GO-88”, or “88” for short.
Presumably, it was the 88th “General Office” form to
be created at Company.
Company has thousands of forms, so this is one of the earliest.
The form was originally set up to match the
computer system (Company Records Management Information System --
“CRMIS”) used to manage boxes.
But a couple of years ago we replaced CRMIS with
Versatile.
So for a couple of years it has been on my To Do List to revise
the form to better match the way information is entered into
Versatile.
This is the kind of thing that you could probably
finish up in a few hours if you could just spend a few hours on it.
But finding “a few hours” without interruptions isn’t that easy.
It’s like trying to find one of the mythical “Round To-It’s”.
I’d work on the form a little here and there, but it always got
put on the back burner whenever something more important came up.
Then, this week, I decided to just hide out somewhere and get it
completed. It’s now
officially off my desk and on someone
else’s To Do List. What
a relief!
Next thing on the hit parade is
Versatile for Windows.
In a few weeks, I’ll be going to a technical conference about this, so
it would behoove me to get more familiar with it.
Plus, I miraculously seem to have time to play around with it.
And to fire off email notes to their technical support to ask why
this does that and how do I do fill-in-the-blank.
V for W comes with on-line help, but it doesn’t seem to be very
helpful. I need to learn it
backwards and forwards before we convert to the new system later this
year. At which time the
GO-88 form will again need to be revised.
What goes around comes around.
Movies...
Saw
Breakdown
with Kurt Russell
and Kathleen
Quinlan. Actually, you
don’t see much of Kathleen.
Yuppie couple in a
brand new Jeep (much
more manly than a station wagon, which is why there are so many of the
miserable things on the highway -- rant, rant) are driving through
Texas (with
Massachusetts
plates)
when their vehicle inexplicably breaks down (see title).
A friendly truck driver offers to take them down the road to call
a tow truck, but the husband elects to stay behind and guard the car.
This is the last you see of Kathleen for quite some time.
Russell plays a regular guy who finds himself
caught up in a nightmare of searching for his wife.
The locals take one look at his designer clothes and write him
off as not worth listening to.
The police are no help (when are they ever in these movies?).
Kurt has to take things into his own hands and find out what’s
really going on.
From this point on the movie’s subtitle could be “Men Behaving
Stupidly”. “Jeannie” kept
leaning over and whispering, “Why is he doing that?”
Answer: Because it’s
in the script.
And Russell’s character isn’t the only one with
more guts than brains. The
reward-to-risk ratio is totally off the wall.
People are seen risking their lives for virtually no reason.
But it does make for good action scenes, as long as you don’t ask
too many questions.
Bottom line:
Wait a few months, then go rent this one and
Unlawful
Entry and have yourself a little Kurt Russell film festival.
Love, as always,
Pete
Any New Venture Goes Through The Following Stages:
Enthusiasm, Complication, Disillusionment, Search For The Guilty,
Punishment Of The Innocent,
And Decoration Of Those Who Did Nothing.
- UNKNOWN
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