March 9, 2000
Dear Everyone:
We are working feverishly to create the documents
that will comprise the instruction materials for our first training
session on the new software.
First two days of training, for out-of-town Records Center personnel,
will be next Wednesday and Thursday.
(Note: As a result of
this training, next week’s Letter might be late, or nonexistent.
It depends on how tired I am at the end of the day and/or if I
get dragged out to dinner in honor of our honored guests.)
These documents contain step-by-step directions for
things like “How to Add a New Box”, along with many little screen-prints
as illustrations. In some
instances, there are even sub-documents with more detail than some
people will need, but which might be needed by others.
A sort of “click here for more information”, since all of these
documents will be on the Company
Intranet.
This will be a totally online User’s Guide.
People can look up, and print if they wish, only the parts of
interest to them. The only
problem is, in many instances, we haven’t had enough time with the
product to really know how to do some of these things ourselves.
So we’re very much learning as we go along.
How do I tell someone else how to print out barcode labels if I
don’t know how to do it myself?
Particularly if we have to design the barcode labels before they
can be printed.
And, wouldn’t you know, right in the middle of all
this, I get a summons for
Jury Duty!
Show up Monday, March 20th, or else.
I have filled out the form asking for a postponement until the
middle of May instead, explaining that I am Project Leader for a
mission-critical software conversion that will affect the whole Company,
and we’re in the middle of everything, yada, yada, yada…
Hopefully, they’ll let me off this time.
I have no objection to actually serving on a jury;
in fact, I’ve done it before.
It’s just the timing that couldn’t be worse.
I once spent an entire week of jury duty, reading a Leon Uris
novel, waiting to be called.
It can be quite restful.
Just not now, thank you.
In other news…
Last week I got a frantic call from “Jeannie”,
which began, “Help! Help!
Help! Help!
I’m stuck!” Her PC
had locked up while she was looking at
email.
I talked her through the “Three-Fingered-Salute” (which is
Ctrl-Alt-Delete for those of you who have never had a PC lock up on
you). I stayed on the phone
while she rebooted and the computer automatically ran
disk-scan.
Then I said, “The family Help Desk is now going offline.”
On Saturday, I went up to her place to see about
the possible need to re-install
AOL (again!), but just
getting rid of one or two previously installed copies seemed to do the
trick (until next time). I
also changed the sounds so that the PC doesn’t growl at her anymore (the
technician had installed all “jungle sounds”).
Now it makes “happy sounds”.
We also did some fine-tuning on her
database so she can
easily compute how much she’s been paying for proofreading.
Now she’s a happy camper.
Having spent all Saturday on “fun stuff”, I went into the office
on Sunday to work on the aforementioned User’s Guide.
But there was a network problem and I couldn’t even get to the
software.
So I went home and fixed the upstairs toilet
instead. All in all, a very
productive weekend, even if it does mean more late nights this week and
no chance of a movie in the near future.
Love, as always,
Pete
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