Crappy Hour

The words began flowing out of me as I wrote my first piece on being ineffective.  For a writer, that is the best feeling in the world.  Damn, I’m good, I congratulated myself.  Maybe I’m not so ineffective after all.  I finished up the writing (and the pinot noir) and was ready to create my new blog, but I couldn’t remember my Gmail username and password.  So I tried logging in using various combinations of user names and passwords which I might have created but none of them worked.  Then, I decided to ask Google to reset my password on a user name that could only belong to me.  Success!

I was so excited to start posting to this new blog and attempted to create it under my Gmail account using my real name and default (MSN) email address.  This is when the fun started because the Google Team decided I must be a spammer and blocked me at every turn.  After about two hours I threw in the towel and created the blog under my default email account even though I had wanted the blogs to be completely separate from each other, because my other blog is about Serious Topics. I am willing to bet big dollars that Highly Effective People can do whatever they want with Google and never get accused of spamming. How I envy them.

A few years ago, I took a part-time job as an “executive assistant” to the executive director of a small local orchestra under the delusion that this would be a fun job.  Judith, the executive director, considered herself a computer expert and had set up a peer-to-peer network in the office which allowed the three computers to share a single printer.  She was a fan of a data management product called “File Maker” and had created a database of the orchestra’s subscribers with it.  The problem with File Maker is that it is easy to use and because it is easy to use it is unable to handle the sort of elegant file structures that a frequently-updated database requires.  Judith’s approach was to keep adding fields to each record for each new subscription year.  After about three years, a subscriber’s record was approaching maximum record size.  Even worse, trying to figure out exactly what data each record contained was an exercise in cryptology.  For example, what exactly did the field “0405msub” contain?  No one could remember, but it was important so the field had to stay.  

A major problem with being a Highly Ineffective Person is that even when you are right, no one listens to you. I, a former database designer, explained to Judith how the database might be redesigned in order to simplify data management and provide more useful information, she then explained to me that her database worked just fine and was easy to use and understand and I should just do my job.  Judith's database was, she made clear, the highly effective product of a Highly Effective Person.  

File Maker has a lovely mail/merge function which saves countless hours of clerical time, a high priority for Highly Effective People like Judith.  One of my first tasks was to create a mass mailing to all past and present (and living) subscribers offering them a discount on the coming season if they bought their tickets early.  To Judith's eternal dismay, it became immediately clear to her that not only was I was a Highly Ineffective Person, but I could bring her beloved network to its knees simply by turning on my computer.  She had to leave for a meeting, so I rolled up my sleeves and tried to make File Maker work for me.  After two hours of frustration, I ended up doing the mailing the hard way (i.e., printing each letter and envelop individually) because in the end it took much less time than doing it the easy way.  When I was about 75% finished, Judith returned and demanded that I stop what I was doing and use File Maker, so I pretended to comply until she left for another meeting.  Thirty minutes later, the mailing was done but File Maker had thrown down the gauntlet.  It was a long four months until Judith had hired my replacement.

Here I am, eight years later, attempting to create a blog using a user-friendly (idiot-proof) blogging platform and being accused by Google of being a spammer.  I am tempted to haul out the IBM Selectric and put my posts on the Publix bulletin board.

 Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved