When I came into this job, as a webmaster, I had a mess to contend with. They had a web page, but it was a poorly organized, ugly web page. It was the kind of web page that you could get to the same place from two links on the same page, which was totally stupid and utterly confusing. I tried to convince them directly that that had to be changed. I was essentially patted on the head, thanked for sharing and then promptly ignored.

If you learn nothing from reading my journal, you should know the following: I am a stubbornly persistent person. I will not give up on things that are difficult purely due to the difficulty. If I think something is right, I get it done.

I persisted on the reorganization of the web page. When the department got audited, all of the sudden, I started to have a more willing audience. I started working with one of the big guys, in order to get around my boss of the time, the boss who'd been responsible for the original organization. The big guy is now my boss, as a result. My old boss is a scientist, not an organizer, so he went back to science and I organized like the good Virgo I am.

At first, I couldn't convince them to let go of the old vestiges of the web page. They didn't want to let it go. I started getting people moved from those things slowly. I had to at first lay everything out there so they could see just how bad the organization was as is and then slowly started moving them to what could be.

As I did that, I got consensus that yes, what I was suggesting was better. So I made it work, made it pretty and then went on maternity leave.

Maternity leave is such a bad idea.

My pay got fucked up...still working out the kinks and I've got another problem.

While I was away, the mice didn't play, they apparently did absolutely nothing.

Skip over this if you loathe technobabble and unmanageable whining. And no, I'm not kidding.

This one gal that I have to work with is in charge of the hardcopy publications that our office produces. Because of the innovation of pdf files and the web in general, we've been making our stuff available on the web. The problem is that she's kind of old school in that she thinks everything that goes to the printer should be done in Pagemaker and now in InDesign. InDesign is kind of a diluted version of Pagemaker with some graphical components. It sucks ass compared to Pagemaker and one of the key components it's lacking is that it does not permit hyperlinks in the text of the document.

Well, while she thinks everything should be done in Pagemaker or some kind of Adobe print program, our office works entirely in Microsoft word. You can place Word files into Pagemaker, but not into InDesign, and things like hyperlinks definitely do not carry over. It sucks. However, Adobe just released a patch to their Acrobat technology (possibly while I was on leave) and now, MS Word files and their enclosed hyperlinks DO get retained in pdf files.

We have a big gigantic publication coming out -- it's something we have to do every five years and is the crux of our program. Because the bulk of our publications are on the web, people are referencing said publications in their word documents that will become this gigantic publication (coming out soon to a website near you). Because it is likely that our publication will be referenced, it is imperative that we create both a hard copy and web copy of the document that are precisely the same, so that the same info occurs on the same place on the same page.

Boring as shit,isn't it?

Because the original documents and the hundreds of hyperlinks contained therein convert from word to pdf just fine, it make absolutely no sense whatsoever to place this publication into Pagemaker and manually enter all the links, but rather to handle the document in Word and retain the links as is and generate a pdf file for print that doesn't have the blue and underline on the links that the web version does. Most printers will gladly take a pdf file and using pagemaker amounts to insanity because all of the links would have to be entered manually, which is just dumb.

The complaint could then be made that word can't handle big files, which may or may not be true at this point. If it can't, you can string together several pdf files together into one big pdf file with ease.

Now, there's one other thing. This woman (who is responsible for publications) and staff felt that there needed to be a publications template. The woman essentially refused to do it, left it in my lap. I did it, rather roughly, because I wasn't sure what was expected and another staff member and I worked together to clean it up and make it bonehead-proof. It was a lengthy head-banging proposition -- because it wasn't our job. Then the programmer (my hubby) wrote a macro, so that all this woman would have to do to strip out the hyperlink info and convert font styles is click a button.

The writers of the big enormous publication came to her before they started and asked about a template or format. She told them there was none. Even though, three staff members had put a lot of time and effort into creating something that she should have done from the get-go because she's the Publication Coordinator person, but which three people had done FOR her.

Sigh.

I had the great thrill of asking in a meeting, "Well, aren't you guys using the publication template?" To which I received a blank look and the question,"There's a publication template?"

"Yes, there's a publication template," as my teeth ground to dust.

On top of it all, when I asked about this big publication getting to the web, this woman pretty much told me that it wasn't my concern and said something patronizing about how I just liked to have my hands in everything, didn't I? Amazingly enough, I did NOT smack her.

Tomorrow, I have to go talk to our collective boss about the problem, because I know she's going to view it as trampling on her "turf" even though she's incapable of handling her turf. I already talked to other co-workers who will be at the meeting on Friday for the web stuff. We've all agreed it isn't going to be pretty. I figure if I go talk to our collective boss about it, I can basically force her to deal with the prospect of using Word to convert to pdf and work out some of the kinks and find answers to questions that will invariably come up in the meeting. I just don't want to deal with it. I'm not feeling emotionally competent to deal with it.

Now, the other thing you should know is that she got a big fat promotion based on a lot of the work that other people and I did for her. She often starts phrases with "I did blah blah.." and then she goes on for a bit and after she's pitched it, she'll look at whoever helped her and remember to credit them. But first impressions count, so everyone thinks she did it, because she mentions your contribution as an afterthought. The unfortunate thing is that she's decided to get involved in stuff that is really starting to show her incompetence. The mapping guys would like to have her drawn and quartered.

I hate stupid people.

The additional tidbit is that this is the same stupid twit who made me be in on student interviews with her and then bitched when I talked about them offhand with our collective superviser after he asked me about them. This is also the same stupid twit who let me know that she thought I should be pumping in the bathroom or my car, even though, I had permission to use people's offices. (The bathroom has no electricity and is grodie dirty besides all that. And no, I'm not sitting out there with my double pump on my 44G boobs and pumping in the parking lot because an uptight born again Christian is a stupid moron.) She also didn't think I should be pumping so often either. I tried to be patient when I explained that I had to pump often to keep my supplies up and that no, I couldn't store a ton ahead on the weekend because Genny drinks most of it, but it was obvious she was being a total bitch about it and not much was going to dissuade her from that path. I knew she'd done this on her own and that no one had sent her to do this, because I work with a bunch of liberal environmentalist types, i.e., cool people, many of whom have wives or knew people that had done the same thing. I complained to our collective superviser who let me know that I could use his office any time he wasn't in it. I couldn't get over the irony that this woman was the same person who had a total fit when I suggested I might have an abortion if the doctor thought my diabetes posed too much of a risk to both me and the baby. Then she had a cow that Mike and I weren't really considering being married. Now, she's having a cow that I would feed my baby to keep her healthy.

That was the day I stopped talking to her about anything personal because I realized what a hypocritical jerk she was.

She wrote me some sort of card, which I think was supposed to be an apology because my boss chewed her out, but she didn't apologize for her behavior. She only said she was sorry if I was upset. And then she blessed me.

"I'm sorry" is just a lot more effective. Really. Blessing me just pisses me off.

I'm already blessed. I didn't want blessings. I wanted a heartfelt apology because she behaved like a patronizing unpleasant bitch. Mike said it was probably as close as I was going to get to an apology.

He's right of course. I'm still mad about it. I keep asking my higher power to take all the anger from me, so I can deal with her, but I'm positively livid with her.

Oh, and another pisser. The school has foisted a fundraiser on Russell, so I took it to work, like any good horribly embarrassed parent. This woman had like three of these pyramid scheme party things last year...like for tupperware type stuff and I never felt like I could turn her down because I was new and she was one of the exec staff people. So, I have no money and I buy the cheapest thing in the whole catalog and can barely manage that. But when I took this fundraiser thing to work, you'd think she'd buy one stupid thing. It's gift wraps and ribbons...nothing too weird or useless, but she didn't. I realize that's her perogative, but the unwritten law of the office is that if someone buys your shit, you have to buy something of theirs.

So back to the publication stuff...there is a part of me that is absolutely delighted to be able to rake her over the coals for fucking all this stuff up and a part of me that is simply just frustrated with having to do it my damned self and a part of me, though little, who simply pities her. The more I pity her, the better I feel, so I'm working on that tangent at the moment.

Mostly, I think with the change of immediate priorities that a baby brings into my life, I simply have lost the art of tolerating bullshit. I don't have time for it.