Urge to Kill. Rising.

I think I'm going to have to kill my co-worker.

It is with great regret that I have decided this as he is quite a nice person. Well, at least when he's not being a curmudgeon. But damn, he is tap-dancing on my last nerve.

We both produce what are known as FRDs - Functional Requirement Documents. Very boring, very tedious, often complex. The problem is that *I* have become by default the software guru for Microsoft Office when I am nothing of the sort. When you can't make it work, run to Sarah! She has the answer!

Yes, I have been an teaching assistant in the various MS Office courses that are offered online at our local community college. No, this does not mean that I know every little nuance of these programs and am frankly often baffled at some of the things they do. I have never bothered to take the MSCE tests. Firstly because I think it's a crock of shit because you would have to re-take it every time a new version of Office came out if you wanted to really deserve the status and secondly because I know that I don't know enough to pass the damn thing. You would think this would give some people a clue, right? Wrong.

As part of our FRDs, we have what we call the "Tree." This Tree shows you the various parts of the document under its different functional headings. It's all very pretty and is very tedious to create and to update. And on top of that, it's a fucking eye chart no matter what you do to it or how big you make it. It is what it is.

To make the Tree work in the simplest way possible, I devised a system whereby it was created in Excel, and then imported into Word as an Excel document. This worked for quite some time. For quick fixes, we could click the Tree, edit a few things and all was right with the world. If we needed to do more, we would go back to the original Excel document and fix it there and then import it back in.

Then either Ehn-Ehm-Si-Eye or Microsoft started going screwey on us. All of a sudden, things weren't looking so nice when imported as they used to. The Tree was getting distorted, half of it would be blurry, the other half crisp - a total mess.

So I got the idea to copy the Excel document, and then paste it into Word as something special, like a bitmap or enhanced metafile. Viola! A perfect picture every time. Problem solved!

Not quite. My co-worker can't seem to understand that because we had to change the way we put the Tree in, that he can no longer click on it to make small changes. You have to go back to the original Excel file, and then re-paste it in there. A small inconvenience, but well worth it to have a better looking document, IMO. (And let me say here that ALL of our problems would be solved if the gummint would let us do this on Macs or if we could use different software such as Interleaf/Quicksilver, but noooooooo! Word is the best! Word is awesome! NOT!)

Well, co-worker throws a fit. Why can't you make this work? It used to work before! These aren't clickable! They need to be clickable! You're not doing your job! You're not helping me enough! I've got to get this out today! Wah! Wah, wa, wa, wa, wah!

Dude. If you would have listened just one of the multitudes of times over the last SIX years that I have sat down and told you about this and described how it works and how YOU CAN DO IT TOO, then maybe, just maybe, you could actually do this yourself instead of relying on me.

But nice gal that I am (he is my customer, after all) I attempt, yet again, to import the document in as a clickable Excel file. And once again, it doesn't work well. And this time, there's another problem. Not all of the file is showing up for some reason. You double click to edit it and try to move the border like you should be able to. It moves, but then snaps back to where it was. But going on the vertical instead of the horizontal, it works just fine. Wierd. And precisely the reason why we changed how we did it. But, he wants them clickable. Fine. He'll get them clickable. So I alter the one that's being the biggest piece of shit into a different configuration as a temporary stopgap. I figure this will do for now as neither of us can afford to spend ALL DAY LONG on the problem. And it's not as if this is the final delivery. The big-wigs don't mind when we do things like this as placeholders.

I e-mail them over to him to insert into his document. And again, they are screwed up. (Our other problem is that for some reason when we e-mail documents to each other, they often come out looking completely different even though we are both set to the same styles, fonts, font sizes, etc. Again, not something I understand, and something I have no clue on how to fix!)

But this time he doesn't tell me they're cruddy. No, he sits on it and waits until I come in this morning to jump on me about it.

These need to work! You have to get on this! :::sigh::: Why couldn't you have told me this yesterday? I have deadlines for different things going on today. What. Ever.

And now, he's ready to have them become bitmaps or enhanced metafiles. Finally! He sees the light! Now I can get them to him lighteing quick. Praise the Lord!

But I am sick and tired of having the same discussion (argument?) every month or so. Just beacause time has passed doesn't mean that our problems have been solved. And I'm sorry that I just don't know enough to fix this for you. How about you take a damn class or two in order to deal with this yourself? Technically, you're the lead here. Lead, dammit!

Oh but wait. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Right. Jerk.