OK, so as President of my alumni club (and, as of right now, the only person running the whole thing), I have to communicate to the masses from time to time. When I want to send out a mass e-mail (guess it's called an "e-mail blast!" in business action jargon), I have to go to the website of this ... I don't know what you call it ... the program? Software? Tool? Module? I have to go this whatever, sign in using my university-given password, and go through these steps in order to send out this communique to everyone in the club who signed up to get my occasional missives.
It sucks. It absolutely sucks. There are too many steps I need to take; I have to go here, then go here, then go here. ... Then, for some reason, there is this small window which looks like the interface when you start up a Word document that you use to type in your words. There are form templates on the top and bottom that, when you finally send, remain the same logorrhea of code that you have to get around when you start typing your e-mail. And then, according to the training I got to figure out how to use the damn thing, I have to push buttons that make no sense. I wonder what would happen if I just saved the whole thing without going through those steps, but honestly, I was afraid I would break something if I cut corners.
After that I have to save it, go to this form, go to that form, check it there, go to another form, then schedule it, and finally approve it. Doesn't an e-mail blast work where you can just type in keyword and the e-mail addresses of everybody in the club that signed up would just appear? And all of this is done with a color scheme and graphic user interface that comes out of the mid-nineties. It's the Wolfenstein of programs/software/tools/modules.
But still I use it because there are people in the club, good people, whom I can only reach with this irredeemably clunky method. Well, until this weekend. Maybe due to the uproar of how shitty that thing is, last month we were told that they were going to switch over to a new ... uh, way of sending out mass e-mails. We were told that Sunday was the last day we could use the old system. Or maybe they said that starting Sunday we could not use the old system. Semantics.
In the meantime I had things I need to talk about, which I wanted to avoid to the very last minute. Football season starts in three weeks and this fundraiser comes soon thereafter, and I had to talk about those things now before it became too late. And while I'm not nostalgic about it, this thing we use to send out e-mails was either going to come crashing down on Sunday or already was being closed down before Sunday. I will always try to use something "one last time," whatever that something may be.
What I was afraid of all week leading up to Sunday night was how much I really needed to talk about, and thus how long this e-mail was going to be. I broke it up into numbered bullet points, of which there were six, but I had to go into detail about what was going on and what I wanted/needed. But it was still a damn long e-mail/dissertation. I tried going to Caffetto Sunday afternoon to at least start, but I sidetracked myself, so I had to bear down once I got home in the evening.
There, the gremlins associated with this thing reared its ugly head. Worse, it then commingled with my slow and worn-out processor that powers -- well, "powers" -- my laptop. While churning through paragraph after paragraph I would hear my computer go "Whirr!" whenever the graphics from one of the webpages I did not click to demanded more power. There was one page I kept up that was giving me the circle thing, indicating (I think) that not all of the graphics on that page loaded in time. But besides that, the only thing I was doing was writing. Yet, it felt as if my laptop just couldn't cope with me finally writing a mile a minute.
Finally the damn thing conked off. I was just about done when I clicked onto another page to check on something, and I got the circle thing on that page. I tried clicking back onto my e-mail blast, but I got the dreaded "Not Responding" message on the page head. This is where I run into another huge problem with this fucking thing: It gives you a warning message that it'll automatically log you off after a minute of inactivity. That's burdensome enough. But that message pops up even when you are active, like it did a couple times while I was typing that thing up. All I needed to do was click on the box that said "Click here to remain active" or something like that, but really, any similar software made in this millennium would have found a way to avoid needing its users to push that fucking button.
Of course, it didn't help that my computer's fucking slow. So when I finally was able to click back onto my message (after probably five, more like ten minutes), the minute of "inactivity" had more than ran out. I basically lost it right then and there. However, before it automatically sent me back to the sign-in screen (another fatal handicap with that stupid fucking program) I at least had the wherewithal to copy everything I had written and pasted it onto the Word template I had opened. I actually should have done that while I was writing it. But at least I opened up Word. You see, while I was at Caffetto I did save a message with just the title. However, when I tried to go back to it, like a saved Word document, I couldn't change the subject line of the e-mail to something I preferred. I wound up deleting it and thinking that if anything happened, I couldn't save anything onto that tool, so I would have to copy-and-paste to Word, then copy-and-paste from Word back onto that module.
So I finished up the message on Word, closed all the other webpages down and opened up only that thing on the Internet. And I tried copying-and-pasting ... but the type was so fucking tiny! In retrospect I guess I could have tried to see if I could have changed the font size. But I was so mistrustful of that damn program that I decided I had to delete thing and type the whole thing over. That's right -- the whole fucking thing.
I don't remember typing anything that fast, or hard, since college. When I want to write for Wailing And Failing I don't type with the fervor I had in re-typing that message. I was doing that thing where I was bouncing my knees up and down so I could spur myself to get through copying that fucking thing from my Word back to this template as fast as possible. And when I got close I talked out loud, to myself, just to make sure I didn't miss anything, even though I was so fuckin' pissed off at that point that I didn't really care if I skipped a word or sentence or paragraph or thought.
While re-conjuring my talking points another long-lost friend visited me: My carpal tunnel. Typing up a storm inflamed the veins where my right wrist is, and it still really hasn't tamped down. I need the firefighters battling those blazes out west to douse the fiery tingling that's crippling my right hand now. And it doesn't help that my fingernails are kind of long, throwing off my tactile sense and making me type in a more painful way and pace.
Two hours. It took two goddamn hours to re-type that whole thing, to Alt + Tab between that shitty module interface and the Word document that had my first draft. After going there and saving and then going there and saving, I finally got it sent away. And, even though I wasn't sure that my college wouldn't just bounce it back if we weren't supposed to use it anymore, I got the e-mail I created in my inbox. Whew.
And now I end this blog post because my carpal tunnel is acting up again.
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