mrs doubtfire – a tale of microsoft office, investment banking and tatties and neeps
TRANSCRIPT
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Mrs Doubtfire A tale of Microsoft Office, Investment Banking and Tatties and Neeps
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Friday, February 03, 2006
Mrs Doubtfire
We have technical experts where I work at the bank. They train the desktop publisherswhen they first arrive in the business and later provide them with assistance when they
are having difficulties with the software or technique under the often considerable
pressure of production deadlines. Often enough, this is simply a matter of helping
desktop publishers to work through difficult tasks systematically, but they are also
frequently called upon to find solutions to the technical issues that arise from the day
to day use of that modern marvel of software engineering -MicroSoft office suite.
Almost all banks use this collection of computer programs for desktop publishing:
Word for documents, Powerpoint for slides shows and diagrams, and Excel for the
graphs that go in the documents - and sometimes other things, like timelines. And once
in a while, bankers, who spend much of their waking hours doing unspeakable thingsto Excel spreadsheets, also decide to use Excel as a word processor. The reason for this
I can only guess, but it may be because they lack the energy at 3:00 am to Alt-Tab into
Word itself.
Although the Office programs are not professional presentation applications with the
strengths and refinements of Quark or PageMaker, and frankly are often just not up to
the sort of complexity of pages banks demand of them, the Office files are easily
interchangeable with just about anyone in the world doing business and they tend not
to require specialist knowledge to adjust, so bankers can work on the document as well
as DTP professionals.
I have worked with Microsoft office for over 13 years now and Word for longer than
that. These programs have in some ways improved and got more stable over time (ie
they doesn't crash every two hours these days), but they still remain riddled with
contradictions and intricacies that I would guess, from a software design point of view,
have a lot to do with tacking band-aid solutions on top of old, already half baked
programming dating back to the days when Bill Gates' still found it difficult to get
dates.
For example, ever since Office 97, bullets will randomly disappear from Word
documents or boogie left or right from the margin. In a job where bullet points are
sprinkled through documents like wedding confetti, this can be a problem. The way
things are going, it will still be a problem in Windows 3003 because Office XP made
no difference that I could see. Or perhaps, in typical Microsoft fashion, they will
finally fix the bullets, and stuff up something else that worked perfectly well for years
and you had got used to depending upon. And undoubtedly this will be achieved by
making it anticipate your needs, or adding a small annoying cartoon character that
pops up every time you least want to see it and asking you what it can do for you.
I await, but have never seen, the joyous reality of a bumper sticker depicting the
Microsoft Office paperclip being dropped slowly, helpfully, and in a user friendly
fashion, or at least friendly to my designs - into a vat of boiling oil. Although it hasvanished from recent versions of Office, the spirit of the little bastard is still in there
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somewhere; you can just feel it.
When these kinds of issues arise during the gallop for some impossible deadline - that
is, courtesy Murphy's law, almost constantly - it can be the calm, smart thinking, or
technical knowledge of one of these office heroes - the technical experts - that is thedifference between a sigh of relief and a disaster of biblical proportions, leading to the
dust of bellicose unhappy bankers gathering on the horizon of your day.
Needless to say these people are highly valued, much in demand and much respected.
And their job can be, when it is busy, next to impossible, as their attention is split
between helping footsoldiers like me meet bankers' deadlines, and helping the bankers
themselves, who are out there, doing their level best to stuff up their own deadlines, by
doing something funky and creative with the template of their documents while they
attempt to make them look 'sexy'.
I sometimes overhear the frantic calls from bankers who ring up for technical support,panting desperately about something strange going on in their document and a deadline
looming like Armageddon's first cousin over their day. And often enough, something
strange is indeed going on. When the techie opens the electronic file, there is that
moment, that pause during which they shake their head in parental disbelieve. Once
again they are faced with inter-dimensional nested financial tables like an Escher
drawing sprouting from every corner of the page, other-worldly disembodied
fragments of diagrams adrift in text boxes, or graphs where straight lines have become
spiralling curves, as though an invisible black hole had appeared in the file and sucked
the data mercilessly towards its inescapable digital maw. This smorgasbord of Twilight
Zone delights, is what happens when an overtired banker tries to make a document
look sexy in the small hours.
These technical experts are all pretty smart, and all genuine characters, distinctive in
their own ways, and some of the nicest people you are ever going to meet. Like the rest
of us, they operate in shifts, so quite often if your shift overlaps theirs, you will get to
have more than one around during a given working week.
During the weekdays, for example, we are blessed by the formidable duo of Agent P
and Comrade Spock, both born East of the former iron curtain, though the former in
European realms and the latter closer to Moscow. Both speak the Russian mother
tongue and use it to communicate for much of the day, intriguing conversations that
start with
"Nazdorovia smeitse, pie chart, da?"
and usually end with:
"Pravda."
More often than not this is followed by rumbles of laughter from both operatives.
About what, none of the rest of us can be certain, as our Russian is pretty basic. It
could be something along the lines of
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"Am observing repeat occurrence of banking individual fitting excessive pie charts
into diminutive document area."
"Yes, truthfully, this phenomena has been observed."
What we do know is that there is nothing they cannot fix when you need them, and no
lengths to which they are not prepared to go to help, assuming you can pull them away
from yet another banker who has deleted half his document while trying to add a sexy
bullet to the footer.
Agent P, is a well educated, humourous woman with a penchant for one liners and a
personality the size of Lake Michigan. She is always amused - amused by the demands
of life, amused by the bankers and other examples of corporate intelligence, amused by
how she manages to juggle small children at home with the grown up children with
economics degrees who constantly ring her up desperate for help getting rid of the
inter-dimensional phenomena appearing in their documents. It is just as well they findAgent P on the job, because nothing from any dimension I an aware of is capable of
ruffling Agent P. I have never actually observed anything even approaching a worried
expression on her face. She not only, by her own admission, sounds like an eastern
European agent in a James Bond movie, she has all the cool of the agent that almost
assassinates bond with a cocktail stick after her virtuoso cello performance in a Prague
concert hall - and looks a bit like her too.
Comrade Spock, is a dependable, likable gentleman with a dry wit, whose laser-beam
like force of concentration and clarity of attention could bore holes in reinforced steel
should he ever choose to move from Banking to the construction industry. Show him a
difficult graph that you think is so frightening it is almost alive, regarding you withferocious multi-segmental pies for eyes and broken axis columns for teeth, and he will
raise one eyebrow inquisitively before probing its intricacies with his built in tricorder
and, within seconds, with a soft "Hm." will adjust and modulate until the desired result
appears as if beamed in by transporter - and the beast is tamed.
On the weekend there are different technical experts on hand. And of all the technical
experts, though I love them all, my favourite is Mrs Doubtfire.
Mrs Doubtfire was not named by me, but by some of her students. This nickname is
nothing to do with Robin Williams in drag, but it harks from the essence of the Mrs
Doubtfire character in the movie of the same name.
They named her thus because of the nurturing energy she has, and well, the fact she is
Scottish. Though she has lived south of the border for many years, she knows her
tatties from her neeps, and woe betide you call a Scottish island part of England as I
once did, rain clouds will sweep across what is without exception, an otherwise a
radiant sky.
Mrs Doubtfire is a woman who has seen the odd sunrise or two more than some, by
which I mean she has grown up children. She does not fuss, but she does know how to
mother. She looks after students like a hen looks after a line of chicks. She tirelesslywatches out for their little slips and slides, and is ever ready with a helping hand or a
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kind word, and a patient few minutes to extricate them from whatever woes Bill Gates'
dateless past or Mr and Lady banker's dateless present have presented them with.
Nothing is ever too much for Mrs Doubtfire, her patience with the distress and needs
of others is limitless. She makes you feel as though you are in the boat together and
she made it, so why shouldn't you.
Not that Mrs Doubtfire is a shrinking violet, she is the sort of self motivated character
who makes you sit up and wonder what all the fuss is about in your life and why you
are not doing more with it. She makes being in your 50s seem like the most delightful
thing that ever happened to a person. She has enthusiasm for life, for learning, for the
things that others enjoy as much as those things she enjoys herself. She smiles a great
deal of the time as though she had a battery of golden egg laying geese in her
backyard, yet she works hard, and everything she has, she has worked for.
Mrs Doubtfire is not prim and proper either. She discusses her failings with
mischievious glee and she has some creative theories about what needs to happen tobad apples, who once graced the corridors of one's life. Woe betide I ever become a
bad apple.
Mrs Doubtfire, is without a doubt one of my heroes. It is partly because of Mrs
Doubtfire's example of making what she wanted of her own life, that I found myself
able to believe after a period of being more than a little down, that I could do the same
with mine. I almost certainly gave up smoking because of her and for that, and the
many other times she has added a little touch of a smile to my day I am ever grateful to
her.
God Bless Mrs Doubtfire.