Don’t believe me?  Try me.

This afternoon, I lost it.  I was beyond furious.

You know those documents that had to be done last Thursday?  And then I found out, no they’d be filed Monday morning? Guess what showed up for me to work on at 3 p.m. today?

Did you guess?

They needed to be converted to pdfs, bookmarked and the table of contents linked.

I’m so unhappy.  But this is what I’m paid for, right? And I should be able to accomplish it in a reasonable amount of time.

That’s when Microsoft decides to shit all over itself and me.

I cannot convince Word that it really SHOULD let me convert these documents into pdfs. 

I tried three different ways, and each time Word simply stopped “responding” and then it didn’t want to let me restart the program (as opposed to just waiting to see if Word planned on coming out of the loop it was clearly in). 

Then I tried Adobe DC Pro.  Nope.  Didn’t want anything to do with these documents because they were saved to the “hard” drive and not to our document management system.  (For reasons known only to itself my Adobe program gets a hardon for our document management system and won’t let me work outside of it.  This is a problem. This is actually a huge problem from time to time.)

So my darling, superhero husband offers to try to convert the docs from Word to pdf on his computer.  And he does it!  OMG TIDBI.  I’m so relieved.

He does the conversion, sends me the pdfs and I open one, in Adobe, and try to save it to my drive (not the document management system) – and IT WON’T LET ME.  When I try to use “Save as” I get the grayed-out “you can’t touch me” screen. 

And that’s when I get an email from the attorney, telling me that, oh, by the way, that finally-finalized-final document I asked you to put into pdf format?  I just made some changes to it.

WHAT?????  !!!!!

I officially lost my shit.  And my poor husband was in the splatter zone.

It is also at this point that I turned everything off, and did a reboot and, of course, when it came back up, whatever gremlin was lurking in the system had been shaken loose and made a hasty retreat – and everything went back to working the way it should have been working in the first place.

I sent an email to the attorney telling him, and I quote “YOU HAVE TO STOP DOING THIS.”  Followed by some choice words (choice as in carefully chosen, since, I’m not ready to retire this very minute; although I am soooooooooooo tempted.)

Now that my computer systems were willing to cooperate with each other, I was able to complete the work, calm the fuck down, and apologize to my husband.

This, by the way, is why we have gun control laws.