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Isn't technology great?
Well, most of the time it is, anyway. But sometimes it can complicate the hell out of something that should be simple...
I don't think I posted this, but a couple of years ago, right before we went on vacation, my wife lost her job. The company was closing her office, and everyone was getting laid off. Simply moving to another office wasn't an option, as we're in central PA, and the next closest one was in Vermont, I think.
I can't say I was surprised. I kind of saw it coming. From what she told me, it used to be a really nice place to work. Then they started taking things away. First they took away Christmas bonuses. Then they took away overtime, which she used to take advantage of to pay off her car and other debts faster. Then she kept getting sent home early because there wasn't any work to give her.
So there we were, ready to leave for vacation, when she found out she wouldn't have a job for much longer. Kind of put a damper on the whole vacation. When we got back, she found out she only had two days left.
She got lucky, however. She applied at a temp agency, and got hired right away. All in all, I think she only had to draw unemployment for a week, maybe two. And the company let everyone cash out their remaining vacation time, and gave everyone a week's severance pay for every year they'd been with the company. She'd been there 15 years, so it covered her almost through the end of the year. In fact, for a couple months she was bringing home severance pay from the old job, and regular pay from the new job.
Not everyone was as lucky as she was. She told me she still sometimes talks to her former coworkers, and two years later, some of them still haven't found a new job.
The new job is with a certain 2-letter company that makes computers and peripherals. Apparently they also do stuff with medical claims, because that's what her job is. Once she proved herself there, she started trying to get hired permanently. After a couple of failed attempts, she finally got it a couple weeks ago.
The company emailed her a bunch of forms to fill out and email back to them. She did that, and everything was good to go -- or so we thought. A couple days ago, she got an email back from them telling her they never received them. She checked her outbox, and had me do the same to make sure she didn't screw it up somehow. Everything looked good as far as I could tell. I don't know if it got trapped in the company's spam folder, or what happened.
She went in the next day to straighten everything out, and was able to take care of it all at work, except for one thing she had to finish at home. She told me she had trouble getting it to work, that some message about "macros" kept popping up, and she had no idea what to do.
I took a look, and it was an .xls document. We never saw a reason to spend $200 on Microsoft Office, so we've been using OpenOffice. We never had a problem with it until yesterday. There were a couple of boxes saying that macros had been disabled, so I searched for help on how to enable them. I eventually found it, but then I got a different set of messages saying macros had been disabled. Apparently those were coming from inside the document itself, because it was telling us how to enable them in Microsoft Office, which we don't have.
I'm not sure who was getting more pissed off at this point -- me or my wife. But then I noticed in the upper right corner of the window that there was an update available for OpenOffice. I decided to click on it, thinking that maybe that would fix the problem. But I got an error message saying it wasn't compatible with my 64-bit operating system, or something like that.
I figured that it was trying to install the wrong update, so I decided to go to their site and download the latest version myself. Oh look, the site is down for maintenance...
You've gotta be fucking kidding me!
My wife told me, "Don't worry about it, I'll just go in and tell them I couldn't do it!" But I decided to try one more thing. My son had told me there were trial versions of Office you could download, so I gave that a try. It took forever to install, but that got us what we needed. My wife was quite relieved at that point, and I joke around about how I wouldn't need to work out that day, as I had already spent the last hour jumping thru hoops.
She's supposed to start the new job on Tuesday. I hope this is the end up the long line of screwups.
I don't think I posted this, but a couple of years ago, right before we went on vacation, my wife lost her job. The company was closing her office, and everyone was getting laid off. Simply moving to another office wasn't an option, as we're in central PA, and the next closest one was in Vermont, I think.
I can't say I was surprised. I kind of saw it coming. From what she told me, it used to be a really nice place to work. Then they started taking things away. First they took away Christmas bonuses. Then they took away overtime, which she used to take advantage of to pay off her car and other debts faster. Then she kept getting sent home early because there wasn't any work to give her.
So there we were, ready to leave for vacation, when she found out she wouldn't have a job for much longer. Kind of put a damper on the whole vacation. When we got back, she found out she only had two days left.
She got lucky, however. She applied at a temp agency, and got hired right away. All in all, I think she only had to draw unemployment for a week, maybe two. And the company let everyone cash out their remaining vacation time, and gave everyone a week's severance pay for every year they'd been with the company. She'd been there 15 years, so it covered her almost through the end of the year. In fact, for a couple months she was bringing home severance pay from the old job, and regular pay from the new job.
Not everyone was as lucky as she was. She told me she still sometimes talks to her former coworkers, and two years later, some of them still haven't found a new job.
The new job is with a certain 2-letter company that makes computers and peripherals. Apparently they also do stuff with medical claims, because that's what her job is. Once she proved herself there, she started trying to get hired permanently. After a couple of failed attempts, she finally got it a couple weeks ago.
The company emailed her a bunch of forms to fill out and email back to them. She did that, and everything was good to go -- or so we thought. A couple days ago, she got an email back from them telling her they never received them. She checked her outbox, and had me do the same to make sure she didn't screw it up somehow. Everything looked good as far as I could tell. I don't know if it got trapped in the company's spam folder, or what happened.
She went in the next day to straighten everything out, and was able to take care of it all at work, except for one thing she had to finish at home. She told me she had trouble getting it to work, that some message about "macros" kept popping up, and she had no idea what to do.
I took a look, and it was an .xls document. We never saw a reason to spend $200 on Microsoft Office, so we've been using OpenOffice. We never had a problem with it until yesterday. There were a couple of boxes saying that macros had been disabled, so I searched for help on how to enable them. I eventually found it, but then I got a different set of messages saying macros had been disabled. Apparently those were coming from inside the document itself, because it was telling us how to enable them in Microsoft Office, which we don't have.
I'm not sure who was getting more pissed off at this point -- me or my wife. But then I noticed in the upper right corner of the window that there was an update available for OpenOffice. I decided to click on it, thinking that maybe that would fix the problem. But I got an error message saying it wasn't compatible with my 64-bit operating system, or something like that.
I figured that it was trying to install the wrong update, so I decided to go to their site and download the latest version myself. Oh look, the site is down for maintenance...
You've gotta be fucking kidding me!
My wife told me, "Don't worry about it, I'll just go in and tell them I couldn't do it!" But I decided to try one more thing. My son had told me there were trial versions of Office you could download, so I gave that a try. It took forever to install, but that got us what we needed. My wife was quite relieved at that point, and I joke around about how I wouldn't need to work out that day, as I had already spent the last hour jumping thru hoops.
She's supposed to start the new job on Tuesday. I hope this is the end up the long line of screwups.
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