Preparing a Proposal

Have spent the last four hours preparing a proposal for a new piece of work with the firms most important account. Correction. Have actually spent three of the last four hours trying to get PowerPoint to do the things it is supposed to do without malfunctioning, crashing or presenting me with that irritating Paper Clip thing. What the hell is that thing anyway? Why does Microsoft imagine that I would follow the advice of a paperclip anyway? I mean, is that even likely, is it remotely rational?

The thing that really gets my goat about software designers (other than the fact that they are all younger than me and earn six times as much) is that they are all so melodramatic! Half way through slide 46 my laptop decided it had had enough of this world and froze. After frantically bashing the 'Enter' key (why do we do that? We know it won't work) I got a message telling me that a 'Fatal' Error of type 23087 had occurred and that my PC would now shut down, hitch to the airport and retire to Bermuda until it felt better. Why are PC problems always 'Fatal' or ' Catastrophic', why can't they say 'a mildly irritating thing has happened and I'm shutting down now, sorry you haven't saved your work for two hours, but, hey-ho, no one ever said life was fair". Moreover, are there really a minimum of 23087 catastrophic things that I can do to my computer? Why do they tell me the number? Is it in any small way possible that I could ever be so much of a trainspotter to actually memorise them ("Oh thank god, it's type 23087, that's not such a bad one, I'm so grateful it wasn't type 23,086 as that one is a total home wrecker").

I don't actually think the error numbers mean anything at all. I'm pretty sure they are just produced by a random number generator anyway. I think I can prove this. When you phone an IT help desk, having gone to great lengths to document every single keystroke leading up to the problem and then writing out long hand the bizzaro error message and number, you aways get the same response from the pimply foetus on the help desk "Have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on again"? I don't know which makes me more angry, the fact that I am paying £1.25 a minute for such lame 'technical support' or the fact that it invariably works!

Finally defied all the odds and got to the end of the proposal and tried to send it to the client but the gods of IT are not done with me yet, oh no. First of all it was rejected by my firms mail server as being too large (lots of sexy graphics in it, e.g half moons, crescents etc - no one ever knows what they mean but they look good) Am now trawling through the thing trying to make images smaller so it will be small enough for the server to deign to send it, latest casualty was a fabulous image of a pyramid with 5 layers to it that looked superb (it didn't actually make any kind of a point but that isn't really important, it looked complicated and impressive and that in my game is what counts).

Whilst doing the research for the proposal, I found myself hopelessly distracted. I read recently about a phenomenon called WILFing. I think the WILF part means "What am I looking For"? I had thought it nonsense when I read the article but have in fact just spent two hours doing it myself. I remember, when preparing the proposal, I definitely opened a Firefox window to Google something specific, trouble is, an hour later I was reading an article by a relative of Ainsley Harriot's on the importance of aerating lawns, which itself lead to a very interesting article on why Bats hang upside down and another on the different fonts used on the old sixpence coins - all very fascinating but totally not what I went online to look for. I still can't recall now what it was I was after.

Time to go now, early start tomorrow, I'll just read this email that has come in.

Oh no, "Your email entitled 'Proposal' was rejected due to error number 23086 and just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, here comes a paperclip to patronise you until you are sorry".