Overheard at Work

[Paul der Krake]

It's not done until I see some unit tests, dammit!

[esq]

I remember when Word used to use Control-L for left align, Control-B for bold, Control-C for center, Control-U for underline, etc, etc.  Then someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

Hmmm, are you pulling our legs?  All of those still work that way except that Control-C is for copy (and Control-V for paste).

I guess I'm not typing in Word as much as I thought.  But because L, R and C no longer work for formatting, I guess I gave it all up.  I feel weird now.  Thanks, LeRainDrop!  :D (Love your name, btw.)

[Tjat]

Alignment in any direction is literally one mouse click. Change doesn't necessarily mean "someone in Redmond" is out to make your life difficult. Worst case you can custom add shortcuts with the Ctrl shift combination.

[esq]

Alignment in any direction is literally one mouse click. Change doesn't necessarily mean "someone in Redmond" is out to make your life difficult. Worst case you can custom add shortcuts with the Ctrl shift combination.

Merely a stab at paranoia humor. :D

And apropo to nothing, Control-B does not work here.

[LennStar]

In my job I often dealt with the converse of this - someone wants a report or spreadsheet that summarizes a lot of information from various sources, and they want it on short notice. "Oh, by the way, I am giving a presentation to Group X, could you pull together an overview summary of Y?" 

I was so sick of this at the end, I actually said "do you know how long that will take?"
Them: "Oh, can't you just run a report?"
Me: "No, information a is in database a, information b us in database b which is not connected to a, etc. and I have to redact irrelevant records and reformat the output and add information that is not in any of the databases"
Them: "Oh" <blank stare>

These are all databases the fuckers were supposed to be using themselves, and information they were supposed to know, and they all had administrative assistants to run auto reports from the software they were supposed to know how to use anyway.

If it was 'just running a report' they should have known how to do it themselves, and even if they didn't, their admins knew how to run it. Glad I am out of there!

Ahaha.
I once was in a similar situation. But I was able to "automate" lots of it, so instead of my already fast 2 hours it took me only 40 (+/-15) after that.
Of course I would still take my good 2 hours and spend the rest time surfing. After all they didnt even pay me.
I did leave the automate excel sheet and a guideline there when my time was over, but I guess it was never used.

[iris lily]

Recently someone said to me "I was going to retire this year, but then I bought a new car so now
I've got to work two more years." And then, went on to talk about her love of shiney things on cars.

Its not even a cool car, just a consumer mobile. Now, if someone was buying a classic Jaguar S car and wanted to sock away repair money for its lifetime, and needed to work for 2 more years to do that hey, I could relate! Haha. But not for some dumb uninteresting auto just off the assembly line.

[esq]

I remember when Word used to use Control-L for left align, Control-B for bold, Control-C for center, Control-U for underline, etc, etc.  Then someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

I remember when there was a program call WordPerfect which was infinitely better than Word for formatting long and complicated documents and someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

#stillbitterafteralltheseyears

LOL, back in the days when I did use word processing on a daily basis, I hated WordPerfect because the formatting used numbers (very unintuitive) and, you had to block the entire paragraph in order for a paragraph format to work, i.e., to center, you blocked the entire paragraph, then hit Control-3.  In MSWord, you could put the cursor anywhere in the paragraph, hit Control-C, and done.  So there.

Just don't ask me what I had for dinner last night.

[iris lily]

I remember when Word used to use Control-L for left align, Control-B for bold, Control-C for center, Control-U for underline, etc, etc.  Then someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

I remember when there was a program call WordPerfect which was infinitely better than Word for formatting long and complicated documents and someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

#stillbitterafteralltheseyears

LOL, back in the days when I did use word processing on a daily basis, I hated WordPerfect because the formatting used numbers (very unintuitive) and, you had to block the entire paragraph in order for a paragraph format to work, i.e., to center, you blocked the entire paragraph, then hit Control-3.  In MSWord, you could put the cursor anywhere in the paragraph, hit Control-C, and done.  So there.

Just don't ask me what I had for dinner last night.

I still mourn the "reveal codes" command on Wordperfect.

[Metric Mouse]

I remember when Word used to use Control-L for left align, Control-B for bold, Control-C for center, Control-U for underline, etc, etc.  Then someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

I remember when there was a program call WordPerfect which was infinitely better than Word for formatting long and complicated documents and someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

#stillbitterafteralltheseyears

LOL, back in the days when I did use word processing on a daily basis, I hated WordPerfect because the formatting used numbers (very unintuitive) and, you had to block the entire paragraph in order for a paragraph format to work, i.e., to center, you blocked the entire paragraph, then hit Control-3.  In MSWord, you could put the cursor anywhere in the paragraph, hit Control-C, and done.  So there.

Just don't ask me what I had for dinner last night.

*snort*

[With This Herring]

*snip*

And apropo to nothing, Control-B does not work here.

Sorry to be pedantic, but "apropos" is spelled with a silent "s."

[Making Cookies]

So while I get the frustration and accept the jokes, I'm also putting myself into the category of people who have pretty much given up on new technology when it comes to social media platforms.  There is so much to keep up with and it rarely benefits me. 

Oh I get THIS! Yes - I am totally inept with social media. Not motivated to learn it at all and my job doesn't require it.

The frustrations I mentioned are people who don't know how to use a Win7 program menu to find MS Office. Or don't know that Chrome or Firefox are alternatives to the big blue "E". Or how to know what program they are currently using. I understand the problems that Win10 poses to new converts but at work we've been using Win7 for a decade now and it isn't that different from WinXP. ;)

Job security for me. Seriously - if these people spend a big portion of each day using a computer, why can't they learn a few skills about it? Basic stuff.

[Making Cookies]

I remember when Word used to use Control-L for left align, Control-B for bold, Control-C for center, Control-U for underline, etc, etc.  Then someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

I remember when there was a program call WordPerfect which was infinitely better than Word for formatting long and complicated documents and someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

#stillbitterafteralltheseyears

Corel WordPerfect still exists! Nice software too in my opinion. Corel has kept updating it all these years.

[nobodyspecial]

*snip*

And apropo to nothing, Control-B does not work here.

Sorry to be pedantic, but "apropos" is spelled with a silent "s."

It used to be, but these days in order to reduce energy consumption and combat global warming we are dropping silent letters.
The campaign is being led by Al Gor

[With This Herring]

*snip*

And apropo to nothing, Control-B does not work here.

Sorry to be pedantic, but "apropos" is spelled with a silent "s."

It used to be, but these days in order to reduce energy consumption and combat global warming we are dropping silent letters.
The campaign is being led by Al Gor

I see!  Thank you for your anser.  Nowing that, now I feel dum.

[esq]

*snip*

And apropo to nothing, Control-B does not work here.

Sorry to be pedantic, but "apropos" is spelled with a silent "s."

It used to be, but these days in order to reduce energy consumption and combat global warming we are dropping silent letters.
The campaign is being led by Al Gor

I see!  Thank you for your anser.  Nowing that, now I feel dum.

Ha!  I was thinking, "what is she talking about, of course I included the silent 's', of course, because I always do, because I'm terribly fond of beginning random thoughts (or in this case, not so random, I was joking) with 'apropos to nothing' ".

And then I looked.  And I was momentarily  horrified.  But now I'm laughing. 

And a bunch of Houston MMM'ers are about to meet each other for the first time, so it's all good.

[dragoncar]

  Our condo building manager sends me Word doc reports where at the end of each line, she presses enter and then tabs in for the next line, so if you need to make any edits, then you have to re-do the f-ed up formatting. 

You may know this but not everyone knows this:
Use Ctrl + H to open Find/Replace. In the find box put ^p^t, in the replace box put one space.

Oh, cool, a new trick, and it works!  I forgot, but she also has a habit of putting lots of spaces until she gets to the next line.  I don't even understand how it's possible to make such screwed up formatting!

A couple weeks ago, I emailed a pdf to her to post to our website.  She insisted she couldn't post it because our printer/scanner "wasn't working."  Huh?  Yeah, because her method of posting a file to our website apparently had been to print it out, scan it in, and then upload it from the scan folder.  And that was the only way she knew how to do it.

I'd probably write a macro to fix her broken files.  There are codes to, say, find more than 10 spaces and place a carriage return.  Something like find " {10:1000}" replace "^p" but I don't really know off the top of my head.  Reduce multiple spaces to double space by running find " {2:1000}" replace "  ", and so on.  String enough of these together and it'll fix most of the problems until she comes up with new ways to be funky.

Even without the macro idea, here's a simple way to do it: find/replace, put in, say 10 spaces in the find, two spaces in the top.  Find/replace all.  Run a few times to get all ones > 10.  Then change the find to 5 spaces, run a few more times (so in this example, 8 spaces would get missed in the 10 run, then first 5 run it'd detect the first 5 of the 8 spaces, change it to 2, then have 3, so then the second 5 run it'd change the 3+2 to just 2).  Then change it to 3, click replace all a few times.. now all multiple spaces are two at most.

No macro needed, just clicking "replace all" a couple extra times until it says "none found" when you click it.

OK I looked up the actual code.  If you turn on "wildcards" you can use the X{Y,Z} expression to find anwhere between Y-Z of X.  So you if you:

find: <space character>{2,1000}
replace <space character>

then click replace all, you will immediately replace all multiples of 2-1000 spaces with a single space if that's your goal

I sometimes use what you suggest to make sure I don't have any triple spaces in my documents. 

[johnny847]

CW: Something is wrong, I can't do (Thing) for this customer.
Me:  (pulls account up, and the standard notification screen that comes up when the customer has amounts owing pops up)
Me: Press the button labelled (Thing) to get past this screen.
CW: Oh.  You know, I'd really like more training on this.  Are there instructions for it?
Me: ...

It's ONE BUTTON.  Labelled as the next step that you want to do.  Do you really need instructions to remember it's there?!  And there are only a couple of buttons to choose from on that screen anyway!  It is not a complicated interface!

The really sad thing is, this is not the first time she's asked me that question and I've shown her that button.  But instructions wouldn't help, they'd just confuse her more, because this step obviously isn't necessary every time, and she doesn't handle "if/then" steps very well.  The real problem is that she doesn't actually understand what's going on and why that screen exists.  I've explained what's happening, because if she *understood* it she wouldn't need help, but it just. does. not. compute.

(I don't think she's actually listening - I think she stops paying much attention as soon as you start explaining or showing her something, because she automatically dismisses it as a computer thing she can't be expected to understand.  I don't think she's naturally this incapable, but I don't see a way to get past her shield against learning something, especially since she isn't consciously aware she's doing it.)

A while ago on I believe this thread someone said some people just expect to follow a recipe when doing anything on a computer. Whenever some exception happens, instead of trying to understand what's actually happening, they just throw their hands up and say oh well the instructions don't explain this...

I don't know how these people expect to get anywhere in life.

[nobodyspecial]

Whenever some exception happens, instead of trying to understand what's actually happening, they just throw their hands up and say oh well the instructions don't explain this...

I don't know how these people expect to get anywhere in life.

You just have to wrap them in a try/catch handler
Failing that - just delete them and cleanup their resources

[zolotiyeruki]

But think about it - how much could we increase productivity by not including silent letters? French productivity could go up 1000%!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  It *has* always mystified me why the French language includes so many letters that are not pronounced.

Of course, English has more than its fair share of anti-patterns, exceptions, oddities and eccentricities.

OK I looked up the actual code.  If you turn on "wildcards" you can use the X{Y,Z} expression to find anwhere between Y-Z of X.  So you if you:

find: <space character>{2,1000}
replace <space character>

then click replace all, you will immediately replace all multiples of 2-1000 spaces with a single space if that's your goal

I sometimes use what you suggest to make sure I don't have any triple spaces in my documents. 

Does Word also support open-ended repeated characters, like {2,} ? That would match any number (>2) of spaces.

Whenever some exception happens, instead of trying to understand what's actually happening, they just throw their hands up and say oh well the instructions don't explain this...

I don't know how these people expect to get anywhere in life.

You just have to wrap them in a try/catch handler
Failing that - just delete them and cleanup their resources

*snort* Or you could include a bunch of try/catch-type structure in your instructions, and see if users can figure it out :)

Along a similar line of thought, it has always impressed me how the instructions for the 1040 form are so well-written.  Seriously, if you've done your own taxes before, the IRS has done a remarkable job of making the whole process very parseable.
(yes, I'm a Java programmer (among many other things) at my day job)

[johnny847]

Along a similar line of thought, it has always impressed me how the instructions for the 1040 form are so well-written.  Seriously, if you've done your own taxes before, the IRS has done a remarkable job of making the whole process very parseable.
(yes, I'm a Java programmer (among many other things) at my day job)

Well I think it's over "dummy proofed" to a fault sometimes. Sometimes I just want to figure out what formula they're using but it's obfuscated by a series of instructions that say copy line 4, take the maximum of lines 2 and 3, etc. It'd be so much simpler if they included the formulas in an appendix or something...

[arebelspy]

OK I looked up the actual code.  If you turn on "wildcards" you can use the X{Y,Z} expression to find anwhere between Y-Z of X.  So you if you:

find: <space character>{2,1000}
replace <space character>

then click replace all, you will immediately replace all multiples of 2-1000 spaces with a single space if that's your goal

Neat! Thanks for looking that up and sharing.  :)

Luckily it'll be easy to look up next time I want to use it.  Just check the "Overheard at Work" thread.

[With This Herring]

But think about it - how much could we increase productivity by not including silent letters? French productivity could go up 1000%!

Brilliant!  Those bonus letters are surely just added to trip up foreigners.

Ha!  I was thinking, "what is she talking about, of course I included the silent 's', of course, because I always do, because I'm terribly fond of beginning random thoughts (or in this case, not so random, I was joking) with 'apropos to nothing' ".

And then I looked.  And I was momentarily  horrified.  But now I'm laughing. 

And a bunch of Houston MMM'ers are about to meet each other for the first time, so it's all good.

Hooray for happy endings!

[SunshineAZ]

I remember when Word used to use Control-L for left align, Control-B for bold, Control-C for center, Control-U for underline, etc, etc.  Then someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

I remember when there was a program call WordPerfect which was infinitely better than Word for formatting long and complicated documents and someone in Redmond decided one fine day all that silly intuitive stuff should go away.

#stillbitterafteralltheseyears

QFT!  I still miss being able to view the format codes and put formulas in my tables.  *sniff* 

[johnny847]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

[WerKater]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

Word!

[Astatine]

But think about it - how much could we increase productivity by not including silent letters? French productivity could go up 1000%!

Brilliant!  Those bonus letters are surely just added to trip up foreigners.

Buy a tennis racquet with a coloured cheque*. :p

*not that we use cheques anymore, but I wanted to make a point, damnit.

[Playing with Fire UK]

  Our condo building manager sends me Word doc reports where at the end of each line, she presses enter and then tabs in for the next line, so if you need to make any edits, then you have to re-do the f-ed up formatting. 

You may know this but not everyone knows this:
Use Ctrl + H to open Find/Replace. In the find box put ^p^t, in the replace box put one space.

Oh, cool, a new trick, and it works!  I forgot, but she also has a habit of putting lots of spaces until she gets to the next line.  I don't even understand how it's possible to make such screwed up formatting!

A couple weeks ago, I emailed a pdf to her to post to our website.  She insisted she couldn't post it because our printer/scanner "wasn't working."  Huh?  Yeah, because her method of posting a file to our website apparently had been to print it out, scan it in, and then upload it from the scan folder.  And that was the only way she knew how to do it.

Ace!

 A bunch of people who send me files only know how to attach files to email using the scanner. So to send me a spreadsheet, they will print, scan, email the scan, and expect me to type the whole thing back into my spreadsheet. But they are genuinely trying to be helpful! I now have a set of instructions (with screen shots) to show them how to attach a file to an email and they think it is magic!

[slugline]

Wasn't Wordperfect part of the Lotus Suite?

You're thinking of Ami Pro.

[Making Cookies]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

NOW you're talking. LaTex on Mint Linux please!!!

[Making Cookies]

Came to work over the weekend for a while. Rarely do that but I wanted to double check some work to make sure it was done right before Monday since it's on my back.

Coworker sold his red car and bought the very same car again, one year newer, but grey this time... What's the point of that?

[Sawedoff]

Came to work over the weekend for a while. Rarely do that but I wanted to double check some work to make sure it was done right before Monday since it's on my back.

Coworker sold his red car and bought the very same car again, one year newer, but grey this time... What's the point of that?

They just HAD to update their maps. Oh, and the radio has an extra button on it now. How can you live without that!?!?!

[johnny847]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

NOW you're talking. LaTex on Mint Linux please!!!

I prefer Arch Linux myself. I did use to use the Cinnamon desktop environment for a while, but XFCE was the only desktop environment that I tried that seemed to properly handle non uniform multiple displays (1920x1080 + 1080x1920 (that's rotated to portrait) + 1920x1200 + 1680x1050). I feel like this behavior really should be controlled by the Nvidia driver, not the desktop environment.  Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can chime in, but I was not willing to put in the time to figure out why this was the case and just went with XFCE instead.
I only typically use the first two displays at any given time, but occasionally I do use the third display. The fourth display is rarely used. When it is used it's only really for peripheral stuff like spotify and chat windows, as it's generally too far to really put anything important on.

What I don't like about LaTeX is it's hard to write efficiently without ample screen real estate. At a bare minimum you need two windows displayed side by side - PDF and source code. It gets even worse when I try to make slide decks in beamer and I'm simultaneously looking at the article, presentation, and handout versions of my slide deck, along with my LaTeX code, web browser, MATLAB, and another PDF viewer for a paper I'm referencing. This is one of those instances that I use four monitors.

[dragoncar]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

NOW you're talking. LaTex on Mint Linux please!!!

I prefer Arch Linux myself. I did use to use the Cinnamon desktop environment for a while, but XFCE was the only desktop environment that I tried that seemed to properly handle non uniform multiple displays (1920x1080 + 1080x1920 (that's rotated to portrait) + 1920x1200 + 1680x1050). I feel like this behavior really should be controlled by the Nvidia driver, not the desktop environment.  Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can chime in, but I was not willing to put in the time to figure out why this was the case and just went with XFCE instead.
I only typically use the first two displays at any given time, but occasionally I do use the third display. The fourth display is rarely used. When it is used it's only really for peripheral stuff like spotify and chat windows, as it's generally too far to really put anything important on.

What I don't like about LaTeX is it's hard to write efficiently without ample screen real estate. At a bare minimum you need two windows displayed side by side - PDF and source code. It gets even worse when I try to make slide decks in beamer and I'm simultaneously looking at the article, presentation, and handout versions of my slide deck, along with my LaTeX code, web browser, MATLAB, and another PDF viewer for a paper I'm referencing. This is one of those instances that I use four monitors.

WTF?  I just code it up directly in vi as a PDF binary.  Render it in your brain and you can use the whole screen for typing!

[dragoncar]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

NOW you're talking. LaTex on Mint Linux please!!!

I prefer Arch Linux myself. I did use to use the Cinnamon desktop environment for a while, but XFCE was the only desktop environment that I tried that seemed to properly handle non uniform multiple displays (1920x1080 + 1080x1920 (that's rotated to portrait) + 1920x1200 + 1680x1050). I feel like this behavior really should be controlled by the Nvidia driver, not the desktop environment.  Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can chime in, but I was not willing to put in the time to figure out why this was the case and just went with XFCE instead.
I only typically use the first two displays at any given time, but occasionally I do use the third display. The fourth display is rarely used. When it is used it's only really for peripheral stuff like spotify and chat windows, as it's generally too far to really put anything important on.

What I don't like about LaTeX is it's hard to write efficiently without ample screen real estate. At a bare minimum you need two windows displayed side by side - PDF and source code. It gets even worse when I try to make slide decks in beamer and I'm simultaneously looking at the article, presentation, and handout versions of my slide deck, along with my LaTeX code, web browser, MATLAB, and another PDF viewer for a paper I'm referencing. This is one of those instances that I use four monitors.

WTF?  I just code it up directly in vim/xxd as a PDF binary.  Render it in your brain and you can use the whole screen for typing!

[johnny847]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

NOW you're talking. LaTex on Mint Linux please!!!

I prefer Arch Linux myself. I did use to use the Cinnamon desktop environment for a while, but XFCE was the only desktop environment that I tried that seemed to properly handle non uniform multiple displays (1920x1080 + 1080x1920 (that's rotated to portrait) + 1920x1200 + 1680x1050). I feel like this behavior really should be controlled by the Nvidia driver, not the desktop environment.  Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can chime in, but I was not willing to put in the time to figure out why this was the case and just went with XFCE instead.
I only typically use the first two displays at any given time, but occasionally I do use the third display. The fourth display is rarely used. When it is used it's only really for peripheral stuff like spotify and chat windows, as it's generally too far to really put anything important on.

What I don't like about LaTeX is it's hard to write efficiently without ample screen real estate. At a bare minimum you need two windows displayed side by side - PDF and source code. It gets even worse when I try to make slide decks in beamer and I'm simultaneously looking at the article, presentation, and handout versions of my slide deck, along with my LaTeX code, web browser, MATLAB, and another PDF viewer for a paper I'm referencing. This is one of those instances that I use four monitors.

WTF?  I just code it up directly in vim/xxd as a PDF binary.  Render it in your brain and you can use the whole screen for typing!

Lol I'm good, but not that good!

I have tried taking notes in class in LaTeX before. Was decently successful, but class notes are far less complex than slide decks.

[Fearthebait]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

[Threshkin]

Pffft you plebians using Word. LaTeX is so much better! (but terrible for collaboration unless everyone else understands LaTeX) (but then again when that's true it makes it so much easier to communicate equations over email)

NOW you're talking. LaTex on Mint Linux please!!!

I prefer Arch Linux myself. I did use to use the Cinnamon desktop environment for a while, but XFCE was the only desktop environment that I tried that seemed to properly handle non uniform multiple displays (1920x1080 + 1080x1920 (that's rotated to portrait) + 1920x1200 + 1680x1050). ...snip...

I have fond (?) memories of Word Star on monochrome displays at 720x350.  If you insisted on color you had to use a 320x200. But who really needs color for word processing anyway?  All formatting was control code driven because it was a text only interface.

[zolotiyeruki]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

[MgoSam]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

[GuitarStv]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams

[MgoSam]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams

I read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and for whatever reason, did not enjoy it. It's wittiness makes it something that I normally would appreciate, but I guess I'll need to go back and re-read it.

[onlykelsey]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams

I read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and for whatever reason, did not enjoy it. It's wittiness makes it something that I normally would appreciate, but I guess I'll need to go back and re-read it.

I loved it when I first read it at 13 or 14, but went back recently, and did not enjoy it at all.  It came off as pretentious rather than witty.

[MgoSam]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams

I read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and for whatever reason, did not enjoy it. It's wittiness makes it something that I normally would appreciate, but I guess I'll need to go back and re-read it.

I loved it when I first read it at 13 or 14, but went back recently, and did not enjoy it at all.  It came off as pretentious rather than witty.

That's exactly how it came across to me! I did "read" it as an audiobook, so perhaps a paper (or Kindle) copy will be better.

[MrMoogle]

OK I looked up the actual code.  If you turn on "wildcards" you can use the X{Y,Z} expression to find anwhere between Y-Z of X.  So you if you:

find: <space character>{2,1000}
replace <space character>

then click replace all, you will immediately replace all multiples of 2-1000 spaces with a single space if that's your goal

Neat! Thanks for looking that up and sharing.  :)

Luckily it'll be easy to look up next time I want to use it.  Just check the "Overheard at Work" thread.

Good luck finding it.  Just remember it's on page 299.

[nobodyspecial]

The original BBC radio series play is better than the novelisation - and a lot better than the later TV version

[PARedbeard]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams

I read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and for whatever reason, did not enjoy it. It's wittiness makes it something that I normally would appreciate, but I guess I'll need to go back and re-read it.

I loved it when I first read it at 13 or 14, but went back recently, and did not enjoy it at all.  It came off as pretentious rather than witty.

That's exactly how it came across to me! I did "read" it as an audiobook, so perhaps a paper (or Kindle) copy will be better.

Try getting the audiobook of Douglas Adams reading it. It really cuts down on the pretension and ups the wittiness factor. When he reads it, you really get a sense of the comedic timing.

[GuitarStv]

I was recently promoted in the military and my coworker comes up to me and says "Now you have to spend all the extra money you make this month on a gift for yourself." Not a TERRIBLE idea, but not something I was interested in. Shortly after he follows up with "You know you should just go out and buy a brand new car, it'll basically be free because you weren't making the extra money anyway!" This same person also paid off an $8000 loan on a car they had so that they could get approved for a loan on a brand new $45,000 Mustang....

Wow. In other words, "you earned a promotion!  Yay!  Now spend that raise in a way that won't actually improve your life!"

Reminds me of this quote

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams

I read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and for whatever reason, did not enjoy it. It's wittiness makes it something that I normally would appreciate, but I guess I'll need to go back and re-read it.

I loved it when I first read it at 13 or 14, but went back recently, and did not enjoy it at all.  It came off as pretentious rather than witty.

That's exactly how it came across to me! I did "read" it as an audiobook, so perhaps a paper (or Kindle) copy will be better.

Try getting the audiobook of Douglas Adams reading it. It really cuts down on the pretension and ups the wittiness factor. When he reads it, you really get a sense of the comedic timing.

Yeah, that's how it was introduced to me . . . on long childhood car trips.  I still hear his voice in my head when I read the book.

[markbike528CBX]

The original BBC radio series play is better than the novelisation - and a lot better than the later TV version

Yep, I was quite young when I heard it on BBC shortwave.   Somewhere I have a tape of me giggling during the broadcast (mobile tape recorder microphone sitting right near the speaker).

I have a copy of the BBC radio play on CD (I don't think it is quite the original, but close).

My (future) wife was worried when I was able to quote nearly the entire first page of the book from memory.

[KodeBlue]

The original BBC radio series play is better than the novelisation - and a lot better than the later TV version

Yep, I was quite young when I heard it on BBC shortwave.   Somewhere I have a tape of me giggling during the broadcast (mobile tape recorder microphone sitting right near the speaker).

I have a copy of the BBC radio play on CD (I don't think it is quite the original, but close).

My (future) wife was worried when I was able to quote nearly the entire first page of the book from memory.

My first intro to HHG was a VHS tape of the BBC series all episodes back to back. Remains my favorite. The movie was a dud IMHO.

[Kitsune]

On a similar note, for those who listen to radio p,aye: check out Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood.