Star Trek: The Old Generation

The downside of being an outlier in the job market for a dozen years is that I haven't had to learn all the snazzy new things that MShoddy has created. Today I was told and blindly followed the steps to do an email blast for Tuesday morning's breakfast education meeting for one of my remodeling groups. Something about initially writing it in Outlook, using control K a lot to make links for things like "if you can't see the images, click here", going somewhere in Access Queries to copy and paste email addresses. Then I know I was directed to Outlook Express, which is apparently a little different, doing some set of keys to automatically alphabetize the email addresses and kick out duplicates. There is no way in hell I really know what I did let alone be able to repeat it on my own. While I do need to essentially know how to do this, my admin (OMG I've never had one of those) can usually do those pesky little tasks for me.

On a more upbeat side I got to play with ExactTarget and did most of the draft of an email for a different association. At least the designing element for that one client will be fun.

But seriously the rest, damn it's going to be a steep learning curve. I'm hoping the copier that scans documents into PDF that then get stored on the server is fairly easy. But I hold out small hope because that way if it's hard than hell I won't be disappointed, on the other hand if it's a bit of a breeze I'll be doing the Snoopy dance.

With all these programs and fancy machines I am getting an inkling of what the previous generation felt like when I buzzing around all confident with WordPerfect 5.1-DOS teaching myself tricks, memorizing the key strokes so that I didn't need that silly crib sheet that fit so neatly over the keyboard. Now I long for such a thing, desparately.

Perhaps tomorrow something will glean and shine as creates a new neuropathway in my brain.