Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Entertaining myself

I am getting over a cold and am not operating in prime form. So I am not particularly motivated to get lots done at work.

A few hours ago, I decided I would work on a spreadsheet, registering people for an upcoming event, when I found a menu that was a link to "hot tips." I was sure I could kill some time learning pointers online while maintaining a reasonable facade of productivity.

All the link did was take me to the Apple Discussions Board for Numbers. Ehh, nothing to write home about, right? WRONG!

At each of the discussion boards, it seems like there are two or three contributors to each that are quite proficient in that application, with that piece of hardware, etc. The Smarty Pants for the Numbers board was one Frenchman named Yvon (French-ily pronounced EeeeeeeeeVON inside my head). It appears that Yvon only has one side of bed to get out of and it's the wrong side.

Someone wrote in wondering how to add time, as in 10:15 plus 2:45 = what? Frenchy was quite testy when he wrote, "Deed you not see zhe manual zhat came with every copy of zhe softwares? It clearly says on page 88 how to remedy zhis. If you could read, you would not bee wasting my time." Then he vomited out piles of commands and symbols that surprised me. Huh. I've been using spreadsheets for years, but I guess I stick to the basic like addition, with an infrequent smattering of multiplication. Math is hard.

He snarfed at someone else along the lines of, "You should search zhe boards and you can clearly see I have answered zhis question before. Don't bee so stupeed as to re-post zhe same question. If you could read, zhen zhis would not bee a problem. Deed I remind you zhat a PDF manual sheeps with every copy of zhe softwares?"

Wow. I'm thinking that Yvan took the whole Freedom Fries thing way too personally.

Of course after reading his Angry Frenchman posts, I want to start a new hobby of antagonizing innocent question askers online. I could entertain myself for days with that!