long week

A work rant follows. Consider yourself warned.

I spent the early part of this week building a huge MS Excel/Access "platform" to make the annual budgeting process easier. Basically it pulls a ton a financial information from a national database via a kludgy and relatively unsupported Excel-based add-in called TM1 that would have been hot stuff by, say, 1995 standards, dumps it into a big Access database where each item dropped into one of about 120 human-comprehensible categories, spits the consolidated data into an Excel template where it can be reviewed, modified, and sent back to the database with the touch of a button -- at which point it gets recoded back into its original financial-system-ease and reuploaded to the kludgy database. After working on this all day until 2 or 3 in the morning on both Sunday and Monday I received an email from my manager around noon on Tuesday asking if I can finish it four days ahead of schedule -- because "the other regions are ahead" of our region. So I managed to finish it around 3 Tuesday morning, demonstrate it to the five other people on my team (who are, thankfully, appreciative of my efforts) around 10 in the morning. I then spent the next 10 hours preparing, checking, and copying-and-pasting charts into Powerpoint slides for a presentation that the Local Emperor of Everything has to give to the National Emperor of Everything regarding how well the Local Emperor is managing almost Everything and what plans he has in place to better manage everything that falls into that "almost" By the way, Powerpoint is not only the television of the corporate world (check out this article from The New York Times Magazine entitled Powerpoint Makes You Dumb), it's also one of the most error-prone, inefficient, and inconsiderately-designed programs I have ever encountered. I'd rather build charts and graphs with a broken-off piece of pencil led held between my teeth.

Anyway, very little time this week to write or read or do anything at all worthwhile. The TV-B-Gone thing was by far the best part. That, and listening to an scratched-but-playable mono LP of the Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons. God, Ruby Tuesday is a powerful, moving song. I've heard on the radio all my life but, until this week, I'd never actually paid attention to it. And what a startling combination of rough-around-the-edges brashness and perfectly stately structure the early Stones' songs were . . .