Today I could be found buried deep in my department toiling with part of a dissertation, furiously trying to get some sort of acceptable template going on MS Word, so that I can give a test copy to the dissertation office by tomorrow. Right now, Open Office is just not cutting it for me, which is a shame because it has improved leaps and bounds in the last few years. But it needs a few more steps to go and in the mean time, I will go campus to work on “El Miscrosoft Palabra.”
As I was leaving campus, there were two firemen walking away from one of the buildings where there had been some fire drill or scare or something needing of the Chicago department personnel. Walking away from the building, one of them, with a huge magnetic grin on his face, told his partner “I feel smarter just from being in there for 10 minutes…”
He passed his grin onto me and probably many others, just about immediately. It was of course a fun way to mildly make fun at all the geeky onlookers and the general reputation of this monastery of geekitude. I smiled even more because today I just marveled about my total inability and stupidity to do something like format a document. I have been fearing this moment for, oh, like 8 years, because I just don’t get it, especially when it comes to more complex formatting stuff and when I am faced with formatting some small and trifling, but essential detail that MUST happen, I feel like I have been thrown in some fantastically large whirlpool, where, if I make it out on the other side alive (not even likely) there are, killer mutant, bees waiting to devour me. I know it may sound like I am exaggerating but in fact, I am not. Just days ago, thinking about formatting made be break out in ways that have not happened since mid-puberty and also get a cold.
Thankfully there are very smart and helpful and kind folks at the U of C, like David Forero who is like a technological god-send to the anthro department and the social sciences. Though his technical skills reach far beyond something measly like formatting a document, he offered his base technical magic to me and got me out of some desperate quandaries today.
I guess this long post is just to thank him: thanks David for keeping me out of the whirlpool today. I hope I stay there.