It’s the end of the Financial Year tomorrow, and I’m really looking forward to it! It has been completely manic at work for the past month, culminating in a final report on my main project, which I was responsible for producing. Writing the content was challenging enough – there is a lot of stakeholder politics involved which can set traps for the unwary – but I particularly hate wrestling with M$ Word. For example, section 4 of the report decided unilaterally to set its default dictionary to French! So instead of being titled “Constraints and Considerations”, Word was insisting on “Contraintes et Considérations”……. I have absolutely no idea why, and had to call on one of our Word Ninjas to force it back into English again. Nor do I understand why the inclusion of a couple of footnotes in one of the annexes completely screwed up the footers, but at least that was easy to work around by jettisoning the footnotes. Bill Gates has a lot to answer for, not least my elevated blood pressure and rapidly greying hair!
I have been working on the report flat out since last Tuesday, including the weekend, and am absolutely shattered! My project manager delivered the finished document to the customer yesterday and I think that my body took that as a sign to go on strike. I had hoped to have paced myself to make it to the Year End, and had planned to review a colleague’s milestone report today and then possibly take tomorrow off as Time Off in Lieu of last weekend. But in fact I woke up this morning with a full-on migraine – throwing up whenever I moved my head, wincing at light and noise, an axe-murderer pounding my left temple, the works. I wasn’t safe to drive, so I had to call in sick and spend a very lazy day at home today, doing absolutely nothing, while I waited for the painkillers to kick in. And I’ll have to go into work tomorrow after all to review that other report which needs to finished and delivered by the end of the afternoon.
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I love the term “Word Ninjas”! Though it reminds me of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” where they use words and sounds as actual weapons…
We had a similar end-of-year Word Crisis on another project this week, and discovered that under some circumstances, adding a “New Page” Section Break can actually _remove_ an empty page from the document.