OC-Don't

I am the antithesis of OCD. Those lovely tasks that require the attention to specific details done over and over again?

Those jobs make me reach for the bourbon earlier and earlier in the day.

This past week, I got asked to do some problem solving. My church has an emailed daily devotional; the associate pastor had taken it on as part of her responsibilities. She is now gone, and we are working to get the replacement text up. I agreed to be on the committee because I like looking for good material.

We found the good material, got permission to use it (temporarily), and one of the committee members started to transcribe it - pulling it from Kindle format into Word.

The church's web person set up a template, and then she went home for the holidays, with the deadline fast approaching. Nobody else knew how to do it, and the staff member in charge of the committee threw up his hands.

Crorey, can you figure it out?

Sure. I am a problem solver. I really like learning how to do stuff. So I opened the software, played around in it until I had created a template I was happy with, put a single example of the devotional into the template, sent it to everyone that needed to look at it, and was done. Questions answered.

Question 1: can we put hyperlinks in the mailerdaemon? (I think we don't use the -daemon term for obvious reasons, but that is what it is)

Answer: yes.

Question 2: Can we make the January 1 deadline?

Answer: yes.

But now Crorey is copy and pasting document after document, renaming each of the devotionals with a unique identifier, scheduling each to go out at the appropriate day, reformatting where there was hidden formatting from the copy from Kindle, and doing quality control.

Descending into my own personal hell.

The only job I ever quit was at the law library at Tulane. I loved the people I worked for, but the job was to take slips of paper every day, locate the journal they were for, and replace the page that had been updated with the updated page. It was an OCD person's wet dream. And since I am NOT, I trudged through those doors every day for a whole week, dreading the moment that I had to start the work. I finally had to tell the bosses that I appreciated the job, but I simply could not deal with the despair every morning. 

  

I ask the web guru, who is now back from vacation, if she would look at one of them for a quality assurance check. Does it look like she thinks it should?

Now Crorey is reformatting each document according to a different template (smaller font, italics for the prayer, quotation marks for the quoted material, breaking each up for readibility.)

Very little would make me descend into madness faster.

If you need me, you can find me at the "library" - the book where I keep the bourbon flask.