Spread This

We're about thirty years in, now, on making our own Christmas cards, and by "we," I mean me, with Dave's usual lavish support. Until five years ago, I carved a block and hand-printed over a hundred cards in black ink, and then hand-colored each one, and then wrote inside them and addressed the envelopes, and in the days before email that also entailed a fat recap of our entire year in longhand, because some of those people only heard from us that often. It worked out to about, carry the one, five thousand minutes per card, which means--move the decimal--I should be done with 1994's batch any time now.

Utterly ridiculous amount of time involved. Of course, I worked then, and as everyone knows, retired people are oh so busy. You know why retired people tell you they're busy? They just want to work "retired" into the conversation as often as possible because they enjoy the look on your face.

So, yes, I'm busy, but that's after working in nine or more hours of sleep a night, and a leisurely morning with the newspaper and coffee, and a considerable chunk of time staring into space. I now devote about three days to carving out my card block and getting a decent print and coloring it, and then it's off to the print shop for mass production. One "Murry Christmas" in my illegible hand on the inside, slap on the stamp, and Bob's yer uncle. The only really aggravating part involves Microsoft.

I made a spreadsheet of my Christmas card recipients. It's got three columns. Name, address, city.

I don't even really know what a spreadsheet is, and my Microsoft Excel spreadsheet knows this, and tries to wipe me off on the first low branch it trots under.

Wikipedia: "A spreadsheet is an interactive computer application for organization, analysis, and storage of data in tabular form." Sure it is! And you can manipulate all that data. And by "you" I mean you, not me. I try to alphabetize my list, for instance, and I get a nice column of names in order, which is useful if you don't mind that their addresses didn't tag along with them. Every time I try to do something like this my spreadsheet goes tectonic. The columns shift along predetermined fault lines with the names uplifted and the cities subsiding. Yes, I looked up how to do it right, but my spreadsheet can smell fear, and is in fact quite energized by it. My spreadsheet will stop suddenly just to watch me sail over its head into the bushes.

At one point I thought I couldn't add a new name to my list unless it fit alphabetically where I deleted a dead person.

So after a while I quit trying to manipulate my data and just flang it in. Which is inelegant, but at least it's all there. Until that dark day comes that I need to do a Mail Merge and get all those data on sheets of label paper.

But this is Microsoft. There's going to be a quiz. What is the name of your printer's first pet? Bzzzt, wrong answer, the parakeet totally counts. What kind of label paper are you using? Here's a list of a thousand brands of label paper. It's probably one of those, have a spin. What is the PIN number for your account? Do you want to start an account? Would you like 10% off for doing a survey? What's your maternal grandfather's first name? Are you sure? They changed things when they left the old country. What? Oh, you wanted to print labels? Never mind. What is the name of your printer's first pet?

Every year. Every year I would curse and drink and spend hours and finally my labels blundered into the barn and I slammed the gate behind them, and then I carefully wrote out instructions for the next year for what seemed to work. The next year those instructions did not work. Shit, I bought a Mac ten years ago, but I was afraid to not use Microsoft, so I got Microsoft Office for Mac all saddled up and tied it to my toolbar where it is routinely spooked by just about everything.  So this year I sidled up to my computer and threw a blanket over my spreadsheet's head and went to retrieve last year's instructions. And guess the hell what? I didn't have instructions from last year. What I did have was last year's list ready to print. I apparently saved the successful last step of the Mail Merge as a word document, and I was able to edit it for this year and hit Print and the gol-durned thing sprinted away and came back with my labels. Like that.

Which means I can send the spreadsheet to pasture and just update my word document from now on. I'm sure I didn't think of this wonderful thing. I think one of my young friends came drifting through and pulled a beer out of the fridge and fixed the settings on my computer and evicted the gremlins and reamed out my phone and said BTW (that's the way they talk) you can just use this document from now on, LOL. And I forgot it until now.

And this is why old ladies keep a lot of beer in the fridge.