Technology

Those of you who know me, know I love technology. For the most part this has served me well, but boy it sure can be a royal pain in the you know what. I have been typing my thesis proposal recently, and the geniuses that be, made a lovely little program called EndNote, that makes the arduous task of citing references about as easy as possible. All I need to do is download a citation from the web, and Endnote formats the whole thing according to the journal style of referencing that is required. Ha, I can remember all of those classes in high school and college that taught "Chicago style" and other referencing styles. Talk about a pain. Well, kiss those days good by. The days of thoughtless citation are here. Call me lazy if you must, but I am quite happy to be called so for such convenience. Muaahaha.
However, this lovely technology caused me a great deal of grief recently. For some reason, this magical program, magically decided not to format the citations as needed, and in place of beautiful citations, it put these long computer-code like looking items in the text of my proposal. Now my proposal looked like gibberish (though it could be argued it was gibberish before this happened). I spent the whole day yesterday trying to solve this problem to no avail. AUGH!!! Then, to top it off, it rained like crazy yesterday with wind and all making my giant umbrella more of a sail than a water shield. This allowed my fake goretex jacket from China to act very well as a sponge. So I sat all day in wet clothes, no progress on the writing due to the technical issues, and then walked home in the wind and rain to complete the soaking. Steam was coming out of my ears. Never has grinding cardamom for dinner felt so satisfying.
Today, I became sensible and called the company that makes Endnote, and after being on hold for 25 minutes, they fixed my problem in about 1 minute. Now all is well again as my proposal appears to be normal again and I am in dry clothes.