The Grumpy Admin

I look up to see Jan and Snow White in my doorway. As usual, Jan starts off with a question I cannot answer:

“How do we convert it?” she whines.

“How do you convert what Jan?” I ask, trying to hide my desire to kill her where she stands.

“An Adobe back to a Word,” she whines.

After a few minutes of patiently listing to her latest emergency, she needs to convert PDFs to DOCs.

Let me digress. I work in a company where we PDF everything. If I sneeze into a Kleenex, we flatten it out and drop it on the scanner. Seriously, there is a bad habit shared by nearly everyone here that involves an end-user working on a document, printing it to paper, scanning it, having the scanner email it to them, and then usually not saving the original document. I’ve been pretty mad for a while that my mail server is filling up with this nonsense. But I can’t stop it.

Well, it finally came back to bite the end users in the ass on Friday. Now they have realized that they can’t open their PDFs in Winword. Well duh. So, now they need to convert back. This wouldn’t happen if you just saved the original DOC you nitwits.

So, I installed the software to Jan’s PC, and showed her “What button to hit” and it now converts back. I don’t need to tell you how bad of a job even the best programs do. Now she gets to go back through all of these shitty “pdf to word docs” and clean up what the OCR couldn’t. Serves her right though.

I think I’ll head home tonight and copy some of my DVDs to DIVX then to VCD then to VHS and then back to DVD. What button do I hit?