Old Dogs, New Tricks

So I am one week into the back-to-school thing, and I feel old.  Even antiquated.  Past my prime.  

I've been in a clerical position for my entire adult career life as a surgical recorder, a medical transcriptionist, and now as an administrative assistant.  Throughout all of those roles, I fulfilled my job expectations above and beyond requirements.  All my performance evaluations say so.  

In keeping with the old, antiquated theme here, I have been using Microsoft Word since it's inception because I am just that darn old.  Folks, I learned to type on a Royal manual typewriter at our kitchen table.  

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.  All good men come to the aid of their country.

When I was able to use an IBM Selectric in high school, that was DA BOMB!  

On a side note, Captain tells me that in the Selectrics that had the ball with the typeface on it, if you flipped up the little latch thing on top and then hit the Enter/Return key, the typeface ball would shoot up to the ceiling.  

I didn't know that because not all of us are teenage boys with juvenile humor.  Heh!

PCs were just coming onto the scene when I graduated in 1985.  When I started at Mayo Clinic in 1991, I was trained on a CPT, which I don't know what that stands for, but it was a behemoth of a machine with a 10-inch floppy disk for external storage.  Yeesh o'Pete!

Then along came the Microsoft Office products, and we all got a crash course in Word and Outlook.  Just the basics; nothing fancy.  But...I was able to do my job, and do it well, with just the basics.  

Now I am relearning the Microsoft Office suite as part of my AAS degree in Health Information Technology.  

In all the 30+ years I have used Microsoft Word, I never--let me repeat that, NEVER--realized there was a whole formatting ribbon for References (citations, footnotes, end notes, bibliographies, work cited page).  

I was so excited on Saturday when I learned this that I dashed right out into the kitchen to tell Bigger about my exciting "new" discovery.  He looks at me with sincere and utter pity and said "Well, duh!  Everybody knows that, Ma!"

No, no they don't.  Those of us who had Microsoft thrown at them as part of their job expectations and only learned enough to do their job did not learn all of these little things.  I realize that all millennials have taken word processing or keyboarding or whatever the blazes they call it now, but us Generation X folks did not.

I will take this time to say that I am having trouble adjusting to eTextbooks and all of the notetaking tools that go with that.  What the heck was wrong with a book, a notebook, and a darn pen to take notes?!?!

But I digress.

When I took the class with the IBM Selectrics in school, it was called typing, and we learned how to manually center something on a paper by counting the total number of characters you wanted to center--including spaces--divide that by 2, go to the horizontal center and then backspace whatever that number was you got by dividing by 2.  We had to work for our pretty documents.  

Oh, oh!  And doing a vertical centering task, that one will drive you to drink the way we had to do it, but that's another thing I don't know how to do in Word.  I just keep hitting the Enter key and checking the document to see if it's in the center.  If not, I hit the Enter key some more.  There has to be a more efficient way to do it; maybe that's part of my module next week.  😆

But I'll admit that I like having Microsoft do the crappy formatting details like footnotes and bibliographies for me.  

On a related note, I accidentally stumbled onto how to alphabetize my list of calendars in Outlook (I have dozens to work with every day) with one stupid right click of the mouse instead of the labor-intensive click and drag process I'd been doing.  

Sometimes I'm so dumb I amaze myself.  

Who knows what other gems of knowledge I will mine from this computer class!