mrs doubtfire – a tale of microsoft office, investment banking and tatties and neeps

8/9/2019 Mrs Doubtfire A tale of Microsoft Office, Investment Banking and Tatties and Neeps

1/4

Mrs Doubtfire A tale of Microsoft Office, Investment Banking and Tatties and Neeps

1

Friday, February 03, 2006

Mrs Doubtfire

We have technical experts where I work at the bank. They train the desktop publisherswhen they first arrive in the business and later provide them with assistance when they

are having difficulties with the software or technique under the often considerable

pressure of production deadlines. Often enough, this is simply a matter of helping

desktop publishers to work through difficult tasks systematically, but they are also

frequently called upon to find solutions to the technical issues that arise from the day

to day use of that modern marvel of software engineering -MicroSoft office suite.

Almost all banks use this collection of computer programs for desktop publishing:

Word for documents, Powerpoint for slides shows and diagrams, and Excel for the

graphs that go in the documents - and sometimes other things, like timelines. And once

in a while, bankers, who spend much of their waking hours doing unspeakable thingsto Excel spreadsheets, also decide to use Excel as a word processor. The reason for this

I can only guess, but it may be because they lack the energy at 3:00 am to Alt-Tab into

Word itself.

Although the Office programs are not professional presentation applications with the

strengths and refinements of Quark or PageMaker, and frankly are often just not up to

the sort of complexity of pages banks demand of them, the Office files are easily

interchangeable with just about anyone in the world doing business and they tend not

to require specialist knowledge to adjust, so bankers can work on the document as well

as DTP professionals.

I have worked with Microsoft office for over 13 years now and Word for longer than

that. These programs have in some ways improved and got more stable over time (ie

they doesn't crash every two hours these days), but they still remain riddled with

contradictions and intricacies that I would guess, from a software design point of view,

have a lot to do with tacking band-aid solutions on top of old, already half baked

programming dating back to the days when Bill Gates' still found it difficult to get

dates.

For example, ever since Office 97, bullets will randomly disappear from Word

documents or boogie left or right from the margin. In a job where bullet points are

sprinkled through documents like wedding confetti, this can be a problem. The way

things are going, it will still be a problem in Windows 3003 because Office XP made

no difference that I could see. Or perhaps, in typical Microsoft fashion, they will

finally fix the bullets, and stuff up something else that worked perfectly well for years

and you had got used to depending upon. And undoubtedly this will be achieved by

making it anticipate your needs, or adding a small annoying cartoon character that

pops up every time you least want to see it and asking you what it can do for you.

I await, but have never seen, the joyous reality of a bumper sticker depicting the

Microsoft Office paperclip being dropped slowly, helpfully, and in a user friendly

fashion, or at least friendly to my designs - into a vat of boiling oil. Although it hasvanished from recent versions of Office, the spirit of the little bastard is still in there


2/4


2

somewhere; you can just feel it.

When these kinds of issues arise during the gallop for some impossible deadline - that

is, courtesy Murphy's law, almost constantly - it can be the calm, smart thinking, or

technical knowledge of one of these office heroes - the technical experts - that is thedifference between a sigh of relief and a disaster of biblical proportions, leading to the

dust of bellicose unhappy bankers gathering on the horizon of your day.

Needless to say these people are highly valued, much in demand and much respected.

And their job can be, when it is busy, next to impossible, as their attention is split

between helping footsoldiers like me meet bankers' deadlines, and helping the bankers

themselves, who are out there, doing their level best to stuff up their own deadlines, by

doing something funky and creative with the template of their documents while they

attempt to make them look 'sexy'.

I sometimes overhear the frantic calls from bankers who ring up for technical support,panting desperately about something strange going on in their document and a deadline

looming like Armageddon's first cousin over their day. And often enough, something

strange is indeed going on. When the techie opens the electronic file, there is that

moment, that pause during which they shake their head in parental disbelieve. Once

again they are faced with inter-dimensional nested financial tables like an Escher

drawing sprouting from every corner of the page, other-worldly disembodied

fragments of diagrams adrift in text boxes, or graphs where straight lines have become

spiralling curves, as though an invisible black hole had appeared in the file and sucked

the data mercilessly towards its inescapable digital maw. This smorgasbord of Twilight

Zone delights, is what happens when an overtired banker tries to make a document

look sexy in the small hours.

These technical experts are all pretty smart, and all genuine characters, distinctive in

their own ways, and some of the nicest people you are ever going to meet. Like the rest

of us, they operate in shifts, so quite often if your shift overlaps theirs, you will get to

have more than one around during a given working week.

During the weekdays, for example, we are blessed by the formidable duo of Agent P

and Comrade Spock, both born East of the former iron curtain, though the former in

European realms and the latter closer to Moscow. Both speak the Russian mother

tongue and use it to communicate for much of the day, intriguing conversations that

start with

"Nazdorovia smeitse, pie chart, da?"

and usually end with:

"Pravda."

More often than not this is followed by rumbles of laughter from both operatives.

About what, none of the rest of us can be certain, as our Russian is pretty basic. It

could be something along the lines of


3/4


3

"Am observing repeat occurrence of banking individual fitting excessive pie charts

into diminutive document area."

"Yes, truthfully, this phenomena has been observed."

What we do know is that there is nothing they cannot fix when you need them, and no

lengths to which they are not prepared to go to help, assuming you can pull them away

from yet another banker who has deleted half his document while trying to add a sexy

bullet to the footer.

Agent P, is a well educated, humourous woman with a penchant for one liners and a

personality the size of Lake Michigan. She is always amused - amused by the demands

of life, amused by the bankers and other examples of corporate intelligence, amused by

how she manages to juggle small children at home with the grown up children with

economics degrees who constantly ring her up desperate for help getting rid of the

inter-dimensional phenomena appearing in their documents. It is just as well they findAgent P on the job, because nothing from any dimension I an aware of is capable of

ruffling Agent P. I have never actually observed anything even approaching a worried

expression on her face. She not only, by her own admission, sounds like an eastern

European agent in a James Bond movie, she has all the cool of the agent that almost

assassinates bond with a cocktail stick after her virtuoso cello performance in a Prague

concert hall - and looks a bit like her too.

Comrade Spock, is a dependable, likable gentleman with a dry wit, whose laser-beam

like force of concentration and clarity of attention could bore holes in reinforced steel

should he ever choose to move from Banking to the construction industry. Show him a

difficult graph that you think is so frightening it is almost alive, regarding you withferocious multi-segmental pies for eyes and broken axis columns for teeth, and he will

raise one eyebrow inquisitively before probing its intricacies with his built in tricorder

and, within seconds, with a soft "Hm." will adjust and modulate until the desired result

appears as if beamed in by transporter - and the beast is tamed.

On the weekend there are different technical experts on hand. And of all the technical

experts, though I love them all, my favourite is Mrs Doubtfire.

Mrs Doubtfire was not named by me, but by some of her students. This nickname is

nothing to do with Robin Williams in drag, but it harks from the essence of the Mrs

Doubtfire character in the movie of the same name.

They named her thus because of the nurturing energy she has, and well, the fact she is

Scottish. Though she has lived south of the border for many years, she knows her

tatties from her neeps, and woe betide you call a Scottish island part of England as I

once did, rain clouds will sweep across what is without exception, an otherwise a

radiant sky.

Mrs Doubtfire is a woman who has seen the odd sunrise or two more than some, by

which I mean she has grown up children. She does not fuss, but she does know how to

mother. She looks after students like a hen looks after a line of chicks. She tirelesslywatches out for their little slips and slides, and is ever ready with a helping hand or a


4/4


4

kind word, and a patient few minutes to extricate them from whatever woes Bill Gates'

dateless past or Mr and Lady banker's dateless present have presented them with.

Nothing is ever too much for Mrs Doubtfire, her patience with the distress and needs

of others is limitless. She makes you feel as though you are in the boat together and

she made it, so why shouldn't you.

Not that Mrs Doubtfire is a shrinking violet, she is the sort of self motivated character

who makes you sit up and wonder what all the fuss is about in your life and why you

are not doing more with it. She makes being in your 50s seem like the most delightful

thing that ever happened to a person. She has enthusiasm for life, for learning, for the

things that others enjoy as much as those things she enjoys herself. She smiles a great

deal of the time as though she had a battery of golden egg laying geese in her

backyard, yet she works hard, and everything she has, she has worked for.

Mrs Doubtfire is not prim and proper either. She discusses her failings with

mischievious glee and she has some creative theories about what needs to happen tobad apples, who once graced the corridors of one's life. Woe betide I ever become a

bad apple.

Mrs Doubtfire, is without a doubt one of my heroes. It is partly because of Mrs

Doubtfire's example of making what she wanted of her own life, that I found myself

able to believe after a period of being more than a little down, that I could do the same

with mine. I almost certainly gave up smoking because of her and for that, and the

many other times she has added a little touch of a smile to my day I am ever grateful to

her.

God Bless Mrs Doubtfire.

mrs doubtfire – a tale of microsoft office, investment banking and tatties and neeps

Documents