I found a print out of an old post and saw that it had been on Blogster. So, for the first time in several years, I clicked on Blogster and signed in – for a wonder, remembering my old password. And I posted a “hello” and then I noticed that several of you are double-blogging – here and also there. Sheesh, I don’t know where you find the time.

I am also surprised that my blog there hasn’t “timed out”. I am pleased that it hasn’t.

One of my projects is to print out copies of all my posts here and on Blogster, and put them in a binder. It’s a tedious business. There seems to be no gobal way to do it. No, you have to click on each one, highlight it, transfer it to a cumulative list in a Word document – when that’s all done, you can do a massive print from Word. This will take forever. And, particularly, because our color printer that we bought when we changed computers a few years ago and the old, really professional printer we had was not compatible (HP techie laughed himself silly when I asked if we could still use it) holds less than an inch of paper. Oh, p on it.

I do miss the really great equipment I had at work. And if there was a problem, pick up the phone, call The Times’ computer department, and voila!, a techie would show up soon and fix it.

I will now digress to a remembrance from that time. The controller, Emily, who managed the finances for this arm (the Syndicate, which sold features to other newspapers) of the Times was a really petty, difficult person, and she was historically angry with me because we had worked together at the book company, Times Books, and I had left to transfer over to the Syndicate at a much higher salary. She sought, following my defection, that she considered a betrayal and a personal insult, to make it impossible for employees to achieve inter-company transfers without the express, explicit permission of their immediate supervisor. I don’t think she succeeded.

To my great chagrin, she, too, transferred over to the Syndicate some time later, and I was to suffer mightily at her hands because she never approved any funds for my projects. Meanwhile, I had taken over the computer data for marketing (I was smarter then) and was working with a program that eventually couldn’t perform the tasks people were asking of me.

I wanted a relational data base, instead of the data manager I had. Emily was dismissive, told me I just wasn’t smart enough to make things work, and refused to consider an upgrade. However, seeking to humiliate me by showing everyone how incompetent I was, she asked the computer people from The Times to come and evaluate my request. She was absolutely certain I would be shot down. I sat with them for an hour or so, showed them what I was doing, how I was inventing end runs around the program’s limitations, and how the program still couldn’t do the job. They then wrote a report that not only approved my request for an upgrade but praised my skill at outsmarting the drawbacks of my existing program. Emily had been hoist by her own petard.

The program was bought and installed and I was sent to the Times’ computer department for training on the new program. After the training, I returned to my office and taxed my brain to achieve the transfer of data into relational categories for the 500 newspapers I was managing for our sales efforts. When I succeeded, I was ecstatic.

You know, Ed has re-invented himself in order to feel, as he puts it “like a person”. I miss the days when, I, too, had status of a sort, and was part of an important whole. And, let me tell ya, there’s nothing like walking into a meeting and saying, “Hi, I’m Harriet Stanton from The New York Times.” What a kick.

xx, Teal