Working frustrations

Oh the aggravation! A very simple (so I thought) work-related task turned into a saga lasting several hours and resulting in quite a bit of frustration today!

Here's what happened: I created two newsletters for a couple of nonprofit organizations; I used Pagemaker but the nonprofits don't have this program so right now we aren't compatible. I'm getting Publisher for the next issues but right now we need to get the current issues printed. My job ends when the documents have been created and I normally just leave a copy of the document on CD with them. Because of the incompatability problem this time and me living close to a Kinkos, my newsletter people have asked me to drop off the print jobs.

Sounds easy enough.

That is, until I set out to find the print shop can't find either one that's close to me. (Really, how hard could it possibly be?) It starts raining and so I pull over to call the store. Between me not being familiar with the area and the young man not having the sense to say "We are at the corner of This Street and That Street" I still can't find the place. Driving around I eventually find it. I'm starting to get aggravated, and the rain starts falling harder just as we are getting out to go in.

I take my kids and my disks and my instructions that I have so painstakingly prepared for the printer and go in the shop. Turns out, that's not how they want it. They want it emailed in, in PDF format, along with the printing directions and payment information.

Oh goodness, that's an extremely aggravating trip for nothing. We drive the 20 minutes home in the rain with me thinking I can still do this without that much more of a headache. How wrong I was.

My PDF program on my computer doesn't do what I need it to do, so I get online and find a free trial for five online file conversions. After I finally got it to convert (lots of waiting), turns out all it coverted was the FIRST PAGE of a 10-page document. I thought it meant a free trial of five documents, not five pages. Perhaps document and page means the same thing to PDF!! Chalk that one up as a learning experience, and a highly frustrating one at that.

My husband found me a PDF converter to download on the hard drive but by this time I've wasted approximately five hours of my day (for which I'm not getting paid, by the way) trying to get this to work with no avail.

I've ended up emailing in Pagemaker format the documents to the printer and they can do the coverting.

What is more, by the time I finish up with all this it's past time for us to be leaving to go somewhere for the weekend.

So I just take a deep breath, eat some chocolate, smile at my children, and refuse to stress over anything the rest of the day.