Goodnight and good luck

It is with a heavy heart that I must now bid you, my fair readers (both of you) farewell. This is something I have been contemplating for a while now, and Dr. Nerd's Technical Trauma Center will be closing (at least temporarily...) There are two reasons for such an untimely end to my tribute to the techno-stupidity of others:

I've become obsolete. As I had mentioned in a prior post, we recently hired a new IT guy who is a god among geeks. Everything around the office is starting to work the way they describe it in the manuals, and he's restricting our access in ways that only the most blazing idiots could screw up badly enough that they'd require help. Unlike those who held this position before him though, this guy is actually qualified and my dear colleagues are coming to me less and less with their questions and problems. I'm starting to realize that the archives will only get me so far and eventually, I'm going to need some new material.

More important than this though, is something I'm terribly ashamed to admit. Doctor Nerd, savior of the clueless masses (who enjoys laughing at them behind their backs), has been beaten. It pains me to type this, but I have fallen to the forces of evil and stupidity. This happened a few days ago and I've been broken up about it ever since...so much so that even my new favorite co-worker setting me up with her (very attractive) nice little Jewish girl friend hasn't been enough to vanquish the thought of this failure from my mind.

One of my colleagues (a repeat offender) called me to see if I could come help her with something. She was getting very angry and close to throwing "this damn computer" out her window (odd, since this particular co-worker doesn't have a window). I went over, figuring it would be something amusingly, innocently dumb that I could share with you. However, what I found was something way over my head. She was working on an enormous spreadsheet, copying data from one workbook to another. When clicking on a cell in the destination workbook, however, it was opening up a blank email addressed to various people whose names were in the first workbook. I figured she was somehow hyperlinking cells in her destination sheet to email addresses in the origin sheet, but was concerned by the randomness of the addresses and the fact that the "mailto" function was being put into what seemed like miscellaneous cells - there was no pattern to speak of. I had her send me the workbook so I could do a quick zeroing out of the formatting, which is supposed to remove the hyperlinks. It worked, but 4 minutes after I gave it back to her, she called again in a panic. Apparently copying one additional set of fields over put ALL of the random links back. I took a look at the original book but couldn't see anything there. Even google was of no use to me in figuring this out. I never thought I'd see the day when I was truly, completely, hopelessly stumped, but it has happened and I feel that continuing under the Dr. Nerd moniker would be akin to fraud. At best, I should be demoted to "Med Student Nerd" or something equally degrading.

So with this, I bid you all farewell.

Shalom Beeotches!!!!!