Thursday, July 30, 1998

        You can't really tell from the photograph, but my Windows wallpaper is "Coffeebean," an allover pattern of steaming coffee cups in various shades of coffee brown.

        When I got a new computer at the last place I worked, all the wallpaper had been removed. The sound card had been removed, everything on the computer that could possibly have any potential for being interesting or fun had been disabled. What could the motivation have been? I suppose sound card thing is understandable to a certain extent, although it seems like it would make more sense to deal with abuses on a case-by-case basis. I doubt that there would have been a problem with me sitting at my desk with music blasting out of the speakers and no one being able to do anything about it. Even so, I suppose it's a good idea to nip those kinds of problems in the bud.

        But how do you abuse wallpaper?

        I made my own, of course, by finding a graphic of a piece of handmade paper and creating an all-over pattern of ivory with little flecks of color. Just anything a little more interesting than a completely blank screen.

        And this week I discovered that I had been lied to in response to a perfectly legitimate question.

        I worked a lot in Word in that job, and I was getting sick of the stupid little paperclip "Office Assistant" in Office 97. There's a window that pops up in response to various things, and inside the window was an animation of a paperclip that suggested various ways of handling whatever task you had just started, i.e., "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like to a) get help writing the letter or b) write the letter without help."

        Absolutely incredibly annoying, and although I was able to get it down to where it popped up with much less frequency, there didn't seem to be any way to turn it off entirely. I tried, believe me. One day one of the computer people was up at my desk for something else, and I asked her about the assistants. I said that I had tried to change the assistant to something else a little less annoying; when you clicked on "Options," there was a whole gallery of them--a robot, a dog, a cat, cartoon representations of Shakespeare and Einstein, a soft-spoken "Mother Earth." However, when I tried to choose one of those other selections, I got a message that they hadn't been installed.

        "Oh, those were never actually implemented," she told me. "They were going to have them in there, but they decided not to. The only one that ever got past the idea stage was the paperclip."

        I accepted that. It seemed stupid, but it didn't really matter. Just another annoyance. Of course, when I started this new job, with the same software, I found out that the other characters are there in the standard version of the software, they were just disabled in the "corporate" version, and telling me that they had never been available was a complete lie. Yesterday I changed the assistant to Scribbles the Cat, a cat made of paper, who mews and washes herself and even has a kitten (there is a kitten, I mean, not that she gives birth to one onscreen), and is infinitely less annoying than the stupid paperclip guy, and who is, in fact, even welcome on my desktop. I enjoy it when the little window opens and I get some sort of suggestion from Scribbles, whereas I wanted to throw the monitor through the window every time "Clippie" or whatever his name was, showed up.

        I suppose there are some advantages to a big corporate structure, but right now I can't think of any. Oh, okay, I can think of one--the cafeteria. However, the lack of a cafeteria is causing me to get out at lunch time and walk, so that's actually a plus, too.

        Pyewacket has been a brat all week. She's been purposely getting up on the coffee table and the kitchen counters, and Bob's yelled at her several times tonight. She'll stand on the sofa and stretch out so that she just barely touches the coffee table with her front paws, and she'll sort of look at Bob out of the corner of her eye, and he'll just kind of lean toward her with a stern look in his eye and she cringes and jumps back.

        She'll run wildly from one end of the house to the other, leaping up on the table in front of the front window, bat the miniblinds with her paw so that they rattle, then race off into the living room and practically bounce off the window in there. We think she's having temper tantrums because we're both going off to work all day instead of staying home and playing with her, or else she has an abundance of energy since she's home alone all day.

        We ordered pizza tonight and when she saw the delivery guy coming up the sidewalk, she immediately ran to the front door. I think she just saw the opportunity to run out, since she has apparently figured out that when someone comes to the door, the door is generally opened. I had to pick her up before I opened the door to keep her from running outside, and since I was holding her, she got her chin scratched by the pizza guy (not the cute pizza guy, worse luck), and, like he does every time he comes, he commented on how much she resembles his own kitty. Last time he came she trotted down the sidewalk after him when he left, and he remembered that.

        What I remembered was that the lsat time he came, and she trotted after him, I leaned down to pick her up with two pizza boxes in the other arm and twisted my back, and it took several days for it to stop hurting. So tonight when the doorbell rang I called for Bob to come help--I said, "Would you either pick up the cat or take the pizza?" He chose the cat.