the deep moans round with many voices

Thing I taught myself how to do today: make fillable fields in Word documents.

This is not something I ever previously had a need to know, though I have worked extensively with such documents -- someone else in the office (usually Mom Boss) has always put the document together before sticking it in the shared office drive.

But! Downtown leases never used to have language about what happens to security deposits if a tenant switches from one apartment to a new apartment (and especially not if the apartments are in different buildings). Apparently Ms. Busywork had a Word document of some sort that she hoarded on her own hard drive, and which was appended to specific leases as needed. I asked Ms. Random Numbers how to handle the security deposit for a tenant who's switching to an apartment with a lower rent, and she told me to recreate that form and append it to the new lease.

So I recreated the form. It was annoying and took significantly longer than it really should have, which is partly because a lot of the easily googleable information about Word fillable fields is based on older versions of Word and I didn't realize that until I'd already mucked up one test file beyond repair. (This is why I use test files!)

Once I had a working version, I emailed everyone to be like, "Hey, I have recreated this form, please look it over and see if it needs any edits (particularly with regard to legal language, because the original document was awful and I'm not sure my tweaks fixed the issues)."

Mom Boss promptly responded with something to the general effect of, "Why is this not in your base lease language already? Collegetown leases have language about what happens to security deposits in switch leases baked into the standard text on page one."

So I went back and checked the new downtown lease (there was no point checking the old one. the old one was HORRIBLE, ran like 14 extraneous pages, and required a signature on EVERY PAGE instead of one at the end) and nope, there is still no language about what happens to security deposits in switch leases. *headdesk* Apparently we missed that when trying to reconcile the Collegetown (sensible! efficient!) lease template with the old downtown (horrible!!!!!) lease template last fall.

I have asked Mom Boss to send me the Collegetown language so I can edit the downtown lease templates. By this point, I am quite confident in my ability to tweak complicated documents with lots of fillable forms. *wry*

(Tangentially, I taught myself how to make fillable .pdf files a few year back for one particular project, promptly forgot all the details because I didn't use the skill again for ages, and then had to relearn again this past fall in order to complete some new projects. Fortunately I already knew there was a pretty simple method, and it was much less frustrating to figure out the second time around.

...

Someday I am going to encounter a reason to learn PowerPoint. I am not looking forward to that.)

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In other new computer skills news, last night I created a Doodle account and today I created my first Doodle poll, as part of trying to schedule a church Board of Trustees meeting. There were some bumps in the process! But it seems to have worked out all right in the end.

Three cheers for the old "bash a few options around and see what works" approach?

Honestly, that's how I figured out 90% of what I can do with my cell phone -- scroll through menus and poke around and see if anything I try does something useful. You never learn anything if you don't either ask/search or just mess around. :)

So one of my coworkers has Covid-19.

In some ways, this is not surprising. If you'd asked me which of the rental company office staff (I don't know all of the maintenance staff as well) was most likely to get infected, I'd have picked Mr. Commercial. And indeed, he got Covid by attending a live in-person church service and singing, unmasked right next to his pastor... who, you guessed it, had Covid.

*headdesk*

Our best guess is that he was infected on Sunday the 7th and I have not had any direct contact with him since... I think Friday the 5th? so I am the least likely among us to have caught it from him. BUT. I have had contact with people who had contact with him, so even though we all wear masks at work in common areas and whenever two people are in the same room, who knows.

Ms. Rise-and-Shine called me this morning with the news, and then called back about 15 minutes later to say the downtown office will be closed today and tomorrow. She also said not to schedule a Covid test until Sunday, so as to give time for the virus to become noticeable (if, indeed, we have been infected). There weren't any Sunday slots available, so I checked in with Mom Boss and scheduled a Saturday morning test instead.

...

I will inform my parents, since we had lunch together on Wednesday.

And then I have an unexpected work-from-home day. I'm going to drive in to the office to grab the iPhone we use to take apartment tour videos and spend my afternoon pulling videos and photos off there and arranging them in useful folders... which I think will then go onto a USB drive that I can take in tomorrow. See, I can't go back to work in the main office until I get my test results, but because I'm not a direct exposure (just an exposure to a potential exposure), I don't have to quarantine and can work from the Commons office all alone, where I will have access to our shared office drive and other programs.

I'll also keep an eye on my company email, but other than that, this is halfway to being a day off.

Ah well, I'm sure I can think of something to fill the hours.

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ETA 6:30pm: I forgot why I'd been putting off the iPhone project since November, which is that the files A) have mismatched naming systems, B) have misleading timestamps, C) include a whole bunch of screwy duplicates from the period where every JPG photo also created a 2-second mirror MOV file, and D) therefore download without any coherent or useful way to organize them, because whether I sort by date OR by name OR by file type, things will always be out of order. ARGH.

Anyway, I got through August. I don't need to worry about January or February, since I've been downloading those files as I go and also got rid of the naming mismatches and the MOV duplicate glitch when I took over possession of the iPhone in November. But I am not looking forward to sorting September and October.

I took my laptop to Best Buy this evening, to get the no-audio-input issue checked out.

It's always so reassuring to have three techs in a row look at your computer and say, in effect, "WTF? That doesn't make any sense," and then later on, "If we can figure it out, we'll definitely write this one up."

...

I have left my computer with them overnight and maybe for several days. We shall see what they discover.

I was today years old when I learned how to use mail merge. *wry*

I've just never had a task that required it before! But it turns out to be pretty simple -- the trickiest part was getting the bleepity bleeping source spreadsheet set up with the right columns in the right format. But the January move-out sheets and key envelope labels are all printed and ready to collate into move-out packets on Monday, once Ms. Random Numbers lets Mr. Geniality know which version of the security deposit return address form to include.

(Basically, when you move out, we return your security deposit less any damage charges. But we're not psychic, so you have to tell us where to send it!)

...

I wonder if I can sneakily cheat and make labels for holiday cards using office supplies from work? That would save me such a lot of handwriting...

Today's adventures in learning how to edit videos:

I imported some of my own phone camera videos into Lightworks and have been playing around with them, in addition to watching more tutorials.

Thus far, I have figured out how to make text crawl up over the screen, which apparently is called a roll rather than a crawl? Or at least Lightworks uses "crawl" for text that marches in a single line across the screen from right to left, whereas a roll goes across the screen from bottom to top.

That is useful for video titles!

The problem is that while I can fuck around with the font, the size, the spacing, the color, and various other text effects, I can't find a way to adjust the speed of the roll/crawl, and the default is P A I N F U L L Y S L O W. *headdesk*

I think I need to make Lawyer man put his title sequences onto a USB drive and hand that to me (and/or put them on the shared office drive) so I can just muck around with those instead of trying to create something from scratch. I should probably also get Miss California's into and outro sequences. We do want to create a unified "feel" for all our company virtual tour videos, after all.

I've also managed to do something with grouping and un-grouping audio tracks, but I can't tell what's on which track and I'm not sure I can adjust their volume independently? Maybe some of the other tutorial videos will explain that.