JL is one of those people you love to be working with. She brings out the best in people, professionally and socially.

Beneath her laconic exterior lurks a cutting wit.

JL was the keeper of a book in which she scribbled “quotable quotes” and “memorable moments”.

The book must be nearly 25 years old now, and I feature in some of its pages from 1988 to 1990.

JL sent me some samples this week. Most of them I wouldn’t like to publish here, but some are okay for mainstream consumption.

May 2, 1988:

Michael Gorey’s first day at The Times.
Customer: “And how long have you been working here?”
Michael: “I only started … er … recently.”
(Actually it was four hours earlier).

June 22, 1988:

Kate, Aurora and JL have massaged Michael’s shoulders to ascertain who is the best at it.
Michael: “With you three massaging I’ll probably have bruised shoulders tonight. Whatever happened to the gentle approach?”
CC (astounded): “The genital approach!”

Note: CC was the editor.

August 31, 1988:

CC and Michael try to convince Kate to become a nun. Kate steadfastly refuses, declaring her interest in marrying.

Michael: “How will you be able to serve Christ if you’re having it off with a strange man?”
Kate: “He won’t be strange if I’m married to him.”
CC: “He will be the first time.”
Kate (pensively): “I s’pose that’s right!”

Note: Kate was a born again Christian, now happily divorced and living in Queensland.

October 3, 1988:

JL and Michael discuss submitting stories to magazines.
Michael: “When I go to Tasmania I might take a camera and get a few shots of anything interesting.”
Julianne: “Yes, do a couple of little colour stories.”
Michael: “No, I’ll probably take black and white.”

October 21, 1988:

JL patiently listens to Michael as he describes the new ABC girl (Virginia) and her over-developed bust.
JL: “She’ll suffocate you Michael.”
MG: “That’s what I’m hoping JL.”

November 3, 1988:

Michael: “Virginia’s part Jewish (pause) … I don’t know which part.”

December 5, 1988:

CC telling Michael about a woman who wants to sue the paper for something he wrote about her in the People column: “I don’t think she likes you very much.”

January 10, 1989:

Michael walks into the room: “Where’s Bhagwan (CC)?”
JL: I don’t know. He’s probably in David’s (manager’s) office watching the cricket.”
MG: “No he’s not. That’s where I was.”

I’ve never been someone who hangs around in sheds. To me, they are storage facilities, often for junk or things that don’t fit in the house.

We have three sheds at our house.

I went browsing in one of them this morning, trying to find some old CDs with work data on them.

I didn’t find the CDs, but I did discover a dozen or so pens, a cricket ball and an old USB disk.

Remember when USB disks first came out?

This one is two and a half inches long, about three quarters of an inch across. The data capacity is 128MB. I have a fairly new drive that stores 4GB in half the size.

Finding the pens was a real bonus. I bought a pack from the supermarket recently and none of them worked. There are never any pens handy in our house.

I often wonder where all the lost pens go. Some of them migrated to the shed, it seems. Not enough though to explain why so many pens disappear.

There must be an underground chasm somewhere that’s full of odd socks and pens.

At work, I need to hold a pen nearly the whole day. If I leave my desk to see someone, I take a pen, even if there is no intent to write with it at the destination point.

I don’t think it’s a security blanket type relationship, more likely it’s insecurity about the pen disappearing before I return.

I actually don’t use MS Office much these days, but its presence is ubiquitous.

I like Atlantis for quick documents, saved to RTF format and OpenOffice is my main choice in Linux.

At work we use Pongrass for text editing and I only need Word for opening contributed documents.

There was once a time I didn’t have Word at all.

At the Alpine Times in 1997-98 we typed our articles directly into Pagemaker. I can’t remember what the typesetters did (people who entered sporting results, letters, media releases, etc). They probably used Notepad or something like that.

We also had Lotus Notes. Reporters generally typed their articles in that program before saving them to Pagemaker.

Email was relatively new in those days. Most media releases still came by fax or post.

Lotus Notes back then couldn’t open .doc files. Imagine that!

Once I received a contributed article by email in Word format and had to explain that we couldn’t open it; please resend it as plain text or RTF.

To his credit, the gentleman seemed impressed we weren’t running Windows for everything.

It’s impossible to operate that way today, however.

Lotus Symphony

What prompted this post was the free availability of Lotus Symphony.

I have tried it in Windows before and tonight downloaded the Linux version. It’s a fully featured free word processor based on OpenOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF) with easy conversion to PDF among many other features.

It’s able to save files in .doc format and open them.

The only downside compared with something like Atlantis is the large file size, a massive 455MB in Linux.

Liking to experiment, I reinstalled Office 2007 and now wish I didn’t.

It’s hard to know why Microsoft changed the traditional interface that worked. Using Word 2007 is like learning the program from scratch; so many things are different, even how to save a file.

The default Calibri font, point size and paragraph spacing is annoying. I’m sure this can be changed, but why upset traditional users the moment they open a blank file?

The Help file says: “The new, results-oriented Office Fluent user interface presents tools to you, in a clear and organized fashion, when you need them …”.

It’s not clear and organised compared with the previous version.

There are meant to be new, improved sharing features for collaborating with colleagues, but I never use these and find them irritating when they sometimes appear in “finished” files.

I think Microsoft have over-engineered the software.

The only feature I like is the easy conversion to PDF.

I’m more likely to use Atlantis (which now supports docx files) or OpenOffice.

Speaking about docx, that’s the another annoying feature of Word 2007. So many people can’t open the files. Why change the world’s most common document format?

Rant over.

1. Sending group emails to people who don’t really need to know;
2. Attaching large files;
3. Sending an email to someone in the same room about a mundane matter;
4. Asking to be notified when the email is deleted;
5. Phoning to see if the email was received (true)!

MacNevin said the rapid growth of email means that many organisations and individuals have forgotten the business guidelines for written communication, sending, receiving and filing of mail.

“People feel compelled to reply to emails even with just a ‘thanks’ adding to the overwhelming number of emails people receive. A simple ‘NRN’ (no reply necessary) can reduce the overload significantly,” she said.

Before email came along I was a big memo writer. The information conveyed and requests made were precise. In most cases, immediate action was not required. I wasn’t very good at filing memos though.

That’s why I find email useful for retaining a written copy of semi-important things which would otherwise not be recorded, like: did I really approve that request for leave? Scan Outlook to find the answer.

Email demands attention and I agree we’ve become slaves to it. I like MacNevin’s idea to tag emails with NRN if appropriate, and will implement that in my workplace.

As a means of personal communication, I’ve observed that text messaging has overtaken email among young people.

The stapler is controlled by a malevolent spirit, possibly the same demon responsible for socks and pens.

The curse of the insidious stapler is that it fails to serve its purpose in times of acute need. Sure, it pins papers together when you don’t really need them, but in times of administrative crisis the stapler goes missing.

Examples:

• You need to staple 30 pages together, but the flimsy plastic stapler on your desk barely chews through half of them;
• Conversely, you employ a heavy-duty metal stapler to join 100 sheets together and it leaves a mini cannon sticking out the other side;
• When you’re in a hurry, the stapler inevitably runs out of staples.

I’m frequently in a rush, but I also have quiet moments, and I can never recall a stapler running out of staples in one of those.

At peak times, not only do you run out of staples, but you can’t find any new ones. Staplers are cursed.

That’s a little surprising when you consider that journalists are writers. But when you think about it, we are craftsmen while novelists are artists. We ply a trade while they follow their creative spirits. We have responsibilities, they don’t.

Three good books about newspapers come readily to mind. PG Wodehouse wrote Psmith, Journalist in 1915; Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop in 1938 and Terry Pratchett published The Truth in 2000.

In Wodehouse’s classic, Psmith arrives in New York on a cricket tour and becomes involved with the home entertainment weekly “Cosy Moments” which he transforms into a hard-hitting investigative journal. He rides the bumps of organised crime and American politics along the way.

In Waugh’s story, scribe William Boot is mistaken by the publisher of the Daily Beast for a war correspondent. He is uprooted from writing country garden features to covering the civil war in Ishmaelia. Both novels are cleverly satirical.

Pratchett’s The Truth is a typically fantastic work from the author of the Discworld series. The hero in this case is William de Worde, who teams up with dwarfs to print the first newspaper in Ankh-Morpork.

As usual, Pratchett offers some tremendous insights into human nature. His observations of the newspaper profession are also very sharp, suggesting excellent research or personal knowledge. For instance, he offers a rare literary tribute to the unsung work of sub-editors.

I’ve just finished reading The Truth for the second time. I found the focus on hired assassins to be distracting and kept wanting the story to get back to the trials and tribulations of The Times.

There are some great one liners, like when the dwarfs make a typesetting error with the newspaper’s logo, which becomes: “The truth will make you fret”.

I related personally to the serial pest who kept coming into the office with remarkable vegetables. Anyone who has worked on a country newspaper will know there are people in most towns who like to show off their giant tomatoes or funny-shaped parsnips.

I admit it’s one of my long-term ambitions to write a satirical novel about newspapers. I started taking notes of strange but true incidents last year, like when one of my reporters disappeared while on the trail of visiting Mongolian detectives.

I have heaps of material; just need the time to write it.

You can make a perfectly audible comment across the office and he just doesn’t hear. To get his attention you have to draw his eye.

He’s not in a job where he has to answer the phone much, or get involved with discussions, but occasionally he is required to engage in dialogue.

Sometimes I see him swaying about the office, and if he wasn’t a non-drinker I’d have every reason to suspect he was intoxicated.

He’s good at his work, and apart from sometimes talking to myself while talking to him, I have no reason for complaint. I’m sure chronic text messagers waste more time than he does.

Is this is a common issue in the workplace? How should I deal with it?

Funnily enough, I’m writing this on the day that Google formally integrated its online spreadsheet application with Writely to create Google Docs.

I like the look and feel of Google Docs, which is minimalist in the Google tradition, but Zoho is also impressive. I’ll continue to experiment with it and give some more impressions here later.