A lesson: Copy and Paste

I just finished typing up instructions on something really hard to do. Wait for it…yes, folks, copying and pasting in Microsoft programs.

So, Big Bird is a bit old, and by a bit old I mean that she isn’t technically old (62), but she is technologically old. She has a hard time comprehending anything computer related and I’m even a bit surprised that she can use her cell phone.

The programs we hand out a funeral services are all saved in our computer as templates using Microsoft Publisher. We have a template for each of the poems/verses that are commonly chosen by families. When a family decides to use a custom program however, something say, with a photo on the cover, we have a local print shop do the printing and photo editing for us instead of printing them in house. Now, in keeping with Big Bird’s controlling nature, she has to design all the wording for the folders before we give this other company any of the details to the program they are to print for us. I have been the one to do this in the past, be the go-between for the print shop and the funeral home, but Big Bird insisted this week on learning how to do it (which I am all for not being the only one that knows how to do something, especially since I’m not really an office worker anyway). So, I explained yesterday to her that the print shop does not have Microsoft Publisher (I tried to tell her that they are a Mac-based people and we are not, but noticed that she thought I was speaking Swahili, so I just said that they couldn’t open the ‘attachment thing’ if we sent it to them like that), and that we would need to save the Publisher file as a picture file when we were ready to email it over to them. I quickly showed her how to do that (she took notes) and then opened the picture file so that she could see what it would look like when the print company opened it. Well, this started a discussion about why they couldn’t then edit it and all that mess. Argh.

So now I am typing up instructions on how to copy the Publisher words and paste them into a Word document, save it, attach it in an email, and send it to the print shop. Swear to Buddha, I might just die.