I want to write a little bit about my day today which includes a visit or my MD, a full set of work, and meeting up with my Texas peeps where they will meet Jin for the first time. Incidentally, the Meetup is also a housewarming party for our mutual friends Mike and Amy who just happen to be good friends with my Ex-husband and his girlfriend. That means Brian and Jessie will also get to meet Jim. How’s that for complex relationships?!

There’s like four blog posts of content in there but my brain is still in a knot over my day yesterday. I actually woke up at 5am this morning thinking about it and could not go back to sleep. I was at the gym by 6:30am, trying to make up for the set I missed yesterday because I was so busy.

I had an early work meeting on one of my new projects where I’m helping on a data conversion project acting as a project manager. Part of me is worried about being able to do a good job with it given all my other projects but after yesterday I’m more worried about working full time while I’m also in school full time. That leads me right to the main problem I had yesterday.

(Spoiler alert – long useless technology rant ahead)…

I’ll preface by saying that by the time I arrived at 8pm, I wanted to scream and punch a wall. I spent about 6 hours collectively over the past few days re-writing my lecture notes from Residency into readable 200-400 word summaries (summaries from 20 different lectures and workshops). Last time around, all we had to do was cut and paste our notes into a word document so this extra step took more time than anticipated.

This time, instead of a word document we were to use a web form. It only took a half an hour to fill out the form, rating each lecture and pasting in the content from each of my 20 documents. Easy right? Wrong. I submitted and the form issued me an error and would not post.

“My response was too long.. try shortening my answers.”. The first time I was like, ok, they must have a pretty tight control in this word count thing. I went back through and checked the word count on each one of my 20 documents and sure enough a few were too long. I took out sentences and paragraphs and made sure it was all good. Then I went back to the form and repeated the cutting and pasting. Hitting submit, I got the same error.

Then I thought it was perhaps the whole form that was too long and ended up cutting out some lectures I had summaries for. I got that down to a minimum and tried to submit again and was met by the same error. By this time I was irritated that this was happening and gritting my teeth about the waste of time.

I was also out of options for cutting content and still meeting the minimum requirements. I called our program coordinator and she was thankfully still at the office. Well, she was still at the office because she had been fielding calls from other students. This was my signal to relax as it wasn’t just me.

Her advice was to try another browser. Not only that but make sure I was signed into the platform with my student email and not my personal email. What? Ok whatever. I was using chrome and she suggested Safari. She also said people were having good luck with Firefox. “Good luck”? It should not take good luck to get a web form to post.

I never use Safari so none of my passwords were stored. And since I let chrome remember passwords I didn’t have mine to enter. The one I had written down did not work so I had to go through the whole password reset process which, at UNO, is NOT straight forward. There are multiple systems with multiple user id’s, and you have to navigate to yet another 3rd party system that controls user accounts and person authentication. Getting through all of that took like another half hour.

When I was finally back to the blank form in Safari, I started filling it out, for like the 3rd or 4th time. I got to the end and hit “submit”.. annnnnd was denied once again. Arrrrrrrg! 😡

Out of options, I cut and pasted the entire form into a gdoc and edited that so it had all my content and answers. I downloaded that document and attached it in an email and sent it off. That will have to do. Again, that was about 8pm and I was in full on super-rage mode. Was it the technology? Was I missing something with my entries? If something wasn’t valid with one of my entries, the form should point to the erroneous field. That’s web form 101. My gawd!

Anyway, my brain could not let it go and I had already wasted my whole afternoon on and evening. My work is backing up and now I only have two days in the work week to get 18 hours in to meet my minimum. That means I’ll probably have to sacrifice part of my Saturday to catch up. And that means there will probably be no Barcamp for me this year. We’ll see how today and tomorrow go.

Ok. Flame 🔥 off. It’s time for me to get my act together and kick this day’s ass now that I have successfully navigated my way out of Web Form Hell.

Doing the Thursday Thing,

~Miss SugarCookie