The Specialist

I can make charts in Excel. Ergo, I'm special.

Not to brag too much, but today, just because I churned out a couple of very simple line graphs using the wizard, I suddenly achieved expert status. And thereby helped out and impressed the Big Boss, hooray! She's no intellectual slouch, but she's at a place in her career where she has people to prepare documents, reports, presentations and the like for her, so she probably hasn't mucked about much in Excel since the Reagan administration.

Back then, you know, Excel had beads.

Remember Max Headroom? I used to love that show. I had such a crush on Matt Frewer! And I wanted to be like the British chick, what's-her-name, because she was so poised, oh-so hot, and she really knew how to work computers - an accomplishment that seemed well beyond the dreams of your average high-school wanna-be femme mentale. A couple of years later, my parents would get an Atari 800, I'd churn out high school English papers in LetterPerfect on a dot-matrix printer, I'd learn a little BASIC on an Apple IIe (boy, talk about the skills you WON'T use again after graduation), and my dad would send me off to college with a Heathkit H89, which confused and frightened me. I mean, the thing required a hugely elaborate string of commands just to turn it on, and if you got any line wrong it automatically administered severe electrical shocks. That thing was scary.

So it's gratifying to be regarded as a computer whiz, dammit, even if only by state employees. But I still can't seem to seize control of the elevators or the cooling system.