Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Blessings & Cursings, Part II

OK, now I know the computer gods hate me.

Since last post, the computer gremlins followed me to work, and immediately went to work on my brand new Microsoft Word program on my beautiful, almost brand new MacBookPro. Yesterday afternoon and most of this morning, I couldn't key in Greek letter characters.

Who cares, you say?

As it happened, I was editing a magazine article submission written by a math brainiac in our industry who had peppered his written piece with equations. Greek letters all over the place — or at least there shoulda been. But when I opened the document, everywhere there should have been a beta or theta or epsilon, there was, instead, a little square.

Our IT guys, our art director and I spent about five man-hours yesterday and again this morning, searching "Help," restarting, rebooting, installing new fonts, re-installing old fonts, setting and re-setting preferences, re-installing software ... and scratching our heads. Late this morning, we finally came up with a work-around, but the mystery remains: Where the "Symbol" drop down says I should be able to insert a Greek character, I simply can't.

Turns out our art director can't do it on his Word program, either. Everyone else in our office — none of whom have any need whatsoever to insert Greek characters — can insert alphas, gammas and deltas in Word 'til the cows come home. But not us.

Our art director and I are looking for arcane charms and rituals with which to appease the capricious virtual deities. Suggestions welcome.

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