Programmers are Magic. Really.

I had an assignment at work.

The assignment involved creating 300 signature blocks for Outlook, our email program of choice.   The signature blocks involved a logo and text specific to each person, the department they work in, their desk phone number and their fax number.

I mentioned this to Ian in passing, and he said something to the effect of, “I could write a program to do that for you.”

“Really?”   … not being able to imagine the possibility.

Today, I was presented with the perfect program, producing just what I needed with the functionality he thought would be beneficial (rightly so) and simple buttons to choose along the way.    I’m betting that even our end users could use this program themselves.   Ok, maybe that’s dreaming, but in a right world where everyone knows how to follow instructions, it should be quite easy to do (there’s just that little tricky bit with attaching jpg files as signature blocks that they’d likely need instructions for).

Most excellent!    This probably saved me days of work (maybe weeks!  I can’t imagine having to do 300 files one at a time..)

I showed my boss.   I was too excited about it to let it go till the morning, so I showed him while he was packing up his stuff to leave for the day.

Me:  “Do you have a sec where I could show you something REALLY cool?”

Him: “Yes.. what is it?”

I showed him.   He was extremely impressed.   🙂

Magic.