Me: Thanks for this. Is there any way I could get it as a PDF?
Streeter: Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. Like Oliver Twist, you always seem to appear at my serving table, begging for more. But unlike that malnourished Dickensian scamp, you, Sam, are as well-fed as Dickens himself. I feed you a powerpoint and you appear before me, rotund and glistening, begging for more file formats. This I cannot abide. For much has been made of wasted paper, but what of wasted pixel? What of wasted RAM? And what of my time? Am I not a valuable employee of this company. Does my title not include the phrase “in Chief”? When I accepted this job offer, I had but one question for our CEO. “Will I have to save multiple file formats when I send around plans for future site development?” I received a firm promise that I would not. And yet here I am, so many months later, painstakingly opening a powerpoint file, searching half in vain for the proper menu item from the dropdown, tediously re-naming my file, fruitlessly searching my computer for the proper file, waiting in agony while it attaches itself to this email and finally staring at the clock to realize it is forty-five minutes since I should have left this office and gone home to my wife. But here I sit, beholden to the whims of a man who cannot be bothered to download a simple program to his “traveling computer,” even though I know him to be technology proficient. Even though I know him to be well-moneyed and capable of paying the small fee for said program. Even though I thought him to be a friend. But what sort of friend, Sam, makes one work late so near a holiday? I return to Dickens, to a different story this time, and paint you a Scrooge while I paint myself as Bob Cratchit, laboring at my desk at that most magical time of year. And though you may have a Carroll in your wife Elaine, this is certainly not my idea of Christmas. File attached.
Wow.
