>>>>>It's quite frightening the no. of people who don't know this. When I taught Excel to secretarial students, some of whom had been using it in work for years, every class I'd ask them the answer to, like, 6 + 3 * 4, and 9 out of 10 would answer 36.
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>>>>>BTW, I'd teach 'em more in 1 day than they'd gleaned in 2 years' use ;-)
>>>>
>>>>Talking about Excel... I was working with a guy who called me to help him out. Remember Lotus 123? Well he asked me to help him with an excel problem. He couldn't figure out how to move a range. Apparently he'd been trying to figure this out all morning. He said to me (and this is an exact quote), "I know how to do this in Lotus 123, but I can't figure out how to do it in Excel." I was almost too stunned to speak.
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>>>Yeah, over here we have 3-pin plugs to put in our 3-hole wall sockets (outlets). Over in Canada I didn't know WHAT to do with the 2-pin plugs and the 2-hole outlets. :-)
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>>Yeah, I've run into that, but the answer is quite simple. You call an electrician to change the outlet or the plug. Ok, it takes a month or two, but it gets done. ;)
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>
>Electricians are ungodly expensive but it's always worth it to see if you found the one on earth who praises his predecessor's work. "Hey, you know what? The last guy who worked on this did a pretty darned good job." Not in this lifetime.

Preceded by a flat exhalation ("outtake") of breath