Change is a Beautiful Thing

August 16, 2009

I’m not good with change.  At the mere mention of change, I dig my heels in like the anchor in a game of tug-of-war and won’t let go. 

Just last week my husband suggested we change our kitchen shutters to blinds.  Even though every single day I curse opening these stupid shutters I still said no.  Why?  Because my instinctual response to change is an emphatic “no”. I like my life on an even keel and when a wrench gets thrown into it I FREAK OUT

So you can imagine the fun times at the DeVellis house when I needed to update my computer with Office 2007.  Did I mention I had over 5,000 emails on my system?  5,000+ emails which I’m very protective of.  It may seem like overkill to the average person but when you have a boss – Hi Erica! – who every once in awhile sends you an email along the lines of “Hi Sharon, about 1,700 days ago, I sent you an email that referenced body soap.  Do you still have it?” -  after the first few times of not having it, you learn from your mistakes and start to save things.

The fact is updating my computer wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity. The Yummy Mummy Club has articles submitted to us on a daily basis and I need to read them. Only some had these .docx extensions and I wasn’t able to open them. In hindsight it would have been much more efficient and cost effective (free!) to download the compatibility pack from Microsoft instead of forwarding the emails to Karen, our resident web guru, so she could open them, cut and paste them into an email and send them back to me - I now owe her approximately 200 cases of wine.

But the bigger issue was the 5,000+ emails on my system.  Because when I did a search on those emails, it took a bit of time to find what I was looking for.  And by bit, I mean I could clean my house, go for a coffee, throw in a load of laundry and run on the treadmill while waiting for the search to end.

Enter in Office 2007. But since I don’t like change and I’m not exactly a technical guru the program sat on my desk for about a week before I gathered up the courage to open the package and insert the disk into my hard drive.  Only I couldn’t get the package open. And oh how I wish I was kidding.  Five minutes later, I realized the package didn’t open like a book, it swiveled.

And had this beautifully placed red tab that you pulled on to swivel it open oh so gently.

Bill Gates is smart.  Me?  Not so much.

So I uploaded the program to my computer and it was Easy Peasy, Slice O’ Cheesy.  Hooray!  And then I opened my new Microsoft Outlook and it was DIFFERENT!!!!

Why are the colours different? Where’s my preview pane?  What’s this little tab here? Where are all my emails and what was happening and oh my god, what the hell am I going to do?

This, my friends, is what I like to refer to as Premature Panic brought on by my No Likeous Changeous disease. It was the shutter scenario all over again.

And by that I mean I had dug in my heels before realizing it was the beginning of making my life easier. 

I was so panicked about the DIFFERENCE, WHY IS IT DIFFERENT that I called the Microsoft Help and Support Line. But somewhere in between telling them who I was and giving them my contact information, my kids started fighting and I had to hang up. 

Kids now in their rooms for a timeout, I sat down and took a good look at my email which is when I discovered everything, and I mean all 5,000+ emails, were transferred into my new Microsoft Outlook in the exact same folders they were in before.  

See what I mean?  Premature Panic.

My panic now gone, I spent some time cruising through my email.  In less than an hour, I was able to get rid of over 2,000 emails.  Turns out a lot of the emails blocking up my system weren’t necessary and I just needed the ability to search through them in a quick way in order to get rid of them. 

How quick was the searching ability?

Well, about 7:00ish that night, Erica emailed me asking a question about an email she had sent the previous month. I typed in the word I was looking for in the search window and was just getting up to grab a glass of water when lo and behold, the search was done.  My butt wasn’t even off the chair people!  Not only that.  The search word I had used was highlighted in an easy to read bright yellow in each of the emails where it was found.  And that excites me because it means less time spent re-reading old emails and more time for re-reading Twilight!

I now use this function on a daily, closer to hourly, basis and I can’t tell you how much time it’s saved me.  Now I’ll be on the phone with Erica, she’ll ask me a question, I’ll do a search and she doesn’t even realize I have no idea what she’s talking about because by the time she’s finished the question, the email is in front of me.  It’s that fast!  And as I type this, I’ve just checked and my email capacity is at 2,458 emails – less than half of what I had before.

As an aside, I want to take a moment to tell you about something very impressive that happened during this big change in my life.  In a time when sucky customer service seems to be the norm and I’m constantly and consistently ignored or treated like an inconvenience, I received a call. It was Microsoft calling me back.  They had noted I had hung up while on hold and wanted to make sure any issues I had been calling about had been resolved. 

Change will probably always stress me out, it’s just who I am.  But thanks to this experience, I’ve learned that change can be a positive and make my life easier.  And maybe, just maybe, I can stop digging my heels in ever so slightly.  Who knows? The next time you come over to my house, I may even have blinds on my kitchen window.