Fancy is always better right?

In my many years of working with computers, I have used many different word processing programs. And they all seem to have one thing in common.

They are all way more complicated than the average human being actually needs.

Word processing ranks up there with smart phones in unnecessary development. Sure they do all sorts of cool things, but invariably they are cool things that most people really don’t need to achieve their objectives. Worse the cool things often are so addictive to play with that one spends all their time with them (the Oooooh Shiny! phenomenon), meanwhile not having a clue how to do the seemingly simple NECESSARY tasks.

Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to actually DIAL my iPhone? Meanwhile I have mastered Tiny Birds.

One thing that has never properly worked in any word processing program that I have ever used is basic page layout. Today I was slightly adjusting my resume, since my collection of pennies is now almost depleted and I need to attempt to pretend to earn some money again. I added one line, which made my two page resume a three page resume. Now we all know that how pretty a resume looks is MUCH more important than the actual content of the resume, so one line on a mostly blank page simply would not do.

Since I kind of believe that the content matters (I know, I am foolish) I did not want to remove anything. So I did the old trick that never fails to adjust the length of a document … I adjusted the margins. And lo and behold, all the text was now on two pages again! Except there was one slight difficulty.

Now I had a third BLANK page … that I could not get rid of. Not an issue if I am printing the resume, but in email it would kind of stand out. I can just see the horror in some self-respecting HR person’s face to see that third blank page messing up a pretty resume. No matter what I did at this point, I could not seem to erase this third blank page. I tried putting in a manual page break at the end of the document, which did a nice job of removing that third page … and placing it somewhere in the middle of the first page.

Obviously.

Eventually I realized that the issue is the program objected to a .9 inch margin top and bottom margin. But it seemed happy with a .88 inch margin instead.

Silly me!