Learned something new

I’ve gone to a mini-conference and a workshop in the last month. Honestly, neither one of them taught me much. They were vaguely interesting and a nice change of pace, but truthfully not very useful or engaging. I never go to trainings/workshops for those very reasons, but I really needed to LEARN something. I’m just nearly aching to learn something new. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I know everything, or even very much, but I’m a pretty quick study and I love to learn how to do new things.
I mentioned in a meeting the other day that I could create this form that would do this and that and go here and there and make spaghetti on Tuesday nights. Well, I knew it was possible (okay not the entrée), but I didn’t really have a clue as to how. I also knew I had a program that I thought I could use to accomplish this…again, no clue how to even begin. Today I had some time and dove in.
After about an hour of bumping around in the program, I decided a little googling might help. After all, it had been an hour and I still didn’t even understand how to populate one of the fields correctly…(turns out you click on an icon…I’m a freakin’ genius).
First google attempt, I can’t even understand what the author is talking about. All the words are English and I’ve heard these words before, but they make no sense to me in these combinations.
Second google attempt, still a little perplexing but it does guide me a little. I start playing around again and I start gettin’ it. I’m getting one element at a time, but I’m getting it.
So, now it’s lunch time. My boss suggests that I call his wife because she’ll know how to do it for sure. He’s totally right. I’m sure she knows exactly how to do it and could easily guide me through the process. I decide that I’m going to give myself a little more time, then I’ll ask her to help me (this is what a loser does…says my brain).
I come back from lunch pretty confident and rightly so! I knocked the rest of it out and sent it to a couple people for a test-drive. Worked like a charm. I realize that it would have been faster to get help, but sometimes it’s just about the challenge. We may not even use the form, but I learned something new today and that was cool.