I'm just a cock-eyed pessimist

So as we're coming off of the tube last night, shadowdaddy says, "Oh, yeah, it turns out I got my brother's address wrong."

"WHAT?" I said.

Yes, that's right. For three weeks I've been having things I ordered (several neat kitchen things off of Ebay, mostly) sent to his brother's house in New York so that we could save the substantial overseas shipping costs. Only now .... God only knows where they've wound up.

"Yeah," he said, "I was talking to him yesterday and he told me he'd gone to his old apartment to pick up his W-2s and found three packages there."

"FUCK!" I had just placed an order for about five Charlaine Harris books AND a bunch of gym clothes and now there was no telling where they were going to wind up. "I can probably call and get the addresses changed on my last two orders ... you did get his new address, right?"

"Uh, no." *facepalm*

Anyway, three phone calls later, he'd got the address from a parent, and I was on the phone AT MIDNIGHT calling these places to try to get everything straightened out. I suspect some of the Ebay stuff will never show up now; who knows.

At any rate, this is why I'm tired today. Grrr.

I have somehow done something (an accidental combination of keystrokes) that's turned on a "helpful feature" in MS Outlook, and now when my emails open up (or I reply to an email), it shows me all of the paragraphs and carriage returns, and when I types little tots appear between the words to show me that I've hit the space bar.

This is driving me up the wall. I don't know how to turn it off because (this has been a problem for YEARS) I don't know what the name is of the thing that's happened so I'm not able to query Outlook in a way that gives me the answer. I've seriously spent half an hour now looking through help, opening every menu on Outlook and on the Outlook email page, and I'm not any closer to figuring out what this plague is that's struck my email or how it can be removed.

Please please please help me remove this blight from my computer.

I HATE Microsoft "help." It only works when you already know the answer, or half of it.

UPDATE: Apparently this is something to do with "show/hide [paragraph mark]," described as "show paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols" in Word, but if you type those words into Outlook help, it will not tell you where to make the change. In Outlook, this is done from "format text" in the "paragraph" sub menu, where there's a little paragraph (backwards P) symbol to point you in the right direction, if you can see it and if it means anything to you and if for some reason you think that adding a bunch of extra crap to something you're typing constitutes a "paragraph" option a la right aligning, numbering, or coloring the text. I fucking hate Microsoft products. And it was my boss that helped me figure out the answer.

I really shouldn't have to work so hard to explain to people why it's important that they do their job. I shouldn't have to tell developers why they need to fix bugs, and build engineers why they need to do releases, and program managers why they should actually get shit organized, because they should be doing these things on their own. What I do is test things, but today I feel like what I'm really getting paid to do is be a nag.

Nice drinks at B&F, though not nearly as much of a visit with hieroglyphe. Next time it will just have to be the two of us and I'd like to have to not be going to work the next day so she can teach me how to drink properly.