The Perils of Technology + ADHD

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. As a matter of fact, it's always better to be lucky than good, since, or so we're told, no good deed goes unpunished. This is by way of demonstrating another area in which I'm dysfunctional: sending email.

When I started writing blog postings for ADDitude, I typed the postings in Word and sent them as attachments. This was easy enough, but it chained me to one computer, since, unless I'd sent the posting, there was no way for me to access it for further work on another machine. Then I started using Google Docs. Probably I've related at least some of this mishegoss already, but bear with me. Best method I could come up with using Google Docs was to write in a doc, download it as a Word doc, and then send that as an attachment.

Those of you who have the computer literacy of the average fifth-grader are already squirming in your seats, waving your hands and going "OOOO OOOO OOOO" like that character in Welcome Back Kotter. You little devils have figured out that this method left me without a built-in labeling system, so I never knew what I'd sent without going back, downloading it, and, horror of horrors, reading my own material again. Brrrrrrr.

Last month I found out that I could insert a header so that each document would have its name, number and date at the top. Then I'd rename the doc with the info from the header. Then, when I was finished, I'd just go to "Share" and click on "Email as an Attachment" and enter my editor's saintly name and off I'd go.

Yesterday I found that three of my postings hadn't seen the light of day.

Why? Well. First, two of them had the same names. Different texts, but same names. Lazyboy copied and pasted so he wouldn't have to poke around for the underscore (_). Of course, this implied that Lazyboy would change the information on the new posting. But nooooooooooooo. And then it became apparent that although I'd changed the info in the header, somehow I'd forgotten to change the info in the name of the doc, so that although the docs and the headers corresponded, I had three postings with the same title in the email.

Don't worry if you can't follow this. It took me an hour to sort it out. An hour. And you know how many postings we're talking about, all told? Sixty? Twenty? Nope. EIGHT. Huit, ocho, acht! Seriously.

So many stupid errors. And you wonder if there's a link between ADHD and depression? I'm so depressed about wasting this whole afternoon that I feel like banging my head against the wall.