What’s really, REALLY sad about the whole thing is that I HAVE a good copy of Photoshop, sitting on the external hard drive, and it would be the work of mere moments to fire up Daemon Tools and mount the bitch.

Alas, I am lazy.

But Gerry’s little Zangief/360 throwdown there has me interested.  Assuming I were to do some very simple rewiring, I could easily put Photoshop on the notebook lappy, where the ability to write directly onto the screen could be extremely handy.  Speaking of handy, did any of you click on the wikipedia link above yet?  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ha ha HA, THAT’S what you get for following directions!  Anyways, yeah, Photoshop.  You may be asking yourself “What the hell does Photoshop have to do with Powerpoint, the alleged title of this blog?  What do I need slideshows for?”  What a clever person you are.  At the operations center where I work the part of my job I can legally tell you about involves making and revising Powerpoint briefings on various (mostly mind-numbingly boring) subjects for all the higher-level mucky-mucks in the command.  That, and patching phone calls.  Yep.  I’m also in Mensa!

That fact that my time is being wasted has served as a great spur to action for me; especially in the field of Finding Ways To Make My Time At Work Less Personally Useless.  A proud tradition, right up there with Trying To Make My Number Of Work Hours Spent Doing Actual Work A Negative Number, much like I am doing right now.  One of the creative methods I have developed involves taking regular recreational or educational reading materials (like the user’s guide for the Torque engine, to name a current example) to work with me so that I may better myself without resorting to masturbation.  The trouble is that such materials are generally readily spottable by Big Brother due to their format (and illustrations) and are greatly frowned upon.  To avoid this potentially annoying interruption to MY work, I have instituted a practice of importing all my reading materials directly into Powerpoint instead of Acrobat Reader (or what have you) so that each page takes up roughly a slide’s worth of space.  Not only is it marginally easier on the eyes this way, I can also claim to be working on a brief for a class for some officer-type or another should my actions be questioned.  No one could tell the difference, anyways… the people upstairs are always having us do damn-fool work like this on a regular basis.  Stuff like “Hey, Coincon, can you slap together a brief for the General on how to work the frivolous new eMail system we paid some 19-year-old like twenty times your salary to develop?  You know, the one that LOOKS mysteriously ripped-off directly from Outlook but actually works much, much worse?”  “Oh, yeah, no problem,” I answer, already just cutting-and-pasting directly out of the in-program tutorial and FAQ that the General could very easily click on himself and get way better formatting than I’ll feel like delivering.  Hey, if they wanted original work they’d've hired a contractor to do it.

But the real mother lode of shammery for me would be the full-blown installation of work-appearing software programs for general day-to-day work avoidance.  Like, just to name the most possibly-justifiable one I can think of at the moment… Photoshop.  Just think: the General needs a new unit patch design commemorating the 227th anniversary of that time we went to war with those guys in that place.  No, not THAT one, the OTHER one, the one with the STUFF, you know.  Anyways, the CG needs it double-quick… but where can we rustle up an exorbitantly overpaid civilian-type to do that kind of work in time?  <door flies open, general windyness blows papers about, etc.>  “Not to worry, Sir, I just installed Photoshop on the Unclassified computer!”  <Me in general Superman getup, big cedilla C on chest>  “Fuck me dead, it’s Sergeant Coincon!  We’re SAVED!”  <general celebratory air, dancing of jigs, inexplicably (for the Army) attractive women in bikinis saying “My hero,” the IT guy who let me install the shit in the first place getting an unnecessarily huge bonus, etc.>

At least, that’s how it’ll go in the Powerpoint presentation I’ll make to support the idea.