Racing Turtles

i made a google sheet a work that took rsvps from our instructors who are agreeing to teach this year out of the system where they RSVPed

then it calculates a unique ID for them based on name and local union

then there are sheets broken out by course number (because each first number has a different person coordinating those instructors) and filled with the info we used to contact them. these generate the same unique ID from their name and local union

then i used if(iserror(vlookup script to pull over their rsvp, the email they entered, and any questions or concerns they had

and then i used conditional formatting to highlight anyone whose entered email didn't match the one we sent their invite to so we can update it in our system

and my boss took one look at this and said "you know no one else in our department can do anything even approaching this?"

so i texted my dad to thank him for teaching me how to do vlookups.

sincerely, if you are starting out in your career, learn how to make excel do a tiny bit of magic and you will go so so very far.

learn how to do vlookup, xlookup, if, iserror, countif, and sum and you'll be most of the way there. conditional formatting is annoying, but useful. pivot tables, if used correctly, might get you referred to the spanish inquisition. and VBA scripts! you can do so much stuff automatically with VBA. I use it every year to break our course evaluation master into individual sheets based on course and instructor. takes me 20 minutes instead of 3 weeks it would take doing it by hand.

you can get a lot of pre-written VBA code online as well, so as long as you know how to activate the developer console, you'll be fine. it's nowhere near as scary as you think it's gonna be.

learn excel. learn spreadsheets. you'll thank me for it.

legit the best advice i can give you: feed your friends

any time someone is in any kind of crisis or upheaval, offer to feed them. tell them they don’t have to choose what it is if they can’t make decisions, just ask about allergies and preferences and tell them you’re just gonna make food happen at their house.

friend having a baby? delivery gift certificate to order food to the hospital after the kid shows up.

someone’s relative passes away? offer to make them dinner.

buddy gets laid off? ask if you can order them lunch.

pal stuck in a depressive episode? offer to drive them to fucking mcdonalds, if that’s what they want.

people in crisis are tired and sad and angry and the last thing most of them are doing is thinking about feeding themselves. so if you have the ability or time or money, providing that is always, always a good move.

legit i do this all the time, and it is 100% always appreciated. i have taught all my friends that when something happens, we feed each other. it makes people feel extremely cared for, and I cannot recommend it enough.

This is really important: tell them they don’t have to choose what it is if they can’t make decisions

Decision fatigue is such a thing.

Jurassic Park except they provide proper enrichment for the animals and they therefor don’t feel the need to hunt slow, small humans.

“We stuffed this pumpkin full of live goats for the T. rex watch him try to get them out with his little fingers.”

“Turns out the raptors are cage breakers, so we’ve gotten them a series of door handles to manipulate. Little guys just love it.”

"The Rexes are incredibly affectionate pack animals, so we were careful to breed multiples. Be sure to come during spring time to watch them go broody over anything even vaguely egg-shaped." "We put the Raptors through target training and now if they are bored, hungry, or just want a scratch under the chin they go to spot near the bars and ring a little bell for attention." "Imprinting after hatching was so common that we now have keepers under contract to care for the animals well into adulthood to prevent them from pining." "The Gallimimus turned out to be just giant Canada Geese, and so fear nothing. Their keeper regularly has to stop them from trying to attack fences, guests, feeding buckets, and the now traumatised pack of Ceratosaurs in the next paddock."

"We also fired Dr. Henry Wu."

I have questions for OP either about how big they think a pumpkin is or about how small they think goats are.

In a fictional genetic theme park, we play by Roger Rabbit rules. They’re however large they need to be to make my joke work.

I respect that. Question withdrawn.

You know what mcu story I want?

The Captain America Conspiracy Theorists.

Like, his plane went down *somewhere* and wasn’t found for 70 years. There had to be some Amelia Earhart type people who believed that he landed in Newfoundland and was a cod fisherman that knew their grandpappy.

Ever few years someone would find some scrap metal on a sandbar in the North Atlantic and there would be a flurry of analysis and 14 hours of CNN coverage trying to figure out if THIS is where Cap died.

There are undated, blurry pictures of a tall, jacked blond man in Germany because Cap NEVER LEFT! He became Nikita Kruschev! He was Laika!

A water landing is most likely, and some people have stories about a malnourished man who washed up in Wales in the 40s who quietly raised goats with his giant muscles.

Maybe he was DB Cooper?

And then, in 2012 or whatever, they find his plane and he’s not only IN it, he’s alive?? The conspiracy nuts have a field day. CapAintDead420 on the conspiracy boards has been saying for YEARS that he’s being kept on ice in a secret government bunker in Antarctica and she is VINDICATED.

People are way too weird to just accept that he was dead, even in he MCU, and we all know it.

Howard Stark checking in on every single goddamn one

That’s how he finds the tesseract.