Stupidity oughtta hurt

Here's the scene:

It's 3:30 p.m. and I'm about to sit down at work to type some legal documents into one of the ad taking sytems to be published in Monday's paper. One particular legal is huge- nay, enormous - and in instances of enormous documents we have asked clients to send the documents to us via e-mail. The formats are simple: PDFs for camera-ready documents which we are not to format or adjust in any way (we love these) and Microsoft Word documents for text files that need to be formatted to our newspaper's Public Notices (legals) style (Helvetica, 6 point.)

This document is 4 pages long, and luckily we were given the choice of PDF or Word document, meaning if we liked the way they didi it we'd just use the PDF, but if it looked like it could use some work we'd use the Word document. The PDF was crap- it was the wrong font, the wrong size, and had a whole helluva lot of extra spaces between lines that were'nt necessary and would just bump up the price if they remained (aren't we nice to take those spaces out for the client and save them money?) So, the Word document it would be. I prepared to open, format, copy, and paste into the ad program, thinking it would be a breeze, a task which would take all of maybe three minutes.

I opened the document. I clicked. I groaned. I almost beat my head against my keayboard, but thought better of it at the last second.

While the document was indeed a Word document, there was no text in it whatsoever- it was one great big, huge, ugly picture box- with the PDF inside. In otherwords, it could not be changed.

Now, what I want to know is which genius decided to, after typing up the document in Word, print out the file, scan it back into the computer, save it as a PDF and put it into another Word document?!? I mean, really- how big a mental leap is it to... oh, say... send the original damn Word file?!? Was the request for a PDF in camera-ready instances too much for their tiny brain to handle?

What makes the situation worse is that we have these lovely text conversion programs at work which convert images (like, say, PDFs) into text, so it could have been easily fixed. Except for the fact that when they scanned in the printed out text, it was a bad scan- fuzzy, which translated to pixelated, which translates in the end to just plain crap. The text conversion programs are good, but not good enough to realize that the word "COUNTY" with blurry fuzzy edges is actually the word "COUNTY," not "(.'OV/V1'J", or some such.

What this means is that tomorrow we will have to contact the client and try to explain that we need the original word document, then explain how the word document they sent was useless because it held only an image box with the PDF in it and no actual, legitimate text, and then explain to them why again (because I can almost guarantee they won't get it the first time we explain it), or- we'll have to type up the whole damn thing ourselves. I have another "or" however, which while perfectly logical, will not happen (alas): we could simple run the PDFs as they are, big as they are, no matter the cost to the client, and simply bump up the Public notices section in Monday's paper from the usual page and a half to five and a half pages, and watch the Publisher have a mental breakdown.

Seriously now, stupidity oughtta hurt. I mean an actual physical pain in the head, sharp and pounding. If this were the case, whenever someone did something phenomenally stupid (like printing out text, scanning it back in, saving it as an image and putting the image inot a brad spankin' new text document) this hirrendous agony would explode in their head - sort of like a shock collar for dogs, but worse.
Hell, with the decline in simple common sense these days, if stupidity did hurt like that, a good half the population of the United States would be gone. They'd have simply had a thought one day, and died, their body unable to handle the pain. Maybe their heads would even have exploded. That would be kinda cool, actually, in a morbid way.

Such a situation would certainly be cuase to celebrate eductaion and ot hold it much dearer than we as a society do now. Colleges would be packed- hell, they'd be the nation's leading industry. People woudl attend colleges and take community classesa all their lives simply to get smarter, at first to avoid head trauma and then, once the intelligence really takes effect, to learn for learning's sake. Because really, learnign new things can be thrilling- like this weird adventure where you don;t know what comes next, but you want to know, so you forge ahead, turn another page, and there it is- Nirvana.

Humans wuld be so damn smart then. Really smart, not smart as in "wev'e discovered ways to combine phone and internet service, movies and vidoes, songs and song downloading, faxes, texts and personal day planners, calculators, conversion charts, and arcade games into one paper-thin device, but... well, we still haven't come up with a transparent toaster so that you can see when your toast is about to go past 'toast' to 'black smoking stuff'."

God, I wish I was God.

EDIT: Please forgiv ethe typos,.I was fixing them, but I have to actually work now...