Even the Hard Part was Fun

I had a ridiculous amount of fun creating stories and puzzles for the new series I’m launching this week.  Yeah, my escape room romance mashup is now a series.  That’s how much fun I had.  My playtesters pointed out lots of things I needed to improve or clarify, and it was intriguing to see how things I thought were obvious were interpreted differently by different people.  I greatly appreciated the feedback.  I appreciated a lot less the “help” I got from Word when I tried to turn everything into a nice, neat book.  This is a brief excerpt of a conversation that went on for several days.

Me: Why is it not an option to put page numbers on the outside of mirror margins?  I know I’ve done that before.

Word: That is so last version.  We do odd and even footers now.  It totally gives you more options, and therefore power.

Me: I don’t want power.  I want simplicity.  And now that I did the odd/even thing, there’s a page number on this page where I already removed the page number.  What happened?

Word: I relinked it to the next section when you changed the alignment in that section.  Isn’t that what you wanted?

Me: No!  I turned that off.  Are you ignoring my power?  Why is link to previous even the default?  Why would I make a new section if I wanted it to be the same?

Word: I moved an object in one of your puzzles two inches to the right.  I know it’s not connected in any way to the page numbers, and now it no longer lines up with the rest of the puzzle.  I think you wanted me to do that.

Me: Why? 

Word: Did you notice the arrow?  When you clicked save, I guessed you were telling me you wanted that arrow to point at something else.

Me: Don’t make me reach through the screen and pull you out of my computer.

Word: I relinked sections four – seven again.  Also, I know you said to apply the margins to the whole document, but you need to tell me that for all eleven sections or I don’t think you mean it.

Me: What does whole document mean to you?

Word: I just added a blank page somewhere in this document.  It won’t show up until you turn it into a pdf.

Me: Why did you do that?

Word: It’s fun.  Everyone likes surprises.

Me: There are four blank pages.  And somehow only one of them is included in the page numbering.  This is not a good surprise.  What did you do?

Word: I moved that arrow for you again.

Me: I’m going to ignore that until I get these page numbers chronological.  Then we’re going to talk about how you keep moving stuff for no reason.

Word: I can’t handle all this negativity.  <crash>