Love/Hate Relationship

I'm in a love/hate relationship.  No, not with any human.  Not with any living thing for that matter.  Right now I'm in a love/hate relationship with MS Access.

Back in my old OLD life, I built Access databases.  Long story, but the company I worked for did computer consulting and even though I was the office manager, I was the only one who knew Access, so they rented me out.  I love Access and all the wonderful things it can do to make a really nifty, customized database.  Of course, that was 1996.

Flash forward to last night when I finally did what I said I was going to do since May.  I built a database for my agent contact information.  Holy shit.  A lot has changed with the program in 14 years, and truth be told, I've forgotten a lot.  Needless to say, last night was not a fun time.  Husband's enjoyable viewing of the Yankees game was interspersed with my shouts of "Why won't you do that?!" and "WTF?  What do you mean I can't change a linked database?"  or "What the hell are you linked to, dammit?"

Last night, I really hated that damn thing.  Long about the top of the 9th, I backdoored the database and now everything seems to work. It's amazing what you can do once you convince any Microsoft program you don't need them to wipe your nose for you.  Of course, in order to do that, you have to fool the program - which in my case meant transferring all my data into Excel, deleting the one column that was fudging up the process and then importing the Excel file into Access.  

It's really very pretty...  See?

...and all my old ACT! data on dozens of agents is at my fingertips.  Sure, some of the data is old, but the actual data part of a database is easy once you create the structure.  It's creating the structure that makes me want to throw my computer out the window.  Now that I have the structure, I can play with it.  I can reset the User fields to useful things and plug all sorts of data in.  Ooo, and I can create other databases based on this one and link them all together.

heh, i'm such a geek

Even while I was hating Access last night, I was loving it.  It totally got my geek on.  It's been too long since I was a super-geek with mad computer skills.  Now the only thing I can say that the geeks of today can't is...

I still know DOS.  =op

Okay, I'm off to surf around the interwebs and then play with my pretty new toy so I can keep track of all my submission info.  Of course, now that I have this nifty database to keep track of my submissions, I'll probably snag an agent and make the whole thing moot.

I can live with that.
 *All images deleted to avoid any chance of copyright infringement*