Ingenuity Rocks

I have a great job. I work with great people and for a great company. I'm a Sr. Systems Analyst for a large ambulatory health care organization. I know...sounds exciting, right?

One of the funnest (most fun?) things about my job is getting to come up with creative solutions for problems. Usually my co-worker Bob and I tag-team on a lot of these problems. We've been working on one lately where we are migrating the documents for a couple of physicians from their old electronic medical record system to ours. A little over 30,000 of these documents are Microsoft Excel files. The system we are importing them into only accepts PDFs or other graphic file types (JPG, TIFF, etc.).

So, we needed a way to transform those 30,000 files from XLS to PDF. Bob worked out a system using PDF Creator, which can "print" pretty much any file type to a PDF, that could batch convert the files. There was only one problem. On every file the computer asked, "Do you want to save your changes?", to which Bob answered by pressing the "N" key. Now, of course Bob didn't want to sit at his desk for 34 hours hitting the "N" key. So he devised a plan. An ingenious plan.

To answer the question you must be asking: Yes, that is in fact a stapler, balanced on a stack of blank DVDs, pressing the "N" key.

Click on the image to enlarge it.