Is America Ready for a President Who Can Convert a Word Document to a PDF?
Is America Ready for a President Who Can Convert a Word Document to a PDF?
America's expectations for its leaders have always been low. We've had presidents who needed help with basic tech, and we were okay with it. But now, we face a terrifying prospect: a leader who might know how to convert a Word document to a PDF.
Guys Kamala is 60 and a career politician. I don't think this is a given.
My HR manager is also 60 and routinely publishes the company newsletter as a .docx.
Nothing is a given in this life.
Also the new intern might not be able to do this either. There's a surprisingly narrow age range where this skill set is expected
Yeah but the career politician part means that she hasn't had a job since McDonald's that didn't come with at least half a dozen underpaid assistants, so it's a fair assumption.
She was also a lawyer early on in her career. I'm sure as an office gopher she handle plenty a PDF, printing, copying faxing and DOCX.
How old are you?
Kamala Harris was already middle aged when the DOCX standard was released or the workflow of converting a word to pdf became common. All of that stuff really didn't hit mainstream until the Obama administration. It would have probably even been longer for a legal office to adopt it.
I think it's safe to say she knows how to use Microsoft Word (or something like Lotus Notes), print a document, and even scan something to a pdf. I bet you could also teach her how to use ether "print to PDF" function fairly quickly. However if you just plop her in front of a computer and tell her to go at it I think the most likely result is Kamala swearing at the ribbon interface..
Early on in her career was before pdfs were a thing.
We're fast approaching that golden age where every president comes standard with PDF creation skills.
I dunno, mobile devices aren't "computers", and Gen-X gets ignored so hard it'll likely be skipped right over, and we'll jump immediately into Idiocracy (it's what plants crave).
Although I bet Pete Buttigieg knows how:-).
Not with their average ages creeping up. It’s the same generation of of people over and over.
they gotta dtop being 80 for that tho otherwise it'll take another 20 years or so
A generation or two ahead and it'll be hard for presidents to operate the holographic interface/brain interface and find typical functions.
Obama, Carter, and (somehow) Teddy Roosevelt
For sure Obama could convert a Word doc no problem. Hell,
CheneyBush Jr. probably could've as well.With his youthful, tech-savvy vibe, many assumed that Barack Obama knew this stuff. But when pressed about how to convert file types, he responded, “What do I look like, some kinda fuckin’ nerd?” His honesty was refreshing. After all, converting a file shouldn’t be the president’s job. That is what interns are for. (Recent surveys show 90% of interns’ work hours are spent combining, condensing, and converting documents in a way that doesn’t crash the aging government servers.)
To be fair, Teddy only managed to convert to PDF by sheer gumption. No matter how many clippies he faced, he never gave up, never crashed his Word, and always disabled OneDrive before anything else.
Roosevelt didn't convert word documents to PDF. He edited the PDF directly, with a hex editor.
"Back in my day..."
"Bully!"
I'm pretty sure you can just select pdf when saving the file in word.
Edit: lol wasn't really commenting on the politics of this post, just being pedantic about word processing software. Please don't read any political meaning into my statement lmao.
One candidate is 78 years old, types in all-caps, and forgets what he was saying halfway through a sentence. For my money, I think it's a fair bet that the difference between a PDF and a native MS Word file eludes them.
On second thoughts...
Come to think of it, a regular client of Epstein's teenage human trafficking ring probably know more about 'PDF files' (ahem) than most of us.
Right, but keep in mind how low the bar is for politicians. They have people for this.
Are we sure this isn't the first presidential election where a candidate even knows what a pdf is?
“What’s word?”
And reminder: "save as PDF" is better for accessibility because it keeps tags and structural metadata. "Print as PDF" strips that and makes accessibility nerds sad. (This comment brought to you by me, a librarian/webadmin armpit-deep in updating several sites to meet the new ruling on digital accessibility for government websites in the US)
I believe the point is that deep in this digital age the only President that's actually used a computer before was Obama (probably).
Only when you "save as" which is too difficult for some people
Correct, since like Office 2007, it is literally a built in file format from the Save As menu.
But will she enable the option to create bookmarks from word headings? Surely no one ready for that.
Okay, but is America ready for a president who is a PDF file?
Give me somebody who uses markdown with pandoc and I'll be impressed.
Or emacs with org-mode.
I think you're looking for Emerald McS. et all, PhD.
Would definitely make a refreshing change
SORCERY
I don't think they even know how to use Word
It's like the principal in my school hitting return many times to get to the next page.
I did an office IT course which was next level: making sections which enable you to change every bit of the page format without altering other sections.
At the time it didn't seem to matter but that course was instrumental in saving so much time and hassle.
