Among the many frustrations in my life at present is my position as Treasurer of the Groton Democrats. If you’ve ever served as a treasurer of a political campaign or committee in Connecticut you will understand what I’m talking about. The reporting requirements are such that it is virtually impossible for a non-expert to set up a database to generate usable reports. You can no longer file reports on-line. They provide a spreadsheet you can use to report, but it’s incomprehensible. They do, however, also provide PDF fillable forms, but of course you can’t save the data unless you buy Adobe Acrobat Superplus, which I am not going to do. That means you have to fill out the forms all at once. To make it just a little worse, they only provide one page to list individual contributors, so if you have more than 6 people who contributed more than $50.00 total in the year, you have to open another copy of the report file and merge them together. To add insult to injury, even if you get the form completely filled out, Adobe and/or the State won’t let you save the document as a PDF (standard in the Mac print dialog) with the data in the fields. That means scanning a printed copy if you want to save it do disk. All in all, a pain.
That’s how I spent most of my night tonight, since there’s a report due on the 10th. When I finished I attempted to print a draft, and presto: Adobe Reader crashed and all my work was lost. Luckily the draft did print, and I was able to use most of it to reconstitute the report. Anyway, it’s done, but I’m in no mood to do any heavy thinking tonight.
So, just a reminder that anyone who can make it is invited to join us for the inaugural meeting of Drinking Liberally, tomorrow at the Harp & Hound, Pearl Street, Mystic at 6:00 PM. So far feedback has been good.
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