Hello. I’m Femmebot 7.0 and I’m trying to solve a tech problem for a client, so naturally my datasets started spinning backwards to the 1920s when my bisabuela Maria La Gata had fewer resources, more mouths to feed, and more obstacles that caused her to die nine times and get re-born between 1910-1926.
In other words, while everyone says, “What would Jesus do?”
I always ask, “What would bisabuela Maria La Gata do?”
Let’s Sing!
Oh no. Are we back to singing?
Every techie needs to drown out the noise with headphones and lyrics to inspire! As soon as I thought of my bisabuela’s name Maria, that song from the “Sound of Music” downloaded into my operating system and forced me to sing and speak with a BAD British accent:
She's a riddle, she's a child
She's a headache
She's an angel
She's a girrrrrrrrlllllll!!!!
Hmmm. Ok. So — the client wants users to configure their email signatures directly on the Intranet, click a button, and pop it directly into Outlook without compromising the fonts. This shouldn’t be hard. But the entire IT team says it’s not possible without an expensive third-party app. Really??? Blink-blink.
What am I missing?
Before Maria La Gata transformed herself from teen mom to dancer to rum-running gangster, she always asked her Madrina Catalina for help and advice: “How do I breastfeed this baby AND make money to feed myself?” Maria was literally 13 years old when she reluctantly pushed out her first child. That’s what happened to women who were raped on the regular in the 1920s. In spite of the circumstances, she was lucky enough to have Catalina around to help her.
“Find a place where you can do both,” Catalina would say while rocking in a chair in front of a window, cooling herself off with a hand fan, after a hard day of birthing babies in Ponce. Catalina, unlike Maria, was a grown-ass woman, who was fully awake and fully aware that solving problems took creativity, ingenuity, and patience. And she wanted to pass along her wisdom.
But Maria was still a little girl, who preferred to complain. “Ayyyyy. Who would want to pay me for breastfeeding? And for what reason? What would they get out of it?”
Catalina snapped her fan shut and laughed. “Men like El Bruto, with tormented memories of their mamis — that’s the kind of cochino who would pay for a twisted re-enactment of the comforting boobie his mother never gave him, pero that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Maria knew Catalina was trying to be funny, but the mention of El Bruto stirred an uneasy queasy storm in Maria’s bowels. She stared out the window, feeling jealous of the children playing freely under the bright pink flowers of a Maga tree. Her legs instinctively shimmied and shook to expel the discomfort. And then, with a low voice that seemed to come from the depths of her soul, she told her Madrina: “Don’t mention the unmentionable, porfa. I keep asking you to stop but you keep doing it.”
But Catalina wasn’t listening. She was watching Maria’s legs. She stood and clasped her hands. A new idea had smacked the older woman into a frantic spin around the room. “That’s it! Tomorrow you will come with me to Ponce and dance in the plaza in between breastfeeding. We will put a collection bucket next to you and I bet you both men and women will throw money in it.”
Shaking her head now instead of her legs, Maria protested. “That sounds worse than —“
“What? That pig on top of you, abusing you every day and night?”
“Ok. Fine. I’ll do it.”
And thus the place Maria could both breastfeed and dance for money became the central plaza of Ponce, where finely dressed European tourists walked to vaudeville shows at Teatro La Perla and fine restaurants and fancy art galleries full of sculptures and paintings so colorful Maria wanted to jump inside of them and escape to another land.
Lucky for me and the Femmebots, all we have to do, is search Google!
“intranet email signature javascript form” yields:
A JavaScript form to generate an intranet email signature involves creating a web page with a form that collects user details and dynamically generates the corresponding HTML signature. This HTML can then be copied and pasted into the user’s email client settings.
Blink-Blink.
Problem solved.
Yes, I may be gloating. Time for some caregiving. This always seems to reset my humility levels. For your research, the original Google search is below.
A few ChatGPT prompts for JavaScript + HTML = the code I needed. Then I edited it for my client’s needs. Tech problem solved, fwacata!
If you can’t read JavaScript, check out this class I took last year thru Udemy. The key to longevity in tech is an insatiable appetite to learn new skills. While I have been well-versed in HTML, CSS and PHP for many years after managing several Wordpress and Drupal content management systems, my understanding of JavaScript was rudimentary until I took that crash course. I’d say my JavaScript knowledge is as good as my conversational Spanish. If I used either more, I could talk to more people and solve more problems! We shall see.
