Thanks to a total dearth of work this morning, I was able to devote some time to my 'goals'. Specifically, I plugged in my headphones, popped one of my MacWord 2001 training CD-ROMs in my computer, and sat back to watch the magic unfold.

The state of mind I find myself in when watching these CD-ROMs is akin to the state of mind the studio audiences of certain late night infomercials whip themselves into. You know that what you are watching is not, actually, that exciting, but you find yourself becoming sucked into every twist and turn of the script and starting to cheer for the most inane things.

Like this car wax infomercial I saw once. To demonstrate the amazing protective powers of this wax, the selling guy poured sand, cement, molasses, and chicken feathers onto a car's hood and set the whole mess on fire. Then, for his coup de gras, he wheeled out as his final victim a police car, which spurred the audience to cry out as one, "OH NO! NOT THE POLICE CAR!!!"

Basically the emotional ups and downs of watching a Macword 2001 training CD-ROM are on a par with that thrilling moment.

1.) At first you are mildly pleased that the CD-ROM isn't interactive. Yay, you can sit there on your lazy butt, humming to yourself and thinking your own thoughts, while ghost cursor moves around the screen showing you how to cut n' paste and making it look to others like you are working.

2.) Then you get bored and start itching for something exciting to happen...the training guy does tease you by making mistakes every once in awhile (so as to show you how to fix them) but sadly they are never "crash the hard drive, abort all data" mistakes.

3.) Then you get to the lesson about 'How to Format', and you are reduced to howling, "MY EYES! MY EYES!" as the training guy procedes to create the ugliest combination of colors and fonts known to man. Three different colors used between the top and bottom layers of texts, plus two lines of wavy underlining in a different color, and then he bolds it and surrounds it with marching red ants. It was the most hideous thing I've seen since I worked in a college bookstore and helped color-blind hedgehogs design fraternity and sorority letter sweatshirts for themselves. The customer is always right, even if they are putting brown and green plaid letters with a purple flowered lining onto an orange sweatshirt.

3.) Then, as you begin to master training guy's advice and get savvy about navigating Word, you get all caught up in the action and start coaching him, yelling out directions like some 1905 melodrama-watcher trying to warn the heroine of the villain's approach, "CLICK THE UNDO BUTTON! NOOOOOOO!!! UNDOOOO!!!"

That's when you just step away.

Holy crap. This is how bad The American Embassy is. This is only the pilot episode, and we've already had the faux-meaningful dream-sequences to establish the heroine's "personality"/problem, Chumbawumba 'tubthumping' on the soundtrack, a meet-cute with a Hugh Grant lookalike who lives in Darcy's house, like half-an-hour of the heroine voice-overing plot exposition/emails home, and an embassy bombing that killed off the special guest star and convinced the heroine to, gosh darn-it, take her life seriously.

The best part was when the heroine's mother was begging her daughter not to go abroad and acting like London is the back-of-beyond or some Fifth-World cesspool with no phones or clean underwear.