So I’m nearly done with finals, and I am totally on top of my grading. Which surprises even me. I’m so on top of my grading that I feel smug. I look smug. I radiate smug.

I enter my grades into Moodle, smugly.

My problem, however, is that I can’t add and I can’t work technology. So basically I’m helpless. My economist friend, Mary Lois, whose guitar riffs were featured in Smolder, put all of my grades into excel for me last semester, which magically produced final numbers. I would have sat there with a pencil and a calculator and a constipated look, scratching away at a piece of paper until I got numbers that were probably wrong.

But that program I mentioned, Moodle, can also produce your final grades. You can even weight them, and collate some, and do all sorts of shit. But, of course, I can’t work Moodle’s fancy bits. I can enter grades, yes, but the minute I start messing with the advanced settings I end up giving everyone 50,000 %, or -9%, or something equally crazy.

So I’m a big ball of pathetic. And I hate it. I hate the fact that I’m such a numpty with math and technology, but it’s one of those overarching weaknesses that I would really have to invest myself in, to get better at. And there’s always something more important to do, isn’t there? Like write my damned third book, which has been gazing soulfully at me from the bottom corner of my iMac this entire time.

Which reminds me, I gotta get to writin’.

Do you have any apparent weaknesses that you dread, but you keep ignoring, wincing every time they rear up to bite you in the ass?