As the resident trainer here at the small company I work for, I’m responsible for developing training programs and material for both our external customers and our internal employees. My current project is for the employees and it’s A) driving me insane and B) a delicious exercise in irony.

Background: Our CEO is a Mac devotee. He loveslovesloves them to the extent that everyone here uses a Mac and we have only one Windows machine in the entire organization (it’s used for testing purposes) and it is rarely even turned on. Everything here runs on Mac, right down to our website. Coming into this as a Windows guy from all the way back to 3.11, this has been a bit of an adjustment for me. Fortunately, most of the apps I use on my Windows machine are also used here at work on the Mac without too many major differences: Firefox, Word, Excel, Powerpoint — and Mac’s cleverly named “Mail” works pretty much like any other mail application out there. Pretty much.

But a new edict has recently come down from on high. Our Mac devotee CEO has decided that we will no longer use Microsoft Word or Powerpoint. Instead, we will now use Pages and Keynote, two applications that are part of the Mac OSX operating system and are similar to Word and Powerpoint — but different. And it has fallen to me to put together a quick-start guide for our users who don’t know these applications. Users like me.

So I’ve been trying to play along in the pro-Mac spirit and create these user guides in Pages rather than in Word. But I’ve been having a hell of a time doing it, partly because I don’t know how to use Pages. What would have taken me just a few hours in Word has taken me days in Pages. Now, to be honest about it, part of that time was taken up with me travelling and doing my training in San Jose, and a lot of the rest of the slack has been me wasting time because I keep getting bored with trying to teach this old dog new tricks. But quite a bit of it has been just plain wasted time because I’m using Pages instead of Mac. Because, to be fair, Pages does what it does fairly well. But to be honest, Pages doesn’t really do all that much. And it also sucks.

And that’s where the irony comes in. Because I have given up on using Pages and am now writing my Pages quick-start guide in Word.