Video killed the font-loving star...

Lately I've noticed I have a hard time concentrating on reading. In this era of self-diagnosis, I swear I'm ADD. I just don't have the attention span to get through much anymore, even a magazine article. I find it pretty depressing.

Still, one phenomenon that drives me crazy is how video has replaced print on the web. I will actually avoid clicking on an interesting headline online if I see it brings me to a video link. I'd rather read.. well.. skim the content. I find the idea of having to sit through a video about it incredibly annoying. It feels like too much of a commitment, if that's possible. Not to mention the fact that it usually means I have to sit through an advertisement first.

Today I finally wanted to teach myself on to put a watermark on a Word document. I'm sure some of you think it's absurd that I don't know how to do this, but I've just managed to avoid it up to this point. But there were a couple of documents I was working on today that were simply better served with the shadowy "DRAFT" embedded in the background; one a letter written under my boss' signature and another a proposed job description.

Since I'm still learning Office 2007, I had to rely on the "Help" feature to figure out how to do it. As I awaited the appearance of the text box providing the appropriate instruction, guess what appeared instead...

A video demo.

Are you serious? I now need a video to go to Page Layout - Insert - Watermark (totally wrong sequence, by the way, proving the video taught me nothing)? And I need a narrative scenario as to why the gentleman in the video needed to go through the exercise ("Bob sure didn't want this document to be distributed as a final copy.")? Absurd.

I know I'm going to lose this battle, and my attention span is already ahead of the game, but I nevertheless begin to mourn the slow disappearance of the written word.