Future Complications...

(NOTE:  I probably overly-complicated this thing, but I figure the problem-solving process might aid someone, some day...)

I had to sign a document for work today.

And let me tell you.  Living in the future, you would think this would be easier than it was.  Or maybe it was just my particular bent, preferences, and ... well, things.

So I got the email from my boss with the agreement I needed to sign, but things started out complex right there.

Because I was one of the wave of folks sent home in March of 2020 who was not at the time prepared or intended to be a work-from-home person, I was directed to take, from my desk, the computer, my keyboard, mouse, monitors, and power cords, and set them up at home.  For my employer who had previously sent folks home, the "reward kit" which appeared prior to a person being sent home was a laptop (usually a Dell, appeared to be the standard 15" version, though I understand many were equipped with the touchscreen), a pair of monitors, and ... well, you could use the touch pad or a mouse, your preference.

So when I was sent home, I had my desktop environment.  Over the past two years, I'd rather studiously ignored passing references to equipment orders.  I checked with my supervisors, and was informed that it was certainly an option to choose to order a new laptop.  I'm no dummy.  I recognized that it was an option, one that was not a requirement, and the equipment I had performed, up to June of 2021, fine, so it seemed to me to be utterly wasteful to dump the computer I had with 8 gigs of RAM and a fairly fast solid-state drive to do the work I did.  

After all, I had invested in a few high-speed network switches (not hubs - pro tip - a hub is the computer equivalent of a school lunchroom.  Let's say you want to talk to your pal Fred who is sitting one table over, two rows back.  You stand up, wave your arms to get Fred's attention, then tell him you're thinking of asking Lisa to the school dance.  Every single person in the lunch room hears you yelling this, including Lisa, her best friends, and everyone else.  The network switch, on the other hand, is your cell phone.  It's in your pocket, and it has Lisa's number.  Instead of telling Fred your intentions, you text Lisa, and she sends back the "LOL, Nope" message just for your eyes only).  I did not need to cost my employer any additional money, things were working fine.  Would a faster computer have improved my productivity?  Doubtful.  The bottlenecks of my position were the Citrix servers we logged into, and would occasionally crash, or often run slowly, and the phone lines, which I also upgraded by upgrading my cell phone router.

So bottom line, I didn't need to add to my employer's costs, so when I had to sign a legal agreement, the trick was either to sign it on my touchscreen, or ... well, print it out, sign it with a "wet signature" then scan it back in.  

Nice trick, if you've got a scanner.  I might have, I have not had the chance to experiment with it.  Due to poor planning on my part, my scanner is very literally located in the polar opposite of the house.  I am typing this on my computer in the basement laundry room, on the west wall, in the basement.  Up three half-flights of stairs (it's a split level.  One half flight to garage/ground level, one half flight to main floor/side ground floor level where we take the dogs out, one half-flight level to the upstairs office/bedroom level where I installed the printer).  So I really don't have a lot of time or energy to run up and down stairs, testing how to scan things from my possibly-network-attached scanner.

I don't have a scanner.  I do have a cell phone, and a tablet.  The tablet has a camera, so does the cell phone.  The tablet's camera has been ... uncooperative of late (it was a Christmas gift a few years ago, a Lenovo tablet, it does what I need it to do), while the cell phone has been fine, but I do not want email on my phone, because I want to "disconnect" a bit from it.  

So I printed the document out to my printer.  I signed the document, then used the camera on the cell phone to take the picture.  I then uploaded the picture to my Google docs drive, then tried to email it from my tablet, which has email, and access to my Google Docs.  It could send the links, but not the images.  Problem is that I need to assemble the three images back into the single document.  Except the tool I have which does that is on my work computer.  Sure, I mean, I could do the ugly trick, but I'd rather not do that for that many pages.

Ah.  Ugly Trick.  Pull the document up in any tool which will display a PDF on your computer.  I recommend not reducing the size of the document so you can view the entire page, look at only half the page.  Press Control-Print Screen, then open up good old Paint (yes, Windows Paint).  Then press Control-V to paste the screen capture.  Then use the select tool to select ONLY the text you want to save, and then past that as an image into a new document (Word, Open Write, whatever).  Repeat for the bottom half of the page (this is where details matter - if you're careful enough, you'll select a natural break on the page, between paragraphs, so your second capture starts right on the pixel right below where your first ended.  If not, you get to figure out how to crop hundreths of an inch off the image until they look right.

Once the entire document is replicated in your word processor, SAVE IT.  Save the document as "Reconstructed_(whatever)".  Then, if you're smart and have a print-to-PDF tool installed/configured, you will print the document to a PDF.  

Then Robert becomes the sibling to one of your parents.  That's right.  Bob's your uncle.  Means it worked, kids.

Of course, the easy route (as noted above) was not the path I could take.  I was not able to get the images from Google Docs from my tablet/phone into my computer.  Thanks, Google.  

So instead, I have previous images - that's right, folks, I signed a piece of paper, took a digital picture of the piece of paper, then cropped the image down to just my signature.  I saved it on my computer.  So it is my legal signature.  And I did all of the above, plus integrating my signature image in the appropriate spot on the correct page of the image.  Then printed it to a PDF after saving it.  Tomorrow I get to assemble the whole thing on my work computer and forward to my boss.  

Sheesh.  Some times I just have to do things the hard way because it's easier for me.  I could have waited a few more days for my wife to scan it at her office, but this was quicker.  And it's done.