how old people can't understand computers

i recently experienced a full does of the smugness and frustration that comes from the generation gap. a certain superior here at the company asked me for "all the updated electronic sales report for this month". As i have explained to him countless times, this cannot be run as one report (because of the archaic nature of the accounting software "reports", ie, printable text document versions of the data, can only be run in specific ways according to a series of DOS prompts--indeed most accounting programs seem to work this way, but more on this later) so the "report" is actually 3 separate reports, and they don't just print, i have to email them to my gmail account (my office outlook blocks the impersonal emails with attachments that come from the accouting sofrware program, and when i complain to the IT manager he just says, "earthlink sucks, what do you want me to say?") so i have to send them go gmail, hit "view", copy, past into notepad, save as a txt, and email to this certain superior. so anyway he expects that i'll be able to run these three reports immediately, but then, when he asks for a report "of all sales made by all salespeople for all of 2006" he is very appologetic and sorry that he needs it on such sort notice.

but running that report is exactly the fucking same steps as running any ONE of the three that he just seemed to think i could make magically appear out of my ass and why hadn't i sent them over ALREADY...

and so, you see, the problem is that in his mind logically a small ammount of recent data must be easier to fetch than a large amount of old data. lord, he probably is imagining me rummaging through dusty filing cabinets, sweating over missing pieces of paper. but no, you dummy, i just type in the dates and there it all is.

and if any of it's not there it's not MY problem because it's not like i'm the one who entered that stinky old data anyway. plus if i had data entry is so far beneath me now that it's serve you right if i was careless and got it wrong.