Can anyone help with 'batch resizing' photos?

I'm so frustrated. I have been offered a little side job where I show up and inspect certain areas of a given store and take digital pictures. I will have anywhere from two to sixty digital pictures from each store at the end of the day.
I need to send the images as a zipped file along with my report in order to get paid.
OK, heres what I need help with:
I want to compress and resize all the images in a given file at once so that I can send the file as an attachment that someone in Dallas can open.
I am able to open the file, view the images, and even resize them, to 500X500 one by one. Thats no good.
This takes way too long. And it would be a major PITA for the person on the recieving end anyway, so I probably wouldn't get paid.
I need to 'batch resize.' the entire group of up to sixty images. Then I can make it into a zip file and send it along.
I think.
These inspections take anywhere from 1/2 hour to an hour, and pay just $12.50, so I can't afford to spend two hours resizing all these pictures.
I have tried using Irfanview, but I can't figure out how to make it work.
"Help", is, of course, written in either Chinese or Klingon, so it is no help to me at all.:banghead3:
I'm sure any thirteen year old could learn /figure this out in ten minutes, but I'm ashamed to admit how many hours I've wasted on this already.
I 'll just say too many to give up now, OK?
Does anybody have a suggestion, either instructions for Ifranview in English, or an easier to use program that will resize a batch of images?

Thanks.

 

Stefan recommends it for this site's gallery. Its called Faststone and its a free download from here:

http://www.faststone.org/

I use it all the time. Make a directory for your new files and another for the resized candidates:

CameraTemp
-- ResizedPics

Or something like that.

 

Thanks Norm. I had a feeling you would know the answer.
Now if I can just turn off the 'stupid switch' for a little while, maybe I can do this.

 

Stefan, do you remember those Roller Paint *doc files you shrank the pictures from? Did you copy to the clipboard and paste into MSPaint or what? I've got a whole bunch of HR's Utimate Paint and Body guide (10 docs) that weigh in about 427 MB's in a ZIP file. Getting them on a pixel diet would suit me just fine.

 

Chinese/Japanese/Klingon and English do share some similarity. Look at this Restaurant name:

 

OMFG, thats just too funny!
Is that real, or is it photoshop?
[and thanks for the tech help, guys.]

 

I just googled it. It's a mock up. I thought it was real. 2,270 hits say it's fake.

 

Ok. I made one in VB6 last year to load and save *.jpg, tif, bmp and gif files, so I'll do it that way to start. Thanks. I've got the Canon photoeditor which I'll try as well.