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[fiona]

Even nice people will occasionally send a .docx. And anyone can go to Microsoft and download a free patch that enables their Word 2003 or 2007 to read .docx documents. Piece of cake. Ladies and gentlemen, start your computers....

Um, you've missed the point. We don't want to read the .docx documents. We are happy not to read them. May the world of bureaucracy all use .docx forever. It's up to the sender to make the message readable. If not, they can dwell in darkness and fulmination.

The Fiona

[daurousseau]

Even nice people will occasionally send a .docx. And anyone can go to Microsoft and download a free patch that enables their Word 2003 or 2007 to read .docx documents. Piece of cake. Ladies and gentlemen, start your computers....

Um, you've missed the point. We don't want to read the .docx documents. We are happy not to read them. May the world of bureaucracy all use .docx forever. It's up to the sender to make the message readable. If not, they can dwell in darkness and fulmination.

The Fiona

Just wanted to help you decide whether you were posting a vent or a cheer. "Indecision is diminishing existence." As you state, the point is a cheer.

Now you know.

[infopri]

Even nice people will occasionally send a .docx. And anyone can go to Microsoft and download a free patch that enables their Word 2003 or 2007 to read .docx documents. Piece of cake. Ladies and gentlemen, start your computers....

You don't need a patch to enable Word 2007 to read .docx documents, as that is the application that makes the silly things--.docx is Word 2007's native file format.

That said, Word 2007 also has the ability to save its files in a format compatible with Word97 through Word 2003.  Even minor administrators ought to know to use the 97-2003 format until they are sure their campuses have fully converted to 2007.

[geonerd]

Dear generally sweet but rather clueless student,

Do not send me messages that say "I went to your office but you never showed up. I kept knocking but you didn't answer."

We did not have an appointment.
I do not have office hours on that day of the week.
I have never had office hours on that day of the week.
I have off campus committments that day of the week, as has been the case all year.
You did not contact me to give me even the slightest inkling that you needed to speak with me.
I did not show up and answer the door because I was not on campus.
My colleagues in the offices next door and across the hall were certainly impressed by the volume, rhythm and duration of your knocking. Were you trying to communicate in code? Perhaps you were concerned that I had fallen and could not get up?

I'm glad to see that my syllabus instructions "When my office door is closed I am off campus or have other obligations, so please do not disturb" made such an impression on you. And I swear if your purpose was to ask me what is your final grade I will have to connect you to the helium tank, fill you up, and watch you float away.

[concordancia]

Mom, I do not know what you used to do that Skype would just automatically log on when you clicked something in the status bar. I suspect that you were not doing that at all, just opening the window to a program that has been set up to log on when you start the computer. If this is so, then it didn't work today because I set the skype status to offline before we went out. But since you can't actually explain what you do, I can't really help you. I also cannot explain why my father, who was using your computer rather than replacing his own, needs to establish additional shortcuts, including replacing the actual desktop programs with shortcuts. You people make my students look computer literate, but that does not mean that you can ask random questions while I am otherwise engaged and expect me to understand what you are talking about, much less how to fix the problem. Nor can you expect me to pretend that the way you want it fixed makes sense to me, when I can't talk about online, offline, logged on vs. opening a window, applications vs. webpages, etc...

And Dad, don't you dare complain about someone else misusing the internet when you make these mistakes.

[ufo_tofu]

I officially loathe the word "winningest."  My comp students' big research paper is the second-to-last paper.  The final paper then is an encyclopedia entry about a topic related to our uni, our town, or the surrounding area.  I do this mostly to introduce them to a local history archive and give them a chance to poke around (I wish I had been introduced to archival work much earlier) and also to finish up on a different kind of research than most of them had done and on a low-stakes paper.

Anyway, so apparently the basketball coach who worked here a few years ago was good.  Very good.  In fact, one of the "winningest" coaches in the state.  The six papers I've read about this guy all use the word "winningest."  A few of them use it a lot.  One of them actually said that this guy was the "third winningest" coach in the region.  Arg!  Third winningest??  What does this word even mean??! 

[daniel_von_flanagan]

One of our minor administrators insists on sending out all memos as attachments, as .docx files.

Ours like pdfs scanned at 300dpi in 24bit color.  That way a memo consisting of 3 lines of monochrome text can become a 2 megabyte attachment. - DvF

[fiona]

One of our minor administrators insists on sending out all memos as attachments, as .docx files.

Ours like pdfs scanned at 300dpi in 24bit color.  That way a memo consisting of 3 lines of monochrome text can become a 2 megabyte attachment. - DvF

Yeah, that, too. What's with the rage for sending things in .pdf that have no reason to be in .pdf?

The Fiona

[msparticularity]

One of our minor administrators insists on sending out all memos as attachments, as .docx files.

Ours like pdfs scanned at 300dpi in 24bit color.  That way a memo consisting of 3 lines of monochrome text can become a 2 megabyte attachment. - DvF

Yeah, that, too. What's with the rage for sending things in .pdf that have no reason to be in .pdf?

The Fiona

I think Adobe's marketing materials have penetrated your administrators' consciousness. After all, who doesn't want to make their written materials impervious to alteration?

[porcupine]

I have had the worst day I have yet had in my current job. I am typing this vent because I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep because I cannot stop crying. This is somewhat embarrassing, yet unavoidably true. Ergo, vent.

Things that happened today, demonstrating that my life sucks:

1. My student emailed me to tell me that they have been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and wanted to know what I thought they should do about the final exam for my course;

2. My department chair humiliated me (I am a full-time VAP) by describing me, with no little sarcasm in their tone, as a tenured professor's 'assistant' at our student awards ceremony - in front of at least 30 students and colleagues. This was after the chair had congratulated my senior colleague on having run a successful conference, to which I had contributed at least 50% of the effort, and my colleague had immediately said that they wanted to share these congratulations with me in acknowledgement of my work;

3. An assistant professor embarrassed me by interrupting my conversation with her partner (who shares my research interests and who seemed, at least at face value, to be genuinely interested in speaking with me on that topic) three times, the latter time audibly remarking to her partner that she "was trying to get him away from me";

4. (2) & (3) suggest to me that no matter how hard I work for my current department dealing with situations like (1) sensitively, they really do not value my efforts.

I have worked 60+ hours a week for these people since August and am completely exhausted, and to what purpose? Apparently, being perceived as the sort of person from whom one wants to extricate one's partner, and being seen as deserving of public sarcasm.

5. The icing on the cake. After they all left for the day, and feeling utterly depressed, I did the damned dishes from the awards ceremony. I really hate myself for doing this, especially as nobody will either notice or care.

[normative_]

Sorry Porcupine. I really think we need a VAP support thread. Would you like to start one?
I was going to complain that the take-out pizza joint left the sausage off my pizza, but that seems rather irrelevant now.

[ufo_tofu]

Porcupine - I'm so sorry!  What a truly horrible day!  Your dept chair and the assist prof sound like jerks. 

Will you have some time away from this place over the summer?

You're in my thoughts tonight - take care!

[normative_]

I've checked and there is indeed no VAP support thread (though there are adjunct threads).

Porcupine, I hope you're all right with me starting one, and referencing back to your post. I think there's a real need for this.

And then it's off to a day of writing for me.

[normative_]

Voila. The VAP support thread.

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,50153.0.html

I sincerely hope it helps.

[porcupine]

Thanks all. Feeling better for the vent, and I appreciate the VAP support thread.

The worst part, ufo_tofu, is that I have to be around most of the summer. And next year. Sigh...