Pineapple Wrestling

[davidn]

I finally worked out what was wrong with my Nomad Muvo. Tempting as it is, I'm not going to turn this in to an anti-Mac thing because I suspect everyone's fed up of me doing that, but the fact was that it was Whitney's computer that did it. "This directory looks far too organised", it must have said to itself in binary or hex or Assembler while I was copying my music on to it, "I'll have to put in a hundred little 1KB hidden files to make up for it". And that it did - there was an inexplicable ".Title.mp3" file for every file that I'd put on it, and those were confusing the poor thing. Not to mention the entirely useless .DS_Store file and the .Trashes directory.

Anyway, the amount of time I've spent working still hasn't outweighed the time I spend on the Internet, but I have at least been given some sort of task to do now - updating half the university staff's online records. This would be a fairly repetitive task, but the interesting bit comes when just trying to find the old records - despite being at a university, half the staff don't seem to know their own names. A surprising amount of them use different forms of the same name on their record, address book entry and telephone directory entry. "Elizabeth" and "Edward" are the worst of them, as both of those names can be mutated in to many different creatures, some of which I wasn't even aware of the existence. Of. Or something. Donald, help.

Typos are also common - one user declared that he was a lecturer at the "Rpbert Gprdons University", which made him look rather "stuoid".

I know I complain about people a lot, but it makes things more interesting. Even fewer than no people would read this if I went on about how great life was. Come to think of it, Livejournal wouldn't even exist.

While I was doing all that, Richard and his friends went down to the river and battered each other with pineapples for some reason. I didn't pursue that conversation any further.

Comments

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, it gets easy to use more than one form of your name if you aren't careful: while I put 'Jonathan' on most official forms, if it's pertaining to university I use 'Jonny', because, er, I've not got around to telling them that my full first name is Jonathan. Or that my middle name exists. I should probably get around to that at some point. Also, there's a few places where I'm down as "John" because someone misheard "Jonny", and had been using that for a while, and I wanted to spare them the embarassment of finding out they were using the wrong first name, especially with a confusing last name that I occasaionally let the spelling go on, because it's easier. So that's how it can happen that someone uses more than one name. And once you start, it can kinda snowball. But I appreciate that it makes your sort of job harder.

And it's always amusing to read your posts like this, don't feel guilty.