Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Gene FINALLY Poops

Shortly after I arrived at work, Gene Gene the Geneal0gy Machine came to the desk and told me that he'd finally penned his letter to the governor complaining about the slowness of our innanet connection. In fact, he'd already printed two copies and wanted me to have the first look at his missive--you know, being as how I'm the guy who's been repeatedly telling him he needed to write this letter for the better part of six months. I was more than willing to give it a look, too, because I didn't trust Gene to get the details right. Sure enough, within less than two seconds I could see things were amiss.

Gene's first sentence was an apparent fragment caused by his use of an unnecessary period after the abbreviation of our state, a period which Microsoft Word had interpreted as a full stop and helpfully capitalized the first letter of the next word creating the appearance of a brand new sentence. I pointed this out to him. Further on, we had some misspellings, one the word "seems" spelled "seams." Gene was unhappy about this and blamed our spell checker. I informed him that Word's spell checker was working just fine and that "seams" was indeed the proper spelling of a word, just not the one he was intending to use. There were more such errors and misspellings throughout, including--and I swear I am not making this up--the word "liberrian."

He printed out two copies of his second draft, which I took from the printer to check before he could even come ask. I could see immediately he'd not fixed all the things I'd circled earlier, so I went out to his computer and offered to copy edit it for him on screen. He gladly let me have a seat and I went through and made sure his complaint letter about us was grammatically correct. I then suggested a few things he might add to it, such as placing the blame for our slow connection speed squarely on the shoulders of DubyaVeeNet, as I'd been explaining to him for months, and an added suggestion to the governor that he consider a different and more reliable internet service provider, being as how there are quite a number of them in the state to choose from.

Gene thanked me for my efforts, printed out another two copies--one for the governor and one for Gene's own records, cause he saves EVERYTHING. In fact, he had a copy of his letter from the "liberry" commissioner about the issue to include with his letter to the governor. Way to go.

Will it do any good? Eh, who knows. I sure hope so because I'm sick of the slow-ass innanet connection too. Back when I had dialup at home, it used to be that going to work was my great escape from the slow speed at home. Now that I have amazingly reliable Verizon DSL at home, however, going to work is like sliding into a nice pool of tepid tar. My boss, Mrs. A, thinks it's far more likely the governor's office will roll this particular crap ball down to the "liberry" commission who will then roll it on to her head despite the fact that we can't do anything about it.

We shall see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Juice,
Perhaps the misspelling of librarian was due to the fact that Gene reads your blog and honestly thought that working in the liberry you must be a liberrian?
Keep 'em coming.

Anonymous said...

The dean of the library school I'm attending sent back the draft of my project yesterday. Her opening comment, written on the title page, was that my conclusions were inconsistent and incorrect.

Trouble is, the dean misspelled the word "and."


An employee of a small town "liberry" chronicles his quest to remain sane while dealing with patrons who could star in a short-lived David Lynch television series.