Pretending that I'm doing well

[austin_dern]

It felt like a day of revelations, although only one actually was. Under my apartment door was a note from the National Environment Agency, which explains why all the mosquito abatement drills may have been going on in my life. It turns out there were two cases of dengue fever in my neighborhood this past week. They sent out a computer-generated letter from the unnamed head of the regional office of the Educational Health Department. Fascinating me is that the letter is a four-page form letter (one page for each official language), with the computer-generated report of two cases, but a blank space rubber-stamped with the date and a blank line with the block I'm in written in pen. If they have forms printed out ahead of time in case of outbreaks, then how far up do the number of cases go? If they don't have the forms printed out ahead of time, why couldn't the computer fill in the address and date without any post-print additions needed?

While this isn't a revelation, it felt like: remember that student I saw on the bus the other day? She e-mailed me to ask if I could review a proposal for her master's program application. I was glad to, but what she didn't make clear was that she needed this review by the end of the day, so when I got around to answering my e-mail the deadline had already passed. She was able to find someone else, though, so she's not badly inconvenienced. It just would've been nice to know there was a particular rush.

And this is maybe not a great revelation, but it's a bad idea to try listening to a Stan Freberg/Daws Butler routine to try getting some of the wording down right at the same time you have a Pixie-and-Dixie and Mister Jinx cartoon in the background. Perhaps there are people who can keep their threads of Daws Butler separate, but I'm not one of them.

Trivia: Nick Young, a boy on the masthead, was the first of Captain Cook's Endeavour crew to spot New Zealand on 7 October 1769. Source: Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook, Nicholas Thomas..

Currently Reading: The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television, David Weinstein.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps there's an ancient law, long predating computer forms, that the current date must be rubber-stamped on such a form.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That is possible. It also might be they ran out of pre-printed forms and got me on a second go-round; the Malay, Tamil, and Chinese copies don't have the corresponding blanks filled in.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I worked at a bank for a while. They had software that would print out mortgage contracts with all the relevant details filled in. Amusingly enough, it printed the contract language in Times and the names and other details in Courier, precisely duplicating how the contract would look if it had been printed and then filled out on a typewriter.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, now, that's delightful. Aren't banks just the most amusing creatures?

[orv.livejournal.com]

They are. An odd mix of being bound by tradition (and sometimes regulation), yet embracing new business technologies.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This is true ... I've been reading more economic histories lately and I'm surprised by how nimble-minded banks typically are. It's quite against the image they have, generally.