No, this isn’t yet another tiresome questionnaire. Rather, I’m tired of questionnaires. Specificially, job applications.
Something I find a little irritating are those little Web buttons that promise a quick and easy application process. What they don’t tell you is that you first need to register– which is an unavoidable fact of life nowadays– and that the registration process will last for twenty screens of pull-down selectors and "Add Another ___?" buttons. Why can’t I just paste in my resume? Why do I have to spend twenty minutes tediously entering skills, jobs, and references when there’s a fairly good chance that I’ll never hear from you anyway?
Yet I’d rather deal with a hundred more of these inconvenient Web forms than have to download and deal with one more poorly-designed MS-Word "form." Gosh darn it, if you’re going to make a downloadable form, make a form. With actual fields, not strings of underscores that cause the document to go all wonky when I start typing. Okay, so maybe dealing with a wonky document could be part of some devious test of my Word skills. I might even accept that, except for the fact that for some unknown reason the originators of such "forms" generally don’t accept anything by e-mail. So that leaves me two choices, to mail in a hopefully-not-too-wonky typed application, or to mail in a nearly illegible handwritten monstrosity. Well, one choice, really, since the ink-soaked, white-out-smeared, handwritten application will probably go straight to the trash.
Repeat after me: MS-Word is not a document exchange format. MS-Word is not a page layout program. I’m not even sure why people use it for word processing.
ERIK
