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.
