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.