Les Bonnes Choses

A case of mistaken identity caused me to lose two cloth shopping bags this morning at the Howard St. Target. It must have happened some time in the dairy section, where I was getting yogurt. Now that I think of it, that's exactly when it happened. I had grabbed two 4-packs of Activia yogurt, put them in my basket, and then noticed that one of them had an expiry date of Saturday. So I went back to the dairy case to get yogurt that didn't expire until mid-November. And on I went with my shopping until I got to the checkout, where I found a couple of peculiar items in my basket, and my cloth bags were nowhere to be found. I kind of felt violated. I blame the other shopper because it's easy. Look, I just did it.

I didn't put much of my shopping away until I got home from work, which was late because I attended a talk and stayed after to (try to) speak to the speaker. I'm not very good at hijacking conversations. I can, but think I come off like an ass when I do, so I just wait politely for the perfect segue. Perfect segues almost never come, unless you can engineer them. Like the one I have just engineered to bridge to the next topic, where I talk about a conversation that I had with a grad student when walking back to my office following the talk.

We were talking about how academic job applications are quite a mish-mash. Some positions are at old-skools, and they want you to send a ream of paper in an oversized envelope plastered with postage stamps. Other schools use 3rd party or in-house websites to manage the submission of your application materials. And finally, some positions require you to email a bunch of pdfs to a department secretary. This might seem like a big leap from the surface mail application, as it is theoretically instantaneous, and costs nothing for postage and paper. It is not without its drawbacks however. I discovered that when a vigilant secretary emailed me to ask whether I had emailed any other materials beside the CV (an academic resume) I had updated and re-sent to reflect a recent upgrade of my awesomeness. I had.

The job ad requested the usual CV, research statement, and scholarly writing samples (i.e., journal articles). Together, these documents weigh in at maybe about 3.5 MB. Some IT departments have strict policies about what can and cannot be sent by emails. UWO, for example, won't let anything pass that has a .exe or .zip extension. I will note they also have an email help section on the IT department website describing how to circumvent this restriction by asking the sender to change the file extension, and causing me to facepalm.


Another common restriction is a filesize limit. Emails exceeding a certain size are just dropped. I suspect this is what happened in my case, and perhaps the case of other applicants to this job, because the secretary reported having a problem receiving emails lately. Now, as I related this story, this grad student and I began to wonder how hard it must be to get a job for a biochemistry student coming out of the lab that invented Viagra. I mean, wouldn't all of their resumes get flagged as junk mail?

Significant Academic Achievements:
Developed a method to INCREASE the LONGEVITY and POTENCY of the VIAGRA drug by INJECTING the non-medicinal substrate with a HARDENING agent.