Fun Size Bytes

Is it 5 o’clock yet?

The secretary came to me this morning all up in arms because her ‘2012’ folder (containing everything that she did in 2012) was “gone.”

I checked and indeed it was not where it should be.

I checked her Dropbox.com account (because all of her important files are stored in Dropbox) and it said that the ‘2012’ folder was deleted on January 30th at 2pm.

“Well I didn’t delete it!” she said.

Sure, because you know people are always breaking into the office to delete folders off your computer.

During work-day hours.

When you are in the office.

Turns out she had unintentionally moved the 2012 folder into another folder.

Last week she needed help 1) downloading an image from her email and 2) importing that image into a Word document.

She has been using computers for over a decade.

I know that she must have done these things before.

She’s either forgetting how to do what little she knows how to do, or she’s just deciding that it’s easier to ask me to do it for her.

Either way, it’s not a good development.

It’s ‘Throw Open Our Office Doors To People Who Want To Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About… Day’ — Toby

I love the “Big Block of Cheese” episodes of West Wing, and The Crackpots and These Women is a great one, but that line hurt me.

These are not “things we could care less about” they are “things we could not care less about.”

Saying “I could care less about X” means “it would be possible for me to not care about X as much as I do.

What Toby is clearly trying to say is “it would be impossible for me to care less about X.”

Toby never would have made that mistake.

Someone who writes speeches for a living, who cares deeply for the English language, would not make that mistake.

(That’s almost as bad as the time that Mulder (who we are told is an Oxford educated Rhodes scholar) referred to the last book of the Christian Bible as Revelations.)

And don’t tell me “it’s an idiom, so it’s OK.” No, it’s not. Some idioms are stupid and just shouldn’t be used.

For example: there is an Ohio (midwest?) idiom “wouldn’t care to” which also drives me nuts. People say “I wouldn’t care to do X” which actually means “I wouldn’t mind doing X” or “I would be willing to do X”. Or they’ll ask you to do something by saying “If you wouldn’t care to do X”.

That one took me awhile to figure out because someone kept saying it to me in an email, which of course meant I couldn’t hear her tone of voice and kept thinking she was saying she did not want to do X when the rest of the message sounded like she would do X.

This has been your afternoon grammar/syntax rant.

</rant>

It’s ‘Throw Open Our Office Doors To People Who Want To Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About… Day’ — Toby

I love the “Big Block of Cheese” episodes of West Wing, and The Crackpots and These Women is a great one, but that line hurt me.

These are not “things we could care less about” they are “things we could not care less about.”

Saying “I could care less about X” means “it would be possible for me to not care about X as much as I do.

What Toby is clearly trying to say is “it would be impossible for me to care less about X.”

Toby never would have made that mistake.

Someone who writes speeches for a living, who cares deeply for the English language, would not make that mistake.

(That’s almost as bad as the time that Mulder (who we are told is an Oxford educated Rhodes scholar) referred to the last book of the Christian Bible as Revelations.)

And don’t tell me “it’s an idiom, so it’s OK.” No, it’s not. Some idioms are stupid and just shouldn’t be used.

For example: there is an Ohio (midwest?) idiom “wouldn’t care to” which also drives me nuts. People say “I wouldn’t care to do X” which actually means “I wouldn’t mind doing X” or “I would be willing to do X”. Or they’ll ask you to do something by saying “If you wouldn’t care to do X”.

That one took me awhile to figure out because someone kept saying it to me in an email, which of course meant I couldn’t hear her tone of voice and kept thinking she was saying she did not want to do X when the rest of the message sounded like she would do X.

This has been your afternoon grammar/syntax rant.

</rant>

Mini Rant

When I tell you (not you) that the staff have been underpaid by $8,000 this year, and your answer is “I’m not sure where we’ll get it from… not that you don’t deserve it” the part that I was waiting to hear was “But I’ll make sure we make this right.”

You may be planning to make it right (and trust me, I’m planning that you’re going to make it right), but you didn’t say you’re going to make it right… or anything other than that (above) and “Why didn’t anyone notice before now?”

Well, you are the chair of Budget and Finance, why didn’t you notice before? I asked the treasurer, who told me that it was correct, and the decrease was due to tax changes. And because it was his job and not my job, I trusted that the answer was true.

I bet if there was an overpayment instead of an underpayment we would have talked about the plan to balance it out.