Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The Value Of Today's Education

My best friend, Trixie, and I email each other several times a day. You know, the usual stuff, our significant others, stress over bills, work and the like. Lately, though, our conversations have gravitated more towards the general bitching and moaning over the injustices wrought upon us by our dictator-like bosses. Although we have concurred that mine is, in fact, a total douchebag, we realized that it’s pretty f-ing funny, too.






One of my seemingly never-ending tasks is to proof-read documents and letters that WoodChuck has to prepare and send out almost everyday. Now, don’t start with the hate-mail, people. I may make a mistake or two from time to time, but at least I have the presence of mind to look at the said mistake and say to myself, “Hmm. That just doesn’t look quite right.” WoodChuck, on the other hand, will write things like this:






“Up on acceptence of this charges I will roll this costs an any other changes in to an AIA approved for mat as soon as possible.”






Um, yeeeaaah. And then, when I go back to him with this,






Upon acceptance of these charges, I will roll these costs and any other changes into an AIA approved format as soon as possible.”






the man actually has the nerve to argue with me about.






For example,






“Are you certain it should be ‘these’ instead of ‘this’?”






“Yes, the word ‘charges’ is plural therefore you need to use the plural form of the pronoun ‘this’, used as an adjective for ‘charges’.”






“Are you sure that a coma is appropriate in this place?”






Agh!!! The man thinks I’m an idiot! He actually thinks that he is sooo much smarter than me. And yet, at the same time, he doesn’t realize that “upon” is one word, not two. Or “format”, for that matter! He is driving me nuts!






Listen, I realize that I am not the smartest smarty-pants on the planet, ok? I may be a know-it-all most of the time, but I make mistakes just like everybody else. When I write on my blog, I use lots of sentence fragments, and misspell many a word. But, that is how you convey feeling. It’s how we speak in real life. If I were typing a formal letter to a business or whatnot, of course I would be using all the proper grammar rules. The point I am getting at here is: this man is beyond stupid. And he has a college ed-jew-mah-kay-shun.






Let me just clarify what I mean by “beyond stupid.”






As I said before, Trixie and I discuss this topic ad nauseum each day. So, when I filled her in on the event described above, she had this to say:






“...Truly, your version is correct and his is so incredibly, unbelievably WRONG. You should just let him look like an ass next time, ROFL. Can’t you sneak into his office and turn on his language editor in Word? Wouldn’t that at least show him all the red- and green-underlined junk that he would create? I have no doubt his entire page or each sentence would be nothing but red and/or green! LOL.”






Um, yeah, remember beyond stupid? His Word editor is ON. It goes beyond natural acceptable levels of stupidity here. I could be standing over his shoulder and see the green and red pop up, and it's like he doesn't even see it. And then, he will sometimes ask me to edit over his shoulder before he prints it out, and I will say,






"See where that green line is under 'their'?"






And he will say, "Yeah?"






And I will say, "Well...(trying to give him a sec to figure it out on his own)...it should be ' t.h.e.r.e.'."






"Oh, really? You think?"






"Yeah, that's what that green line is for."






"What green li...oh, ok. I see it now. Hmm, wonder why it wasn't there before?"






"Oh, it was."






"No, I'm pretty sure I didn't see it until now."






"Okaaay. Let's go on to the next one..."






Do you see why I just want to punch him in the head??? If this man were sweet, or remotely funny, or even just cute (ok, even cuteness wouldn’t make up for the way he is), maybe this would be ok. I’d probably pity him and not make such a big deal out of it. But this man is an ASS MONKEY. You can read here some of my thoughts on how he treats me. I have vented enough for one day, people. My brain hurts.

5 comments:

Katrina said...

My brain is hurting, too, from reading that unedited schlock your boss churns out! If only he knew how lucky he is to have you. And you missed your calling as an English teacher! You could be explaining these very same concepts to America's youth for abysmal pay and little appreciation--isn't that tempting? :)

Last Day Emails said...

Woodchuck is unbelievable! You are a saint for dealing with that on a daily basis. I remember as a kid when I first started using Word, I didn't know what the red and green lines meant either. But it just so happened that all the Big Words (which were hard to spell) would be underlined. So for some reason I just assumed that the software automatically underlines all the important words, like to help you emphasize your point! LOL. But then again, I was a kid. Not a boss!

Malnurtured Snay said...

OMG! That pisses me off. I totally don't get people who mix up "there", "their" and "they're." Especially reading -- fuck me, I gotta sound it out when they're missusing that shit.

Trixie said...

I love reading this stuff from work. Like the other day went you sent me the PDF version of yet another of WoodChuck's masterpieces and you entitiled the PDF mybossisamoron.pdf. I about lost my shit at my desk. Keep it coming girl, you know it's good stuff.

Anonymous said...

I think a "coma" is appropriate in this place, too (sorry, I just found it funny, being that grammar and spelling are the premises of the post). Very funny post, though.

An experience I had was with a manager at my last job. He was such a complete knob that he asked me to spell division for him, since Spell Check didn't fix it for him... he initially spelled it "devashon"... All I could do is drop my head, shake it and swallow lots of laughter. Of course, I shared this experience with ALL of my fellow co- workers.