Saturday, February 14, 2009

Last meeting, we decided on a new way to do officer reports: email.

But people objected to getting eight email messages every other week. (An average of 0.57 messages per day, tending toward the last couple days before the meeting. OMG, so much email!) Sign up for the digest version of the mailing list, maybe? No, instead officers will all send their reports to the Trustee who will manually combine them into a single report (which, of course, will be as long as all individual reports combined anyway). Result: more work for Trustee, less up-to-date reports (they have to be sent to the Trustee nearly four days before the meeting to which they apply), the inability to mark individual reports as read/starred/flagged/etc., and one more important point I just stumbled over:
Our Labour Czar's report had something I wanted to reply to. I had three options:
* Not use email. Presumably this is what the technophobes who wanted the manual digestation method would have used, but that's much less efficient: our Labour Czar isn't here right now and what I have to say IS, whereas the precise details of it may flee from my mind at any moment. I may not see him all day, or only when one of us is busy.
* Hit reply, sending my reply to the Trustee who could then manually forward it to the Labour Czar eventually--possibly in time.
* Look up the Labour Czar's email address on the UT website, c/p his school address to my email client (hoping it's the address he uses, and that it's the right him), c/p the relevant portion of the original email to my reply, turn it into quoted text, and then type and send my reply.

Technophobia has costs. If you're a senior honours student at a somewhat prestigious university, I think I'm justified in expecting better.

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