I’ve gotten chicken pox twice, both times before 1995.
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Viruses were tougher in the good old days. I remember when they had proper epidemics. Not like nowadays. People dying like flies, you knew where you were with your diseases then. Mumbles off into vague rant about the younger generation keeping off the lawn.
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Stuff that really grinds my gears:
Humanity.
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“l’enfer c’est les autres” - Sartre (Huis Clos).
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Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
- Douglas Adams
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I suppose I should upvote you for the lower case c in “cheddar”.
It’s a very sore point around here that the British government of the time did not use EU rules to protect “Cheddar” (so as not to annoy the Irish, Australians and New Zealanders who can’t be bothered to develop their own cheeses).
But here you can buy real Cheddar that comes from the Valley, gets packed locally and is even delivered around the local supermarkets and shops so it comes almost door to door. It’s to “cheddar” as single malt Islay is to bathtub Vodka.
And as an anecdote one of the things that started the Cheddar revival was when an American programmer married a local farmer and introduced the first IBM mainframe in the Valley.
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It seems like every year undergraduate programs or graduate programs find new ways to sap the joy of writing letters of recommendation. This year:
- Several programs emailed me reminders to submit letters of recommendation daily from the time the student applied until the letter due date.
- Some continued “reminding” me after I had submitted my letter, as the system did not discriminate between folks who have completed the application and those who haven’t.
- Sending the instructions for how to submit a letter in screenshot form. That makes it impossible to paste the email address I’m meant to send it to. Really annoying.
I really like this part of my job. But I hate that administrators keep finding new and exciting ways to wreck it.
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Does this mean you get hassled for doing a favor?
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That’s why it’s orange
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Recommendations are weird. Helping students get where they’re going is part of the job - so in that light, this is not a favor to them. But in another light, it’s a favor to the company or entity that wants to hire them. So they’ve got me: I don’t want to let a student down, and therefore, there’s no incentive to improve the interfaces for me sending my letters. Because I’m gonna do it whether the interface is busted or not. Really irritating.
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Incredible. You’re good to put up with it. I wonder how many people in your position say “well, screw that.”
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So what does “po-faced” mean? Aside from being the opposite of “za-faced”? I don’t know what “za-faced” means either, so it’s not much of a clue.
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In my experience, people writing recommendations take it really seriously. During my job search, I had folks upload letters for me with a two-hour turn around because a system crashed and my app info was deleted. But I’d be shocked if there weren’t some bad actors out there who just give up.
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having an assumed solemn, serious, or earnest expression or manner : piously or hypocritically solemn
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What’s that supposed to mean?
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That’s Po, from the Teletubbies.
- Tinky Winky (who just died)
- Dipsy
- Laa Laa
- Po
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Possibly short for poker-faced, possibly suggesting that the person gives away as much as a toilet bowl (=“po” in English slang). There is also an English expression for being excessively drunk, “shit-faced”.
It’s pronounced as in “Poe”, not as in the Russian prefix you seem to be referencing.
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Some of the blatant misogyny at the other place…
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