College Life

I was reminded again today of how nothing is ever as easy as it seems.  One would think that, by now, one could write a paper in the well-designed and intuitive interface of Apple's word-processing software Pages and export the finished document to a Word format without irreparable loss. Not so much.  Furthermore, apparently these files are read differently by different computers, even if they all also use Word.  I summed up this afternoon's dot-doc foibles in the following Facebook status update.

Write paper in Pages, using required margin and typeface settings: exceed page count. Review paper in Pages: gee that's pretty!

Review paper in Word at same margin and typeface settings: fall short of page count.

Review paper on another computer, in Word, at the same margin and typeface settings: the footnote numbers have now become Roman numerals.

[Bang head against wall]

Sometimes, life imitates The Oatmeal.

Some new entries in the works for tomorrow or the next day.  As this is my "train of thought," I have some more stuff to get off my chest about communication.