Friday, May 24, 2013

The Laziness of the Internet Bottom Feeder


I get email:

Hi Chris,
 I stumbled on your page about career resources for students.  The page that I landed on was (link removed) and I am  looking to see if you were the correct person that administers or manages this page.  I have a question regarding the resources and wanted to know if you were the right person to help answer them.
 If you are not the right contact, I would appreciate if you could forward me to the right person!  Hope to hear back from you soon. 
Generic Woman's Name

The email address is a gmail account. The link actually took you to an outdated page on new computer science books in the library, and I'm a little ashamed that it hasn't been kept up-to-date. That's another problem. There isn't a page in the libguides about career resources for computer science students, because, to be honest, the students know more about that than I do

So what should I do? I'm not crazy enough to answer an email that can't even get the basic facts right, because who wants whatever it is they're trying to sell me. So, it's blog post time.

More email:

Hi Chris,
I would like to suggest a site for the Biology links page located here:http://libguides.brandonu.ca/content.php?pid=10652&sid=71246
The name of the site is (website removed).
It's a helpful resource for researching ecology on the Internet.
(link removed)
Generic Woman's Name
The links page isn't anything to write home about, but I don't think it's obviously outdated. The problem is the suggested site. It's on a general site that laughingly calls itself best of the web. The ecology page is awful. Just brutally bad. Does someone think I'll just link to it without taking a look. Or does someone think that it's actually good? Either thought is depressing enough.


Thursday, May 02, 2013

What's French For Lazy?

A little dusty in here, don't you think? When in doubt, let's talk about Spam.

So I get a message informing me of a workshop in Montreal to "Reussir son role d'assistant(e), ressources-humaines". Not much use to me in Manitoba. At some point I got on the French business spam list, and once you're on the list, there's no escape. There is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message, and I dutifully click on that. The page it takes me to asks why I want to leave the list. I say, as I always do, "I never subscribed". It won't actually get me off the list, because each mail out has its own list. I get a confirmation email saying "We are sorry that you decided to opt-out." As if care they're sorry. Whatever.

The interesting part is that the unsubscribe web page and the follow-up email are all in English. I guess there's no French spam infrastructure or its just too much of a hassle to change the default messages on the software from English. Why anyone goes to their workshops, even Montrealers, is beyond me.